Sparkle and Shine

I tried my hand at making homemade glitter tonight.  The recipe can be found all over the internet, so I won't worry about linking them!  I just mixed 1/4 to 1/3 cup of salt with a few drops of food coloring in a tupperwear container and shook it until they were mixed.  Then I spread each color on some foil and placed on a baking sheet in a 375 degree oven and baked for 10 minutes (this is just to dry out the salt and the food coloring).  So,  with 5 minutes of mixing and shaking and 10 minutes of baking, I've got 6 colors of glitter ready to shake onto my princesses' art work!

Another thought I had - maybe this could be used to teach children how much salt to put on their food since they can see it?  Or maybe for a party?  Hmm...

Homemade Laundry Soap

So, I decided to make my own laundry soap.  Yep.  Homemade laundry soap.  I got the idea from this blog, so I'll just briefly share the recipe and my pictures.  According to the blog, it works just fine in cold water (which I use a lot) and apparently works in a High Efficiency washer (which I do not have).  I have yet to try it, but when I do, I will post an update!  I can't wait to see how it works!

1 4lb 12oz box Borax (2.15 kg or 76 oz) found in the detergent aisle

1 4lb box Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (1.81 kg) found in the cooking aisle
1 box Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda 55oz (3 lb 7 oz) found in the detergent aisle
3 bars of Fels-naptha soap, found in the detergent aisle
2 small containers of OxyClean or store brand OxyClean (try to get about 3.5 lbs total (1.58 kg)) found in the detergent aisle  (this is apparently optional, but I’m a big fan of OxyClean…)

I found all of this at WinCo Foods.  My total for these items was around $16.  I bought a cookie jar at WalMart for $5 and I used the scoop that came with my tub of generic OxyClean.

Although the recipe calls for 2 small containers of OxyClean, I opted for a large tub of the generic brand.  It was the same price as 2 tubs of Oxy and I figured it would all get used eventually!  To figure out how much of this 6 lb. tub I actually needed for this recipe, I browsed through that blog’s comments and found that I needed 32oz. (2 lb.) of OxyClean.  Since my tub was 6lbs, that meant I needed 1/3 of the tub – so I measured it all out and found I had 12 cups….1/3 of that is 4 cups and Ta-Da, thank you high school math!  :P

So I mixed in all of the ingredients and my 4 cups of OxyClean and grated my Fels-naptha soap with my handheld grater (I don’t have a food processor, but apparently you can use that too.  The soap grated very easily – probably easier than cheddar!).  

The soap looks just like cheese!  This blinding picture is everything together...very white!

All done!  The whole process took 15 minutes (this blog is taking longer...go figure!) and was very easy to do!  I fit what I could in the cookie jar (which I will decorate later) and the rest in a ziplock baggie for storage.  Going to use 1 scoop per load (the scoop was fairly big...supposed to be around 2 tablespoons per load) - this recipe should last me about 6 months according to the blog (hers lasted 9 months, but I have a feeling I'll be doing more laundry than she does!).

Laundry soap for less than $20 that lasts for 6-9 months...YES PLEASE!!!!

***UPDATE:  I've been using this soap for a week and here are my thoughts - there has been NO RESIDUE on my clothes and the soap has dissolved just fine in my cold water (which, actually, has been a big complaint of mine with store-bought powder soap).  I just washed a load which contained clothes that my littlest daughter was wearing when we had an explosive diaper.  Sad to say, I did not wash it right away, but I thought it would be a good test of this soap to see how it got the dried on poo off...and it DID!!!  Not a spot, not a smell!
As for the scent of this soap - it just smells clean.  There is no "Caribbean Breeze" or "Spring Mist" scent, but neither do the clothes still smell dirty.  They just smell clean.  And after they're dried, they smell like the dryer sheet I put in there!  All in all, no complaints or concerns yet!***


***UPDATE 3/25/12: I'm nearly out of this laundry soap.  I'm hoping to squeeze one more week out of it...This means I went through my soap in 3 1/2 months (bummer, not the 6-9 months!).  However, I need to keep in mind that there are 3 adults and 2 children here - both kids have accidents in their bed at least once if not twice a week - this means more laundry in washing bedding several times (including blankets).  So, I'll try this soap again.  It was easy to make and gets the laundry clean!****