Rainy Sunday Productivity

Hurricane Patricia brought an insane amount of rain to Central Texas this weekend & it made for the perfect napping, reading, lazy bum weather.  I lived in yoga pants & long sleeved t-shirts, did {relatively} nothing all day yesterday and decided to be productive after church this afternoon.

It has been on my goal list a handful of months to make my own laundry detergent and so when Coach Husband loudly declared this morning that we were out of Tide, I decided today was the day.  Thanks to a sweet Master Reading Teacher friend I had a recipe o file and got busy. 

Ingredients

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda

20 Mule Team Borax

Purex Crystals

Arm & Hammer Laundry Super Washing Powder

Oxi Clean Stain Fighter

Fels-Naptha Bar Soap (3 of these!)

Five Gallon Bucket for mixing

Airtight container for storage

Grate the bars of soap using a cheese grater.  This was much easier than I originally expected & permeated the kitchen with a clean smell which made my heart happy. 

Dump all the ingredients in a five gallon bucket and mix well with your hands. 

Pour the mixture into your air tight container & voilà!

All in all the ingredients cost us about $20.00 or essentially one bottle of Tide liquid detergent.  However, the container looks as though it could last us 8 months to a year running around seven loads of laundry a week.  {Yes, there are only two of us and it takes seven loads of laundry….I’m a little OCD when it comes to sorting}.

It took a total of 15 minutes to make and as I pulled our first load of laundry out of the washing machine this afternoon I am pleasantly surprised with the cleanliness and fresh smell!

P.S. This weekend was Homecoming and for the first time in eight years I was not in attendance at the game.  Kickoff was at 11 a.m. and CH had meetings until noon.  It was the weirdest feeling for both of us, but I was still able to hug my sweet Alpha Chi Family Line minus a few generations.  I guess when Bre comes in December for the final game of the season we will have to make up full force for all the haunts we missed this weekend. 

DIY: Friendship Mugs

Oh my goodness, it is 2014!! 

For the New Year I traded in some Southwest miles and flew to Texas to ring in 2014 with my loves Emmy and Meagan. We had the best time shopping, chatting, reality tv-ing, facial-ing, massaging and basically everything else GIRL! 

It only took about 20 minutes of us all being together to decide to have Christmas and exchange our gifts! All three of us are currently obsessing over hot tea and anything 'cozy' (think blankets, fires, hot chocolate, fuzzy socks, sweaters, etc.) 

To go along with our current life theme - I bought each girl a cozy wrap style sweater while boutique shopping over Christmas as well as an assortment of hot teas. I also decided to try my hand at creating the friendship distance mugs I have seen all over Pinterest and Etsy. 

They were surprisingly easy to whip out! I purchased the mugs from Wal-Mart and then traced the state outlines on to the mug. I then free-handed the heart and squiggly line. Lastly, because it's us, I added a gold initial and some decorative swirls on the mug handle. Total this entire project took me about 20 minutes for both. Once you finish your artwork, you will want to bake them in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes, in order to let the sharpie and paint pen set. (Confession: I didn't actually bake mine, I didn't realize you were supposed to do this until talking to the girls...obviously I was trying to recreate something I had seen without actually reading the directions!) 

I was very pleased with how these turned out and think they would make a great housewarming gift or a small token for a hostess. Especially filled with an assortment of teas or hot cocoa, a girl would be crazy not to love this!

Texas <3 Missouri