Homemade Laundry Soap

For about 6 months now we've talked about the idea of making our own homemade laundry soap. I researched and pondered, and decided OK! Well, fast forward, and I made it last night. A simple enough recipe all the ingredients and I was set.
I honestly don't' remember where I got the recipe from, but I will say that it was simple!

1 bar Fels Naptha Soap (grated)
1 cup Borax
1 cup Washing Soda

NOW, this is the part that wasn't clear, nor did I care for. It tells you to add 2 cups of water to the soap and melt it down. However, this doesn't work out as well as I'd hoped it would. You actually need upwards of like 6 cups of water to melt your soap down. Why? Well, if you're only using two cups, chances are you'll end up with a bubbly soapy sticky goo.

I added my Borax and Washing Soda to my 5 gallon bucket with hot water and stirred it until dissolved. After adding the soap mix to this I stirred and stirred. The hot water didn't get all the soap melted (remember the bubbly goo?), so I strained out the soap chunks, added water from the bucket and melted it down again and poured it back into the bucket.

Stirred and stirred some more, then I let it sit over night, covered. I broke up the gel and got my mixing beaters out to help break up the gel clumps, and added to detergent containers we'd purchased from the store. I'm unsure how they'll come out of the push spout (still kind of chunky).

I am super excited to try this on our clothes, and will be testing on our cloth diapers too! I added up approximately how much a 5 gallon bucket would cost, and it's about $1.50. A lot of sites say that's about 80 loads, but I added some more water to it once I got it into containers, so I'm hoping to get more than that (the containers claim there's 166 loads in each one).