Friday, January 7, 2011

"Dish" Home Cleaning Swap 2011

As some of you already know, I am a member of "The Dish Forum", which is made up of a very talented and generous group of formulators and business owners. Each year I participate in several "Swaps", where different people make products to share with one another. The next swap that is due for my products is the Home Cleaning Swap.

The Home Cleaning Swap came about after a discussion about using natural ingredients to clean the home. Several people in the discussion make specialty products such as degreasers, dryer sachets and such. We each signed up for a cleaning item with the stipulation that only essential oils could be used for fragrance.

My choice was carpet freshener, or as I have labeled my items, "Carpet Re-Freshener". I don't have many carpets left since working for the past 3 years to remove the wall to wall in favor of hardwood with a few area rugs. Even so, those area rugs do get a little 'not-so-fresh' in the winter time, so I went about researching and testing until I cam up with something that worked very well in my house.

The ingredients are simple: Sodium Bicarbonate (Baking Soda), Borax and non-Iodized Salt. For fragrance I chose Lavender, Lemon and Litsea Cubeba. For a little fun, I added dried lavender buds.

The next issue I had was to choose packaging. Glass Mason style Jars would have worked, but mailing them to the hostess of the swap, then mailing them again could prove disastrous. Instead, I broke out the trusty Singer and made shaker pouches. Basically I made drawstring bags out of muslin with a piece of nylon netting inside the opening to control the flow of powder out of the bag and provide a bit of 'sprinkling' action. It worked great, but took for EVER to make all 10 of them.

I added an iron on transfer to the front of the bag to identify the contents as mine and make the plain bag a little more dressy. When full to the maximum capacity these bags will probably hold 3-4 lbs of carpet refresher.

Here they all are waiting for wrapping:


I sealed them in shrink wrap for their journey, but decided not to shrink them because they looked better 'unshrunk'.


I included the 'recipe' and directions in the shrink packaging so the swappers would be able to make it again if they chose to. If you would like the recipe, or would like to know how I made the shaker pouches just drop a comment below.