Laundry

I don’t have crazy stinky feet or anything, but having nice fresh smelling shoes is oh so nice!  I’m always in the market for something that will make my world smell a bit better so I decided to try this new method for deodorizing shoes.

It turns out tea bags are a great solution for a simple homemade shoe deodorizer without having go wash the shoes.  The best part about using tea bags to deodorize your shoes is that you can pick any flavor, or should I say scent, of tea bag that you want.  Apple spice, peppermint, or lavender scented shoes anyone?  I say, yes please!

I figured I’d test out this new shoe deodorizing remedy with a few bags of mint tea since I’ve always got a few boxes of that laying around and, hey, minty shoes sound/smell pretty good to me!

If you’re making your our homemade laundry detergent then you’ll definitely want to find a good diy homemade fabric softener recipe to go with it. I really like homemade fabric softeners. They don’t make your clothes feel the same as store bought fabric softener do when they come out of the dryer. I think that’s a good thing.

Homemade fabric softeners won’t leave your clothes smelling like artificial scents or leave behind that strange chemical softness that dryer sheets do. What homemade fabric softeners will do is make your clothes feel softer than they would if you dried them without some sort of softener and that’s enough for me!

Here are a few simple ways for how to make homemade fabric softeners that work great and get your clothes cuddly and smelling awesome in no time!

Here are my homemade cleaning product post for getting all your laundry clean!  Getting chemicals out of my clothes was one of the first big changes I really wanted to make when I started making my own homemade products.  I don’t like the idea of wearing clothes covered in chemicals, and dryer fabric softener sheets always seemed gross to me with their sticky texture and sickly sweet smell.

Here are the homemade laundry cleaning products I’ve made so far.  I’ll let you know which ones are my favorite as you read.

The first time I ever used soap nuts for laundry detergent I was blown away.  Then I learned you can also powder soap nuts to use as a homemade laundry detergent and my mind was blown again!

There is a small inconvenience to using soap nuts, a trade off I’m totally fine with.  The inconvenience is that you have a little bag you need to keep track of between loads, mushy husks to throw out or compost, and you have to make sure the bag is going to dry out or it will mold between loads.

Powdering soap nuts should have all the benefits of using whole soap nuts without those few drawbacks.  So without further ado here’s how to use soap nuts for laundry detergent by powdering them.

If you are interested in soap nuts, also check out How To Use Soap Nut for Laundry Detergent for my post on using whole soap nuts to wash laundry.

A few months ago my wife and I went to France.  We booked a nice apartment in Vannes on AirBnB (that link will get you $25 off when you sign up for AirBnB) complete with a washing machine.   The owner was kind enough to let us know that the laundry detergent was in the closet.

When I opened the closet to find the laundry detergent all I found was a more or less empty closet with a bag of nuts inside.  After Kelsey and I both dismissed the bag of nuts as definitely not being laundry detergent we decided there had been a misunderstanding, and reached out to the owner of the apartment.

The owner of the apartment kindly explained to the stupid American (my words, not hers) that they were soap nuts, and to just chuck a few in with our clothes and they’d magically be cleaned.  To our disbelief the soap nuts worked amazingly well, and that is how I was introduced to the wonderful hippy magic of soap nuts!

No more story telling from me, here is how to use soap nuts for laundry.

I remember seeing people use dryer balls when I was a kid. I remember thinking that friend’s parents were a little crazy because they were chucking her kids toy balls into the dryer with the laundry.