And, no the one chore that I don’t mind doing isn’t sheep wrestling, it’s LAUNDRY! Yes, call me crazy, but I’d take doing laundry over cooking or dishes any day of the week. Before I get into a bit of info on laundry and how to make your own wool dryer balls, I need to take you to a previous ‘life’ of mine and fill you in on some backstory.
In another ‘life’ seven years ago until about two years ago, I sold Young Living. While I still use their products from time to time, I no longer actively try to sell them. That being said, one of the things that I learned a lot about while I was engaged in selling Young Living was how chemicals affect our bodies. AND one of the resources I found when I worked in Young Living is an amazing website called the Environmental Working Group. Why is it amazing? Because you can look up almost any personal care product that you use on your body, and it rates them from 0-10. “0” being pretty harmless and inert; “10” is more along the lines of ‘run the other way.’ When you look up household cleaners, they score them from A to F. You get the gist of the grades, I’m sure.
During the time that I was in Young Living and researching more natural recipes, I discovered that most of the personal care products and cleaning products that are on the shelves at most stores are pretty damaging to our systems in numerous ways. At that time, when I was learning to make most of my own personal care products I started researching other household items like alternatives to dryer sheets.
So in research for this article, I went to ewg.org and looked up the first kind of dryer sheets that came to mind – Bounce. Each variety of Bounce Dryer sheets that I found was given the grade of D. So I went and looked up Snuggle – yea, you guessed it, the next kind of laundry sheet that came to mind. It was worse. Snuggle dryer sheets all rated an F.
So what’s a girl to do when she doesn’t want clingy clothes but also doesn’t want chemicals laden on her and her children’s clothes?
You make your own wool dryer balls!
There are more benefits to making your own wool dryer balls than just avoiding the chemicals. When you use wool dryer balls, your laundry will dry faster. Big plus. The balls also will hold moisture and release it slowly to help your clothes avoid static and release at least some of the wrinkles. Plus two and three! So how do we do it?
If you can wind a ball of yarn, you can make your own dryer balls. Simple and easy, just follow these five steps.
1.) Buy yourself some wool.
Wool tends to be a more expensive fiber. I buy one skein at a time at Hobby Lobby and use a 40% off coupon. This gets the yarn at much more affordable level. Right now, it’s on sale for $3.49/skein. And that’s an awesome price. But depending on how much faster you want your items to dry and how much static control you want, you may want to purchase 6 skeins of yarn.
2.) Roll each skein into a ball.
You want to roll each of the skeins into their own separate ball.
3.) Pull out some old pantyhose or knee highs or buy some.
If you’re using pantyhose, you’d cut off one leg. Drop your first ball down to the toes. Make a knot in the pantyhose just above that ball. Then drop the next ball into the leg making sure it goes all the way down to the knot. Then tie another knot above, and keep going until you run out of space or wool balls.
4.) Wash your dryer balls in HOT water.
This step in necessary to help them felt.
5.) Once you pull them out of the hot water, dry your dryer balls in the dryer while still in the pantyhose leg.
You can do this again if you want to just to make sure that the balls have felted properly.
That’s it! Once you’ve done those steps you have your own wool dryer balls. In the process, you’ve made your home a cleaner place with fewer chemicals. You’ve also saved yourself a good deal of money in the process!
Have you ever made your own wool dryer balls before? Did you enjoy using them?
There are links in this post. Some of the links may be affiliate links. Some of the links may not be. My promise to you is that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality of items to serve you. These are the items that I buy for my own family. You can feel free to use my affiliate links, of which I will get a small amount in compensation, or you can choose to search out your products on your own.
