Homemade Dish Detergent: Update

I did it! I made homemade dish detergent. If you remember this post, I had decided to use this recipe:

• 1 cup borax
• 1 cup washing soda
• 1/2 cup citric acid
• 1/2 cup kosher salt (for scrubbing action)

I wasn't able to find citric acid, so I bought powdered LemiShine instead. I still used half a cup. I assume this is acceptable. I also followed the FAQ that went along with the recipe - it said to leave it sitting out for several days, stirring it, to prevent clumping. That worked great! Until I got stupid. >.< The first couple days I left the lid off of the container and stirred it frequently. No clumping at all! Then I got cocky, and put the lid on it. It almost - almost - turned into a brick. I caught it in time, though! Took the lid back off, dumped some rice in, and stirred like crazy. I think the amount of it increased by 50%, because it's not a fine powder anymore, as much as it is a kind of chunky...something. Not huge chunks, mind you. But definitely less fine than when I first mixed it. We still haven't used it yet, since we had a few pouches of the old detergent. But the clumping problem has been resolved at least! Now let me dig through my phone pictures to find some to add to this...

These are the ingredients I used, excluding the Clorox wipes. ;) I got them all at Walmart. The Borax was a little tricky, because they didn't have any on the shelf. But we found a guy and he checked and they had some in the back, so baZING! Washing soda, Borax, and LemiShine were all in the dish/laundry aisle. And the salt was over in the food somewhere - Mr. T found it while I was waiting on Borax.

This is what it looked like immediately after mixing. Like I said, it's  increased in size since (awww...yeaaaaah....), so the container is probably half full. I could've doubled the amount to fill the container up, but I wanted to save my ingredients in case it didn't work. I can use pretty much all of it for other stuff. The magic of DIY!

So, yeah, that's that! I'll report back in after we've run a few loads with it, let you know my final opinion. Hopefully everything works out great!