DIY Laundry Detergent

One of my first pins from pinterest was DIY laundry detergent. I finally got around to trying it last week. You can find the original post and tutorial I followed here.

I cut the recipe in half for my first go around, so as to not waste ingredients if I didn't like it.  So I used:

1/2 bar of soap
1/2 cup of washing soda
1/2 cup of Borax
1 gallon of water.

First grate 1/2 bar of soap into 1/2 the water. Stir occasionally until soap is melted. This took quite a bit longer than I expected.

Next add the washing soda and borax. Bring to a boil. Transfer off heat source.

Add the other half of cool water. Once the mixture is cool(ish), transfer to container of you choice. I found the gallon container at the dollar store.

After a day or so, the liquid will thicken up a bit and become more the consistency of liquid detergent. I used it right away because I was out of detergent. It worked great! The original blogger says that it will not create suds, and I found this to be correct. 

I am still looking for the perfect "scoop" get detergent from the container. Looks like another trip to the dollar store!

I absolutely recommend trying this pinteresting money-saver!

DIY Pan Spray

This is a simple little idea I found on Pinterest. The original pin was from here. I didn't even look at the website until just now. Someone had written in the pin comment to combine one part olive oil with five parts water, and voila! To be honest, I didn't even measure, I just eyeballed it. I've used it several times now, and it works really well.

Just remember to shake it before each use because the water and oil separate as it sits.

Fun with Toilet Paper Rolls :)

There are tons of pins and tutorials on pinterest about using toilet paper rolls to create your own artwork. The original pin I saw is here. But I mixed it up quite a bit. Sorry no pictures for a tutorial. I wasn't envisioning blogging about this stuff at the time I made this. But it is fairly simple. I bought a 3-pack of shadow boxes at Big Lots. I glued scrapbook paper to the backs of the frames and then glued the toilet paper roll shapes to the lined backs. You can follow the link above to make the toilet paper roll art.

Here are a couple pictures from the whole wall collage. The owls are from Pier One.