DIY Household Products

[annah]

Anyone make their own shampoo? I used to use a tablespoon of baking soda to wash my hair and I rinsed it with vinegar, but my hair started to feel dry after doing this for awhile. Now I use a shampoo soap bar, which works REALLY well. I love it, and the ingredients are mainly just oils and glycerin, so it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to make. . . . Anyone know?

[matt walker]

I haven't done it yet, but here's one I'd like to try. It seems easy enough to make.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/the-crun ... ecipe.aspx

[dave brenneman]

yeah, I should look into that. Currently just using Dr. Bronner's

[annah]

[Lollykoko]

A friend and I have been talking about making some shampoo or bath bars. She has a good supply of wood ashes to use for making lye and saves all her meat and chicken fat in the freezer. I have an assortment of essential oils and a jar of coconut oil. One of these days...

[Lollykoko]

I whipped up some laundry soap last night. In a few days I can tell you how well it works.

[George Collins]

If you take a small bit of gasoline and add to it an obscene amount of styrofoam, a jelly-like substance will form. If you tear off a hunk the size of your thumb from the last knuckle on and stick a match to it, the flame will burn for ~ 7 minutes.

The applications are broad.

One of my favorites: if you are going into the field for an extended stay, not knowing whether or not foul weather might be headed your way, I know of no other fire-starting aid that works more reliably. Couple this recipe with some water proof matches, a hatchet for splitting dry standing wood and a sharp knife to turn that split wood into feather sticks and you have about the most reliable method of starting fire there is. Better even than fat pine which we grew up calling "lightard" witch is a corruption of "light wood."

If the part of the world you live in is anything like where I live, styrofoam on the side of the road is an all too common occurrence. That and Christmas is where my raw materials usually come from.

[Natasha]

I've been making my own laundry soap for a while now. It's working great for us. I don't like the smell of the Fells, so next time I plan to use a Kiss My Face or Dr. Bronner's bar and see how that goes.

We've also been making our own dishwasher detergent, and it's working really well most of the time. A vinegar rinse in the rinse container helps too.

For hand soap we've been using a big bottle of Dr. Bronner's liquid soap diluted down in a foaming soap bottle. We love it. It makes less residue mess than bar soap. A friend of ours makes her own bar soap, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

You guys mentioned how cleaning with vinegar can get pretty potent. We like to get a big spray bottle, fill it with mostly water, add about 1/4 cup of vinegar, some drops of Dr. Bronner's liquid soap, and then, top it off with some orange essential oil. It takes care of the smell department quite nicely. You can use about the same mix for washing your floors.

If anyone's interested, I can find the link for the dishwasher soap recipe.

[Lollykoko]

Natasha, I made my first batch of laundry soap with a bar of Irish Spring. It worked well enough and had a bit of scent to it. Next time around I used Fels Naptha and added essential oil for the aroma. I guess I've never noticed Dr. Bronners soap anywhere. Is it something available at the average retail spot?

[freedomlives]

Copyright would go as far as basically not copy-and-paste their text. While I'm not a lawyer (and I doubt they'd hire one to sue for copyright infringement), I don't believe it would be a problem to take their formulas and share them, so long as you aren't copying and pasting. That sort of idea would not be protected by copyright, but rather by patent.

I should add that it is actually useful to write the formula here, so that in five years, if the original website is down, people reading this post can still benefit from it.