I’ve taken up bootlegging

I’ve taken up bootlegging, thanks to a suggestion from RealSimple. As soon as I read it, I knew I had to give it a try. My boots are now standing up in my closet instead of lying on their sides–and my enjoyment of James Arthur Vineyards San Realto has been hidden from sight instead of being proclaimed from a bookshelf.

It’s my first day of a four day weekend and I have enjoyed being lazy and indulging my DIY impulses. I started with making some homemade laundry soap. I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of days now and figured I’d jump in. My first batch cost $.64 and 30 minutes of labor (including cooking, mixing, and cleaning up). For 64 loads that’s a pretty good deal. The cheapest commercial detergent I could find cost around $.05 per load. Of course, I haven’t tried the soap out yet on any laundry. But I definitely had fun making it–even to cutting down an old water bottle to create a makeshift funnel for pouring the solution into an old laundry detergent dispenser.

After the laundry soap, I spent some time online and found an interesting how-to for making an oil lamp out of a glass bottle. I test burned snippets of three different mismatched socks outside before deciding on one as “mostly likely to contain only cotton fibers”. Then I put the lamp together. I used canola oil instead of olive oil (canola is much cheaper and I read somewhere that it’s still a good, non-smoking, relatively odorless burning oil). The lamp burns just fine–until the wick burns down too low. I’m not sure if the oil is wicking upward quickly enough to keep the wick from being consumed. Meh–it’s not like it cost me anything.

Despite the few projects of the day, most of my time was spent reading DIY:Happy. This blog is stinkin’ sweet. I should know, I spent the last five or so hours reading it from last to first and following its numerous links. The blog is a compendium of bizzare, high-tech, low-tech, computerized, knitted, origami-ed, ridiculously sophisticated projects. I highly recommend it.