How to make laundry gel from natural handmade soap

We never throw away the remains of our handmade soaps. Rather than rinsing the bucket where we have mixed our soap straight away, we let the soap set overnight and then scrape the bucket and save these "scraps" in a plastic container. Periodically, all the scraps and the trimmings, and all the "bad" soap we have around are recycled and re-used to make our washing gel. Since trimmings and scraps are often not enough for our washing loads, we also make the occasional batch of laundry soap to keep in stock.
Natural soap makes a wonderful laundry soap: it cleans well, respects the fabrics and the environment, and leaves your clothes so soft, you won't neeed to use any fabric softener ever!

The soap and water proportions to make laundry gel are:: 1 part natural handmade soap; 10 parts water; 1 ts (5 ml) Australian Eucalyptus essential oil per litre of gel

How to prepare the gel:: I usually prepare a large pot of laundry gel at a time (roughly 10 litres). I weigh the scraps and trimmings, and then add enough laundry soap (or other recyclable soaps) to make 900g. Whole soaps do not need to be grated - I simply slice them up with a knife.
I place the soap in a large stock pot and add 9 litres of cold water. If using bath or beauty soap scraps, I also add a tablespoon of NaOH to counter-balance the original superfatting.
Place the pot on medium heat and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally. Usually, all the soap is melted by this time. If there's any residual soap bits, reduce the heat and simmer for another few minutes, then cover with a lid and let the mixture cool down. Small lumps of soap will eventually "jellify" anyway.
When the mixture is cool, I pour it into a large plastic bucket, add the eucalyptus essential oil, mix thoroughly and cover with the lid.

How to use the laundry gel:: Use 1 to 1 1/2 cups of this gel for each washing machine load. Since my washing machine only uses cold water, I melt the laundry gel in a bucket of hot water and place this soapy water in the washing machine (top loader) before turning the water on. Warm to hot water gives the best results with whites and *really dirty clothes.
To prevent scum build ups in the washing machine, and to give our clothes a lovely scent (which also keeps moths away), I add half a cup of essential oil scented vinegar to the last rinse.

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last updated 12 mar 2007