Carpet stain remover

1 little squirt of dish soap

an ounce or 2 of white vinegar

an ounce or 2 of water, hot if you want (I've used cold and hot and works well both ways)

I use an old toothbrush to mix and apply the mixture. I know everywhere tells you not to scrub, rub, or do anything but blot stains but how many of us really sit there and blot our little hearts out. So I scrub scrub scrub and it works great. I usually just use a clean cloth and blot/wipe dry. Sometimes I use a damp cloth followed by a dry one but either way I get the same results.

My carpets are the typical too light beige that apartments like to use for whatever reason so I don't really need to worry about taking color out but it always a good idea to do a color test before using a spot cleaner.

I am not big on cleaning but I also kinda am. I don't keep my place clean on a daily basis, if you were to just drop by you might find a quite clean and "normal" looking place or you could find a place that looks like a tornado has hit. I get into cleaning moods and EVERYTHING gets cleaned then. Every part gets a good clean every one or two months and it's usually that often that I get to spot cleaning the carpet.

Most of the stains on my carpet are pet related. Spots of cat puke and other gooey bits of cat messes, dropped bits of canned food that get left unseen for a while. There are also some husband food spots, hehe. I had some good photos to go with this post from months ago but when my computer crashed I lost them. At that point I had a lot of big nasty black stains all over my carpet. They were from cat medicine, one of the cat's was having slight hairball blockage issues so she was on a stool softener and it was very sticky liquid and so some would get on the floors. She was on it for about a week and after 2 days I gave up on cleaning the spots right away so a few weeks later when I finally went to clean them all they had attracted A LOT of dirt and grime. There was one spot where she spit the whole dosage back onto the carpet and I did blot it right away with a damp cloth but that stuff is REALLY sticky so it did little. This cleaner worked wonders and my carpet is all bright and shiny now.

Soap dish

My liquid hand soap ran out in one of the bathrooms about a week ago and instead of buyinganother bottle of liquid soap in another plastic bottle I decided to actually use one of the many bar soaps I have lying around. I have about half a dozen lying around and have had them for many many years and never used one. The only problem is I don't have a soap dish and whatever end of the soap ended on the edge of the sink would get all soggy.

I own one soap dish that I found lying around, that one has been used for my bar face soap. Earlier in the year I went to bar soap in the shower and my husband uses a shampoo bar, both of those are in little rice bowls, I used them because I had broken one and glued it back together so it couldn't be used for food anymore and I have a pair so when we got the shampoo bar I used the matching one, which I later broke and had to glue back together so now they really match, two broken rice bowls for our soap.

I had seen this Chopstick Soap Dish on UncommonGoods.com and really liked it but I have $0 money to spend, especially after Fridays $300 vet trip for the crazy cats. I went walking around the apartment looking for something to use as a soap dish or to make into a soap dish, I found two pairs of wooden disposable chopsticks and my glue gun. I decided to try and make a chopstick soap dish of my own. Of course it looks nothing like the one on uncommon goods and it definitely isn't as pretty but it was free and functional. I just cut each chopstick in half and then glued them together in a grid pattern. After I made one with the disposable chopsticks I decided to use two pairs of some nicer chopsticks and make another for the other bathroom, I have a lotof chopsticks and these I don't use often because their ends are too pointy to cook with, I like chopsticks with blunter ends.

Here is what I ended up with, lighter one is the disposable and darker is the nicer chopsticks:

More on my hair treatments

Since my last update on my hair on April 10th (read it here) where I was at war with my scalp but loving my hair I have been in love with both amazingly. I think the hot coconut oil treatment I did really helped even everything out and let me basically start fresh. The conditioner/treatment thing we put on our shower seems to help with the soap scum issues I was having with baking soda washes. My routine since then has basically been a once or twice weekly baking soda wash with an apple cider vinegar with rosemary essential oil rinse. (read about my no poo start and recipe I use here) I think the rosemary helped some too with my scalp. Things have been going great and no real issues.

I used up my coconut oil last week and was really not wanting to buy more (for the reasons I discuss in my last post about hair, link is above). I read around and apparently shea butter is pretty good to use on hair too and I have been wanting to get some to use on my skin as well so I decided to go that way. My hair has been really dry recently and the idea of a thicker moisturizer really appealed to me. I bought a glass jar (yay for glass jars I love reusing them for other things) of handcrafted shea butter with lavender and mint essential oils from Alaffia. It is not organic but it is fair trade, the organic option was in a heavy plastic jar so I was leaning towards the glass. Shea butter is a lot thicker than coconut oil and it is a bit harder to work through my hair than oil but it is not difficult, it also seems to moisturize a bit better.

Last week I noticed my head was getting flaky again and yesterday after I showered it was HORRIBLY flaky and it hurt. It felt tight and cracked and sore, not very itchy though. So last night I gave myself another scalp oil treatment, this time I opted for grapeseed oil. After I applied it I tied up my hair and slept on it to let it soak in. I also looked around for some other treatments I could use and made myself a thyme tea to use on my scalp. I used 1 tablespoon of thyme in 1/2 a cup of hot water, it smelt great. I let it cool and covered it and put it in the fridge.

I then thought about making some sort deep conditioner or something for the length of my hair since it has been so dry and the season is changing and it is only going to get worse with the cold dry winter weather. I remembered how much my hair seemed to like the flaxseed wash I tried a couple times (read it about here and here) and decided to make a batch and use it just on the length of my hair since it doesn't do so good with the scalp and I didn't want to end up with a weird greasy patch like before. I made a batch, 1 table spoon of whole flaxseeds in 1 cup of water brought to a boil and then simmered for at least 5 mins. To this I also added a bit of clove and a 1/4 stick of cinnamon. It smelled so good, I strained the mixture into a heat safe container that I had a chamomile tea bag in and another tea bag of lavender. I let them steep for a bit and then took them out, let the mixture cool and covered it and put it in the fridge to be used in the morning.

This flaxseed wash is AMAZING as a once in a while wash for you hair. It makes my hair dry so quickly and it makes my natural waves come out in full force. It also seems to brighten up my hair a bit too, clove is suppose to highlight red so that could be a factor too but I didn't use cloves last time and it looked bright then too. The grapeseed oil and thyme tea rinse also seemed to help my scalp a lot. When I showered in the morning I massaged my scalp thoroughly then continued massaging while I used my normal baking soda wash. Followed that with the thyme tea rinse and more massaging and rinsing. That was followed by using the flaxseed wash on the length of my hair and a thorough rinse. As it was drying I worked in some shea butter to the length and then just left it alone.

The color and texture and look and EVERYTHING of my hair is amazing today.

Just look at it:

It took very little effort, the only effort was making the mixtures, which was not difficult at all.

I am definitely going to add a flaxseed wash back into my routine, maybe once or twice a month, I am also thinking of buying some shikakai and trying that as a wash instead of baking soda. The baking soda works but I would like to try and find something different. I read about shikakai on the no poo livejournal page I always fall back on for loads of information on no pooing. Apparently it is used just like baking soda to make a wash, it is also rather cheap like baking soda is, I found it available on amazon. Hopefully I can keep the love going and have trouble free scalp and hair.