-:- damson, finished

Modeled with a $12 J Crew coat found at our local thrift store - just missing a button.

Pictures by Mr.

xox

-:- pinterest weekly

I love making homemade household products,
but because we have never lived in a place with a dishwasher,
I've never had the occasion to make my own dishwasher detergent.

Until now.

I have used this once just to see how it works (we still need to use up our store-bought stuff!) and it's pretty awesome. In fact, I couldn't tell the difference between this and the other.

I used this pin as a guide and just quadrupled the recipe.

I would have liked to make more, but container of citric acid I bought only holds about a cup. So that's where I was forced to stop.

Still, though, this is a lot of detergent to get through at a tablespoon per load.

And it's formulated to work well with hard water - an added bonus for us.

I'd call it a success.

I also made laundry detergent - from this pin, but I used one bar of Zote instead of the Fels Naptha. Now that it's safe to go down to the basement again, I washed Mr.'s load of (really) stinky hiking gear with just one tablespoon of this stuff.

Worked like a charm.

Two successes in one post? I'd call that a third success.

xox

-:- finding unique

When we lived back east, Mr. and I went an entire year without buying anything new (no new clothes, household items, etc). Anything that we purchased could only be secondhand or handmade, with obvious exceptions (i.e. underwear). During this time, we relied heavily on a huge thrift store called Unique.

There were several locations in our area, so it is definitely a chain, and we just had such luck finding what we were looking for at that place. I had a lot of "ask and ye shall receive" moments there.

Anyway, last weekend, while we were out running errands, we ran into another Unique thrift store.  Was it the same? Could we be so lucky?

We decided we had to go check it out and sure enough, it was the exact same set up as the ones we frequented back east. Same rewards card, same price tags stapled to all of the clothes, same everything. We were thrilled.

I was especially thrilled because this supports #10 on my list of things to do - no new clothes for a year. So now, even if I never succeed in making my own clothes, I at least know that I can find Banana Republic Italian cashmere cardigans in perfect condition for, um, $2.99! What?!

Man. Who needs full price, anyway?

xox