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!