Homemade Laundry Detergent

When people ask me how they can start eating better, I usually tell them to focus on one thing at a time. Don't throw out every nasty thing in your pantry at once; pick one thing, work on it for two weeks, master it, then move on to another thing. Maybe you switch to wheat bread instead of white. Or brown rice instead of white. Then you focus on sugar. Then processed food, and so on.

This is the process we used, and it's the process I'm slowly using to get rid of chemical cleaners in our home, too. I'm already on the vinegar and water cleaning solution band wagon, and you know how big of a fan I am of the magical shower grime killer (see it here).

A year or so ago I decided I ought to look into making my own laundry detergent. That was right after I bought the mother lode (pun intended) of laundry detergent on sale at Walmart. So about 300 loads of laundry later, last week I was finally ready to take the plunge on making my own laundry soap!

I used The Wellness Mama's recipe, as it seemed simple and straight forward.

Here are the ingredients:

Borax: found at Walmart
Super Washing Soda: found...I can't remember where. I bought it a year ago after I knew I was going to make this. It sat faithfully in my laundry room until last week. It was kinda chunky due to age.
Castile Soap: found at Walmart. We've been using this castile soap for several months now. Drew has skin issues and I wanted some natural soap. Zach likes it so much he uses it as shampoo, too. It smells nice and lathers well, even without the sulfates that most contain to make lather.

First, I had to shred the soap. I started with the cheese grater, but as I was grating two bars, I decided to get out the big guns: the food processor.

The recipe says that the soap should be finely ground, so I brought out another attachment:

Then I mixed the following: 1 part soap (I had about 3 cups grated), 2 parts washing soda, 2 parts Borax, plus 2 tsp. of baking soda. Then I mixed thoroughly.

It made quite a bit of soap, and luckily I found some spare Mason jars to store the soap securely. I nearly filled up three jars.

The recipe says to use 1/8 to 1/4 cup per load, and an old scoop from our P90X Results & Recovery Formula measured a little more than 1/8 cup. Perfect!

So making the soap was very easy. Took maybe 30 or 40 minutes. (Clean up was relatively easy and struck me a bit odd..."cleaning" soap. Whatever!) But would it wash our (incredibly stinky) clothes?

Yes!

I'm so pleased with how this soap washes. It does not get all sudsy like regular soap, but the soap companies just put that stuff in to make you think the soap is working well...it's not really necessary. This soap made my clothes come out smelling like...Nothing! They didn't really have a smell, which is a good thing. It's kind of like when we installed our reverse osmosis water filtration on our sink and the water tasted truly like "nothing."

Lately our clothes had kind of a wonky soap buildup smell. Like maybe the detergent just wasn't ever rinsing out or something. No more! That smell is gone and replaced by pure nothing-ness. I'm very impressed!

Here's the official recipe if you'd like to make your own laundry soap:

Natural Laundry Soap Recipe
1. Grate the bar soap or mix in food processor until finely ground. Use the soap of your choice.

2.In a large bowl, mix 2 parts washing soda, 2 parts Borax and 1 part grated soap. (Add a few teaspoons of baking soda if desired).

3.Store in closed container. If you are using a big enough container, you can skip step 2 and just put all ingredients in storage container or jar and shake.

Use 1/8 to 1/4 cup per load of laundry.

***************

Workout of the Day

P90X3 Yoga, AKA the best yoga ever put on DVD.

Here's Zach doing "Ted's Chair" this morning. I'm amazed every time I see it!

Clean make-up brushes

Yesterday my Mom called me up to tell me that she saw my make-up brush cleaning pin on Pinterest and that she tried it out. Naturally, I had no idea what she was talking about since I pin things and never revisit them. But she told me that I definitely needed to try this out!

The pin was a cleaning solution for make-up brushes. It calls for 1 cup of hot water, one tablespoon of white vinegar and one tablespoon of liquid Dawn dish soap. 

Here are my results:

The brushes and the detergent before brush immersion.

The brushes while being cleaned.

Disgusting! And, awesome! While I'm really pleased how well this cleaning solution worked, I'm pretty disgusted that I've been running those filthy brushes on my face for, like, I don't know...three years? Five years now? I don't track these things.

This is the second time in as many days that I've used the vinegar and Dawn super cleaning solution, as I'm a super fan of the "Magic Shower Cleaning Solution" of hot vinegar and Dawn (see more here).

Try this out! It's fast, easy, and you probably have all the tools already in your house to give your make-up brushes a good cleaning. Your pores will thank you!

********

Workout of the Day

Insanity Pure Cardio

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

How to clean a wood burning stove window

You're probably wondering why in the world some Texans have a wood burning stove in their house. Well, we have two good reasons:

1) We are super cheap and don't like our heater to run.
2) We are super cold because we don't like our heater to run.

So for those three bitterly cold weeks in Texas (you know, 30 to 40 degrees), we keep that wood burning stove rocking. Last week I dragged the comfy leather chair over in front of the blower and studied my personal training test materials all day long. If I were any closer to that fire I'd have been sitting in it.

The first year we had the stove I tried to use Windex to clean the stubborn soot off the window. Then I'd give up when my arm felt like falling off.

Then I saw a blurb in The Farmer's Almanac that said you could clean soot by wetting a towel, dipping it in ash, and rubbing the soot off. Y'all, much like how the hot vinegar and Dawn miraculously dissolves shower scum, ash makes cleaning the stove window an absolute snap. No elbow grease required!

Take a look:

Dirty, sooty window. Can't see the pretty fire!

Take a wet rag and dip it in ashes.
(This rag has been used for this purpose a few times, obviously.)

Scrub gently.

After the soot is gone, wipe window clean with clean wet towel.

The fact that you don't have to buy some fancy cleaning product to get that window clean as a whistle delights me to no end every time! I imagine this would work for any stubborn window stain, although cleaning with ash is pretty messy. But in this case it's totally worth it.

Random aside:

See that neat looking iron kettle back there? It's new. And unfortunately useless.

When you run a wood burning stove in your house it dries the air out something awful, and we usually keep a little pot of water on it to humidify the air. At Tractor Supply we saw that kettle and thought, "Hey! That would be cool to use on the stove instead of our tacky little pot." But what didn't cross our mind is that, "Hey! If you leave water in an iron kettle for more than 10 minutes an inch of rust will form on it!" Those things aren't really meant to be left on the stove all day. So now we have a really cool looking useless iron kettle. At least it was only eleven bucks!

************

Workout of the Day

Combat 45 and Les Mills Pump Core

It's been about a month since we started this program, and I still look forward to it every day. My kicks are getting stronger, and I still laugh at Dan's crazy comments.

How to Get Soap Scum Off Your Shower

It's time for another installment of "Clean Cleaning," sponsored by Pinterest.

This one's all about the nasty soap scum in your shower. Don't you hate it? I've used all kinds of cleaners on my shower, and none of them seem to do much of anything. I scrub and scrub, and that nasty layer of brown scum remains.

So a few days ago I saw a pin that talked about using a solution of vinegar and Dawn soap on your shower to dissolve the soap scum. Upon further Internet investigation, I found sites affirming the method.

Here's what you do:

Measure 1/2 cup (the recipe actually called for a full cup, but my shower isn't that big) of vinegar and heat it for a couple minutes in the microwave.

Then pour the hot vinegar into a sprayer and add 1/2 cup Dawn soap. Shake it up a bit (it foams a lot!), and then spray it all over your shower. It makes a foamy paste that sticks to the walls pretty well.

Let the solution sit for about 1.5-2 hours. Then hop in the shower and scrub it down with a sponge or scrub brush. (It's always nice if you can combine an actual shower with shower cleaning, since then you don't have to worry about getting your clothes all wet, etc.)

I wish I had taken a before and after pic, but, quite frankly, I was pretty embarrassed about the state of my shower. We're talking pink and brown gunk and a very cloudy door.

But here's an "after":

Big whoop, you say? Well you can actually SEE inside the shower, right? This is a major improvement, trust me.

Aside from the fact that this little vinegar and Dawn solution worked famously, the best part of the whole thing is that it probably cost, what, like 75 cents maybe? A little vinegar, a little Dawn...voila! A clean shower without stinky, scary chemicals. Hooray! Try it out!

************

And now another Public Service Announcement:

While we all know it is good to ice sore muscles, please don't overdo it.

Saturday morning I threw my lower back out of whack, which was really depressing to me because I haven't had lower back issues in more than a year. Not sure exactly what did it, but it was some combination of Vertical Plyo, a TurboFire Core 20 workout, and scrubbing the bathroom floor with yet another Pinterest cleaning solution (water, vinegar, baking soda, and ammonia...worked well!). 

I knew that I'd done something to it on Saturday, but Sunday is when it really seized up. It's the worst! Sorry to be graphic, but I could hardly wipe my own butt. I considered asking for assistance, but I thought that might put my husband completely over the edge, so I took care of the situation. 

Unfortunately I'm well aware of what to do when my back locks up, which is an all-day regimen of ice, heat, and Advil. But I fell victim to a flawed sense of reasoning in that if icing for 20 minute increments is good, 40 minutes must be better. It's not better, it's frostbite:

OUCH! Get me some Neosporin, stat! I didn't even know I had done that to myself until this morning when I was trying to do some light stretching and scratched it with that tag on my pants. Shoot, man...what am I supposed to do now? My back is still sore, but I sure don't want to put any ice on it! 

It's funny, I'm almost more wimpy about the skin than I am about the back muscles. I think because I can actually see the hurt skin whereas the muscles are buried under my frostbitten skin. 

(P.S., don't email or comment to tell me that it's not really frostbite...I know because I can't unsee the images I saw when I typed frostbite into Google. More likely it's frostnip, which comes before frostbite. Wikipedia told me that!)

*************

Workout of the Day

Getting out of bed. No workouts for me till these back muscles quit barking at me!

Clean Cleaning

When it comes to my two most dominant personality traits -- 1) frugality and 2) a desire to be fit, healthy, and as "natural" as possible* -- it's hard to say which trait is stronger.

So when I find tips and tricks that serve both masters, I'm a pretty happy camper.

The other day while perusing Pinterest (it's grown on me in the past year -- I don't check it daily, but a few times a week I scroll through and repin some things that interest me...and sometimes I actually FIX the recipes I pin. Novel!), I saw a pin about Natural Cleaning Tips and Products. It linked to this blog telling about "Eight Ways to Ease into a Natural Home."

Katie outlines some facts about cleaning products, including the one that there is no Federal regulation for cleaning products and that bleach, when mixed with other cleaning agents, releases a poisonous gas. (And which "other" cleaning agents are they, I always wonder? That's had me scared straight for years--I never mix bleach with anything.)

So I was pretty interested in learning all those little tidbits, but then Katie says she's going to show us some  natural products that work just as well and...it will be cheaper too! Smack me sideways...you had me at "cheaper."

I'll let you read Katie's blog for the whole story, but here's the gist:

For pretty much any kind of clean up you need, you can turn to one of four products that you probably already have in your house:

• White vinegar
• Hydrogen peroxide
• Baking soda
• Rubbing alcohol

(And I'll add two of my own that I've used in the past: lemon juice and salt -- they make an excellent scrubbing agent.)

For counters and floors you've got your vinegar and water mixture (4 TB vinegar to 3 cups of water). For mirrors and windows you've got your hydrogen peroxide:

Look at that! I love how you just stick the spray nozzle straight onto the peroxide bottle. I went to The Walmarts this weekend and picked up two empty spray bottles (98 cents each) and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide (52 cents). I stuck the sprayer in the peroxide bottle (apparently it's important to keep peroxide in the dark bottle), and cleaned the yuckiest of yucky mirrors -- the sweat-stained one in our gym. It worked great! 

Like she mentions in the blog, I'm going to have to wean myself from my view that bleach smell = clean. But if I can get things reasonably sparkly with those few easy "ingredients," I'm happy to comply with Katie's wish that we would "Get rid of the toxic stuff."

Try it and let me know how it works at your house!

* I have to admit that my desire for non-toxic things abruptly fell by the wayside the minute I had an ant problem in my kitchen, at which point I wanted to lay down a chemical storm the likes of which those ants had never seen. I didn't end up unleashing it full force, but it seems to be enough to have stopped the problem for now. I wonder if ants hate vinegar?

************

Workout of the Day

Insanity: Pure Cardio

Love this one! It's brutal, but it's over quickly.