Miscellaneous Tutorials

How to Make Home-Made Liquid Fabric Softener

What you need:

• 1/2 cup Baking Soda (a 12-lb bag is about $6 at Wal-Mart)
• 3.5 cups Distilled White Vinegar (a gallon is about $3 at Wal-Mart)
• Some cheap hair conditioner (this part is optional)
• Water
• A clean empty 2-liter bottle
• a cooking pot
• wooden utensils
• funnel
• Fragrance, or essential oil (optional, you can get fragrances at Michael's, or online)

Steps:

1. First, measure out 1/2 cup baking soda and put into a large vessel (I used my largest cooking pot)
2. Add 1 cup water
3. SLOWLY pour in 1 cup of the vinegar.  Stir around until it stops fizzing
4. Put your pot on the stove and turn on the heat to low (this part is optional)
5. Slowly continue adding the rest of the vinegar and stir until the fizzing stops.
6. If you have the heat on, allow the remaining baking soda to dissolve.
7. OPTIONAL- Add 1/4 - 1/2 cup cheap hair conditioner.  You will need to add a little more water, and I'll explain in a second...
8. Bottle your concoction into an empty, clean 2-liter soda bottle, or juice bottle (I used a sturdy V8 Fusion bottle).  Use a funnel... it's a lot easier :)

How to use:

• Shake to mix if you added conditioner
• Add about 1/4-1/2 cup as you normally would with store-bought fabric softener.  I add mine to a pre-measured cup that is part of my machine.

Basically, when baking soda and vinegar mix, you get a chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide, a little bit of water, and sodium acetate salt in solution.  In my recipe, 3 cups of vinegar is sufficient to neutralize the 1/2 cup of baking soda, however I like a little extra vinegar for some more cleaning power.  The solution will smell a little like plain carbonated water.  You will be able to tell if you have excess vinegar when you can 'faintly' smell that pungent aroma.

Store-bought vinegar is actually only about 5% acetic acid, which is the active compound that gives vinegar its characteristic smell.  Acetic acid is a great universal solublizer and cleanser.  If you don't use heat in your procedure, you might find that it takes longer for the baking soda to dissolve.  This is normal, heat just makes everything faster!  It will eventually dissolve in your bottle.

If you opt to add the cheap hair conditioner, you ought to mix it with some water before adding it to your pot.  The reason I say this is that I added it straight to the pot-- hair conditioner is a mess of ingredients that may or may not be water soluble, which is why it is an emulsion.  From what I have experienced, half of my conditioner (1/2 cup) dissolved in my mix, and the rest is kind of a watery float at the top that I shake back into solution before using.  This has me guessing that the emulsion has half-dissolved in the water portion of the reaction between the vinegar and baking soda.  It does not want to dissolve in the remaining sodium acetate salt solution that was created.  Anyway....

Happy Laundering!