DIY, Domesticity, stay-at-home-mom

No Grate Powdered Laundry Soap

Hello again friends! It’s been a long summer of travel with teens to conventions, camps and more. It has been a blast but I am so ready for fall now! I love the schedule that school brings, being home with my 3 kiddos is my dream come true. Our homeschool begins this Monday so I’ve spent the last week prepping our school room and home for the up coming year. 

Part of this prep was making our laundry soap for the next 6 months. We were running pretty low and it needed to be done. I can’t complain since I only have to do it twice a year! Plus it is really fun, only takes about 20 minutes, and best part… saves us around $120 a year in other store bought laundry soap! 

First of all let me tell you about my many fails at DIY laundry soap! My original attempt was to make the liquid kind where you grate the soap and then boil it with water into a liquid soap (with other stuff too). Well I put in the hours and made a ton of it. We used it for a year. After about 6 months I could see a change in our clothing. Not a good change… our clothes were dingy, losing color and wearing out at an accelerated rate. I thought it was my imagination, but after a year there was no denying it was ruining our clothes. Since it was an attempt to save our family money this was an unacceptable result. We never made it again.

A year or so later I came across a new recipe for a powdered laundry detergent that didn’t ruin clothes. I gave it a try. Just making this DIY laundry powder was a workout! The grating alone reminded me of why I didn’t enjoy this process at all. Still I made it and it worked great! 6 months no change in our clothing’s appearance or integrity of the fabric. Wonderful news until I needed to make a new batch… ugh the grating again. I will admit I bought a jug of Tide to “tide us over” until I felt like spending an hour grating soap again. 

Then I found this (cue angels singing in my head):

  
WHAT?!?! No more grating?!?! SOLD!!! I’ve been using this almost a year now and clothes are doing great, we are saving money, and absolutely no grating! Just mix it all up 🙂 

  
Ingredients:

1 Box Borax 

1 box Arm and Hammer Laundry Booster

2 bottles Downey Unstopables (or a different scent booster you love)

2 boxes Zote Soap (pre-grated) 

2 small containers oxy-clean 

1 box baking soda 

Mix it all up and put it in a cute container (mine is a huge glass jar from Walmart for $7)! I use a trash bag to mix mine up 🙂 it’s hard to stir in the actual jar I use. Here it is all ready to go! I use a 1/2 cup scoop but usually only need to fill it halfway per load. If it’s my son’s t-ball clothes or we did something particularly messy I add a full scoop. 

   
   
Well that’s all for now, thanks for stopping by 🙂 

Johanna

Advertisement
Art for kids, craft, DIY, Fall, Reflections, stay-at-home-mom

Chalkboard Pallet

So toward the beginning of my 30 Days Of Thankfulness Challenge I decided to turn a pallet into a chalkboard pallet! We had our roof worked on recently after one of our lovely Oklahoma storms ripped part of it off. The roofers were kind enough to leave behind two pallets, a crafty girl’s dream 🙂 I thought of at least 50 ways I wanted to use these pallets and settled on using one for my chalkboard pallet idea. Continue reading “Chalkboard Pallet”

Christmas, Kids, stay-at-home-mom

100+ Non Toy Gifts Ideas for Kids

I’m already starting to think about Christmas gifts. Each year I try to come up with some stocking stuffers and gifts that are not toys. My kids get toys too but it’s always nice to give practical or functional gifts as well. So this year I’ve compiled a list of ideas for non toy gifts to share with my readers.

Continue reading “100+ Non Toy Gifts Ideas for Kids”

craft, DIY, Kids, Reflections, stay-at-home-mom

Published!

Eek! So I got some really exciting mail today… from American Profile Magazine! I had in my hands 3 copies of the back to school issue that my blog post College Ruled T-shirts was featured in. I wrote this post 3 years ago and it was so much fun to see it resurface and even become a feature in a nationwide magazine! This full color magazine is printed and distributed in newspapers across America. Check them out at AmericanProfile.com. Continue reading “Published!”

Birthday Party, cakes, DIY, Kids, Reflections, stay-at-home-mom, Thankful Thursday

Shark Cake

Today is my sweet oldest Katie’s 7th birthday! We already had a fun big Frozen themed party with friends. The girls like to celebrate their birthdays together and have a party between their two birthdays. So on the actual day we let them choose what I make for dinner, make a small cake at home and have a few local family members over for cake 🙂

Continue reading “Shark Cake”

DIY, Kids, Recipes, stay-at-home-mom

Shark Week Ice Cream Sandwiches

Shark Week is in full swing friends! Today at lunch my Dad got my kids ice cream sandwiches for dessert as a treat. We made them a bit more fun (can ice cream sandwiches be any MORE fun?!) to go along with Shark Week! Continue reading “Shark Week Ice Cream Sandwiches”

Art for kids, craft, DIY, Kids, stay-at-home-mom

College-ruled T-shirts

This post was featured in American Profile magazine this week! So I’m reblogging it as per many requests 🙂 It is a fun and easy back to school project! Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Johanna

My Crazy Blessed Life!

So I recently made these really adorable and easy shirts for my girls.  They are made to look like a piece of notebook paper and remind me of school, so with school just beginning for the year and office supplies everywhere for sale…  well you get where my motivation to create these came from. 

Here is a quick and simple tutorial for making them:

1.  First you need a white T-shirt (I got the girl’s shirts a while back at Hobby Lobby when they did the 50% off shirts so they cost 1.50 each.  You will also need blue and red paint (fabric paint or acrylic with fabric paint additive), a paint brush, poster board to put inside the shirt so the paint doesn’t leak to the back and wide masking tape.

2.  Next, take the masking tape and tape off the shirt where you want your blue lines to be.  I found that…

View original post 188 more words