Day 201: DIY Shoulder Pad Dryer Sheets

Do you remember Day 160, when I made my own laundry detergent?  It’s working great!  Fella and I are completely happy with how clean and fresh our clothes are getting!  🙂  What follows is an extension of my newly found DIY laundry products obsession.

A few months ago, a good pal of mine moved away.  She didn’t want to deal with moving her cleaning supplies, so she kindly gave them all to me.  There was just one thing that I really didn’t have a use for : a big jug of fabric softener.  I only use dryer sheets, and Fella doesn’t use the stuff at all.  It actually weakens the fibers in your clothing, but I hate static and I LOVE that fresh from the dryer smell!  🙂

Still on a DIY High from making my own laundry soap, I found this site that tells you how to make your own re-useable dryer sheets!  They suggest using flannel scraps or any other really thick fabric.  Other sites suggest using sponges.  You can probably guess what I used.  😉

To make the solution for your dryer sheets, you’ll want to mix 4 T Fabric Softener with 10 T Water.  It’ll look like this:

Next, toss those (clean) shoulder pads into the solution.

You’ll want to keep them in a water-tight container.  I just used an old sour cream tub.  It ain’t fancy, but it works!  Northern Cheap$kate used an old baby wipes container, but I can’t justify having a child just so I can have a nifty re-useable container.  😉

Each pad is good for two uses.  After that, just toss it in with a load of laundry and it can go back into the tub!

That’s it!  Now I have reusable pads from supplies that otherwise wouldn’t have been of any use to me at all!

Of course, the cost of making my dryer sheets was $0, because I never had to pay for the bottle of fabric softener.  If you actually bought the liquid fabric softener, your cost per load would come to 1 cent, vs. the 11 cents you were paying per load!  Plus, you’re keeping all those little dryer sheets out of the landfill!  🙂

Cheers!