Non-Toxic Dryer Sheets
Non-Toxic Dryer Sheets
Commercial dryer sheets are loaded with toxic chemicals, synthetic fragrances, and hormone disruptors. By making your own non-toxic dryer sheets, you can avoid those chemicals and reduce your waste.
All you need is scrap fabric - cotton or flannel are ideal, distilled white vinegar, essential oils, and a large jar with a lid.
Don't worry the vinegar smell doesn't stick around. It will dissipate during the drying process and help with static.
Use caution when adding the essential oils, as some essential oils can be flammable. Use no more than 20 drops of any oil for this recipe.
Ditch and switch to reduce your toxic load happens one small step at a time. Replace items in your home as you use them. Try out this recipe for homemade laundry detergent and natural laundry boost to fully replace your laundry needs. Switching out your laundry items is a huge leap to reducing the toxic load for yourself and your family.
Don't have time to make your own homemade laundry detergent? Try out this Thieves Laundry Soap recipe.
Non-Toxic Dryer Sheets
Ingredients
- Approximately 6x6 scrap fabric, doesn't need to be exact
- 1 cup of distilled white vinegar
- 15 drops of essential oils (lemon, lavender, or eucalyptus are great!)
Instructions
- Cut your scrap fabric into squares
- Add vinegar and essential oils to your jar
- Soak your squares in the mixture for several minutes
- Remove squares and squeeze out excess liquid.
- Fold and store squares in a jar with a lid.
- Add one square to dryer load, I like to add two to bedding
- Once the squares are used, soak them again!
How to Clean Your Wood Cutting Board
How to Clean Your Wood Cutting Board
We use our wood cutting board for everything. I snagged a gorgeous, heavy, heirloom-style cutting board from a local woodworker and I've never looked back. I vowed that I would put time and effort into cleaning my wood cutting board since we all know that funk can get trapped in the grooves.
I've only ever used soapy hot water, until I learned that that's not cutting it - pun intended. When you make grooves in the wood, bacteria can get trapped underneath. If you're using one cutting board or cutting meat where you cut your vegetables, bacteria can easily form in your cutting boards.
I love a beautiful wood cutting board. It ranks up there with my cast iron in my favorite kitchen items. Like cast iron, if you take care of it, you can ensure it is clean and extend its life dramatically.
Here is a simple way to clean and sanitize your wood cutting board. This is great to do every couple of months to ensure your wood cutting board is clean and in good shape for long term use.
Step-by-step to cleaning your wood cutting board
First, wash and scrub your cutting board with hot soapy water.
Next, pat dry and spray your cutting board with white distilled vinegar. If you don't have vinegar in a spray bottle, simply pour some on and wipe it around.
Third, pat it dry again and sprinkle your board with salt. I use a coarse celtic sea salt.
Next, cut a lemon or lime in half and rub the salt into the board with your citrus. Small circles. You'll find out if you have any cuts on your hands now. Do this until most, if not all, of the salt is dissolved.
Then, pour on some olive oil and rub all over the board.
Let your board completely dry, then brush off any excess salt.
If you want to take it a step further, you can add a bee's wax based board balm after your board is completely dry and cleaned off. I like to use a bee's wax board balm since it is all natural and very effective at sealing the wood to prevent moisture and bacteria from hanging out in the grooves of your board.
Homemade Laundry Detergent
Homemade Laundry Detergent
Commercial laundry detergents contain a variety of harmful chemicals. From dyes, to fragrances, to irritants, there are countless reasons to ditch your commercial laundry detergents and move to your own homemade laundry detergent. It's easy, cheaper, and effective!
Use this recipe with my Laundry Boost for the ultimate stain and stank fighting combination. Adding essential oils will give this a great scent, without the chemicals. Castile soap is sold unscented or with scent. I like to add the same essential oil as the scent used in the castile soap - lemon and eucalyptus are my favorite.
Be sure to mix prior to use. Contents will naturally settle. Keep out of reach of children. 
Homemade Laundry Detergent
Ingredients
Instructions
Notes
Thieves Laundry Soap Recipe
Laundry detergents love to market themselves as cleaner than they actually are. Many that are marketed as extra clean, safe for sensitive skin, and safe for babies are actually filled with SLS, SLES, dyes, petrochemicals, formaldehyde, phosphates, and synthetic fragrances. All of which are known skin irritants and hormone disruptors. Known. Being marketed to us as clean, safe, and even great for our babies.
Why I Switched to Thieves Laundry Soap
Just a few days after the birth of my son, I started to develop a very itchy widespread rash on my hips, knees, and elbows. Rashes are so mysterious, aren't they? I couldn't figure out what was doing it, where it came from, or how to get rid of it. Terrible. Especially on top of the usual postpartum healing and care, figuring out nursing, and caring for a brand spankin' new baby.
After days of narrowing it down, I finally figured out that it was the Baby OxyClean. Marketed as the most sensitive. I learned that when you are nursing, your resistance to irritants is routed to your baby, and you are left with diminished defenses. So this awful rash was what my body was defending against all day long, and I washed all of the blankets, swaddles, and baby clothes in it.
I threw the Oxy Clean in the trash, got some Thieves Laundry soap from a friend while I waited for mine to arrive, and rewashed everything three times with the Thieves. The rash that had me taking oatmeal baths and coating myself in salve went away in less than 48 hours.
The Dilution Recipe for Thieves Laundry Soap
Young Living sells most of their Thieves cleaning line products as concentrates. That means you get a lot of bang for your buck. Especially with the Thieves Laundry soap.
At first, I was skeptical on how well it would work. Between farming, hunting, gardening, exercising, raising babies, these clothes are dirty, y'all. This works wonders on our clothes. If they are really gross, I'll add a couple of bloops of vinegar to the washer in addition to my Thieves Laundry soap mixture to give it a boost. I know some people like to use an oxygen booster to their clothes. I love Molly's Oxygen Boost for a clean option on Amazon; otherwise, Branch Basics Oxygen Boost is a great option.
Since the Thieves Laundry soap is super concentrated can be diluted. Here's the recipe below.
Thieves Laundry Soap Recipe
Ingredients
- Three 32 oz glass pump bottles
- Thieves Laundry Soap
- Thieves Household Cleaner
- 15 drops lemon essential oil
Instructions
- Split the Thieves Laundry soap into thirds into each glass pump bottle until the Thieves Laundry soap is empty. Measure with your eyes.
- Once each bottle has 1/3 of the Thieves Laundry soap in it, pour two capfuls of the Thieves Household cleaner into each bottle.
- Add the lemon essential oil (or your fav EO - I love eucalyptus or lavender here!)
- Fill the rest of the bottle with water
- Give it a shake to mix
- Add 6-8 pumps per load.
Natural Laundry Boost
Natural Laundry Boost
Going the natural route for your laundry doesn't meant you have to sacrifice on having a nice fresh scent. Trust me, after Dylan cleans out the pig pen (or leaves his bottle of elk estrus in his hunting pants, IYKYK) - we need a little (a lot) help in the scent department. Plus, kids, exercising - you get it.
We aren't short on reasons to have a laundry scent boost. Plus, we can trust that it isn't filled with chemicals and synthetic fragrance that will disrupt our hormones and cause skin and respiratory irritation. And, most importantly, safe for my bebe.
The Switch
One of the things that pushed me over the edge into low-tox living and questioning the products and foods I was putting in and on my body was laundry detergent. When I was early postpartum, I started to develop an incredibly itchy rash on my legs, waistline, and arms.
If you're a mama, you know how physically challenging those first few weeks are already. Add the lack of sleep, cracked and sore nips, sweaty, in a diaper, changing diapers - oh, and trying to keep a new human alive. Add a rash that made you want to rip your skin off. I mean, off, y'all. And rashes can be so mysterious. Was it internal? Was it external? It took finally realizing that the rash was the most dense on contact areas where my clothes hit.
That's when I realized. The laundry detergent. I just bought the Oxyclean baby brand that was rated pretty well on EWG. That was it. The shoddy synthetic fragrances. Curses!
I threw it all away and completely switched everything to Young Living's Thieves cleaning line - it was the cleanest stuff I could find. The rash went away almost immediately. I was skeptical with how effective it would actually be. The liquid laundry detergent is great - super concentrated, lasts forever. I split the bottle of liquid detergent into three one-liter bottles, fill the rest with water, add some oils, and done. With the farm and baby, I knew I needed a little extra boost in our laundry. I'd read articles about Borax that I wasn't quite sold on and I wasn't sure on washing soda.
In comes this natural laundry scent boost. My favorite oils to add are eucalyptus, lemon, or lavender.
Natural Laundry Scent Boost
Ingredients
- 1 Cup of Baking Soda
- 1.5 Cups of Epsom Salt
- 35 drops of essential oils
Instructions
Dump, shake, done!
Sprinkle 2 TBS in each load.
Notes
I love eucalyptus, lemon, or lavender essential oils.
Orange-Infused All Purpose Cleaner
Infused All Purpose Cleaner
This infused all purpose cleaner is easy to make, non-toxic, with no essential oils, artificial fragrances, dyes, chemicals. It's pretty much free of all the things you don't want to clean with, especially when you have babies roaming around the house. This is great for a quick wipe on the bathroom counters, toys, your car, the changing pad. Just don't use it on marble or hardwood - orange and vinegar can be finicky when it comes to those surfaces.
Is this my mega-deep clean, dog had an accident, baby had a blow-out go-to cleaner? No. This is my everyday, de-funkify, give the countertops and high chair a quick wipe and move on type of spray. Vinegar is a surprisingly effective cleaner. Plus! Put those rinds to good use.
Instead of orange peels, swap them out for limes or lemons for a fresh fun scent. Love using essential oils? Feel free to add a few drops in when you are mixing this in the spray bottle.
When you've mixed your cleaner, throw the rinds to the chickens or pigs or add them to the compost pile for a no waste cleaner.
These are my favorite amber glass spray bottles!
Orange-Infused All Purpose Cleaner
Ingredients
- Glass Quart jar and lid
- Orange peels 6-8, depending on size
- Distilled white vinegar
- Well-filtered or distilled water
- 16oz Spray bottle
Instructions
- Add orange peels to your quart jar as you use them
- Once the jar is full of peels, add vinegar to cover the peels
- Let sit on counter and steep for 10-14 days, with lid on.
- When it's ready, remove the peels, fill your spray bottle with 8oz of water and 8oz of the vinegar.
Notes
Use on counters, toys, bathrooms, highchairs, and more.
Swap the orange peels for lemon peels!