Homemade Dish Washer Detergent: A Knock Off

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In an effort to find a more economical way of life I have been searching out homemade soaps and detergents.  We have been using a homemade laundry detergent on our cloth diapers with much success for sometime now.  So it was a natural progression to figure something out for our dishwasher detergent as well.  We run our dishwasher at least once a day, sometimes twice, so that $9 bottle of Cascade was really biting into our budget!

So I found this recipe from Ashley over at Simply Designing...I even used her idea for the cute Jar and vinyl lettering!


The recipe:

2 cups: Borax
2 cups: Super Washing Soda
2 cups: Lemi Shine
1 cup: Kosher Salt
(For all you locals, I got every thing at HyVee in the laundry/dish soap isle)


You only have to use one table spoon of the made soap per load of dishes.


I followed her instructions of keeping it in an open bowl for a few days and stirring every so often so that you do not get one huge CLUMP.  My Oxy Clean has done this and it is no fun...every time I need to get a scoop out I have to go after it with a butter knife. 


After the few days was up I put it in this gallon sized jar I got at Wal-mart for around $8.  And had a little Cricut fun making cutting out the lettering.  

And as you can see I went OVER board on the size of the jar.  One batch of this stuff only fills 1/3 of the jar...But I really like the size of the jar and how it adds to my kitchen decor.  I think for now on I will make three batches at a time.  Which would be about a year's supply of soap! It would come out to be around $17 to make this year's supply!  Whoa Mama!

 

I also picked up this little coffee scoop at Wal-Mart for $1.97.  I measured out 1 table spoon of soap into this scoop and it ended up being around 3/4 of the scoop.  Make sense?

 So I put on my jar the instructions to use 3/4 of a scoop.

And for the rinse aid we have been using white vinegar.  


So far we have run three loads of dirty dishes through and they have come out magnificent!  They have come out as good and maybe even a little better than the off brand Cascade.  I am SUPER pleased with this, and so is my Penny Pinching Husband! 

Felt Memory Game...An AWESOME Toddler Gift

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I ran across this "Pin" (above) in my first few weeks on Pinterest ....it seems most my projects are coming from there these days!  It cam from the blog Greenqueenmckeen.blogspot.com.  This blog has since been removed...or so the Blogger error message reads.  

Anyway I thought these would be a great stocking stuffer for my 2.5 year old Hayden.  She loves sorting colors, and shapes, and finding the matches.  And she or her 9 month old brother could chew on them, if they so desired) and they would not be destroyed like your typical card game.

I ended up making 12 matching card(24 all together).  I hand sewed the shapes on with embroidery thread.  If anything can be nicely hand sewn, I do it...it is an easy to do activity that I can do while my children are playing near by.  I can stop and start with out an issue, and there is little to no mess.  Then I machine sewed the patterned backer cards to the shape cards with a zigzag stitch.

The photo below shows the cards backs...ignore the knot of ribbon...it was a design fail in the prototype...explained below.

I had originally made a loop out of ribbon ton each card for easy storage, but those quite quickly fell out...so I took all the ribbon loops off and now I store them in a little mesh bag I found at the Dollar Tree...works pretty well.  I have since seen other felt card games on Pinterest that have nice grommets in the corners for storage.

There are so many ways of personalizing these for your own little ones!  And there are so many learning concepts covered while playing with them!  And they are VERY inexpensive to make!  All in All an AWESOME Toddler gift!