DIY
DIY scented laundry vinegar—refresh your clothes naturally
Laundry vinegar works like fabric softener, giving your fabrics a subtle scent. It also keeps your washing machine clean, and when diluted, serves as an excellent cleaning agent. Here’s how to make your own laundry vinegar.
Materials needed for laundry vinegar:
- 3 x 400 ml white distilled vinegar
- 3 x 100 ml water
- A handful of rose petals, a bunch of mint and lavender, and/or essential oils of rose, mint, and lavender
- 3 x 500 ml glass bottles.
Instructions for making laundry vinegar:
- Pluck the rose petals and separate the mint and lavender into sprigs. Rinse each separately and set them to dry.
- Wash and dry the bottles.
- Place the herbs and petals into the bottles. The more you add, the stronger the scent and color the vinegar will have. Pour in 100 ml of water and 400 ml of vinegar into each bottle. Seal the bottles and let the laundry vinegar infuse for about a day.
- Remove the herbs and petals. You can pull out the sprigs through the bottle’s opening, but for rose vinegar, it’s best to strain it into a bowl and then re-bottle. If you’ve used colorful roses, you’ll notice the laundry vinegar has a beautiful pink hue. To be safe, use the reddish vinegar for dark laundry. If you want colorless rose vinegar, use white petals.
- Add additional fragrance if you wish. The scent from the herb sprigs and petals may not stand out over the vinegar smell, so try the laundry vinegar in action first. As the laundry dries, the vinegar scent fades, leaving behind a subtle aroma of herbs and flowers.
- If the scent is too faint after testing, you can intensify it. Mix in up to 15 drops of essential oil per bottle of vinegar. Remember to shake the bottle before each use to blend the fragrance and vinegar.
- Measure about 50 ml of laundry vinegar into the fabric softener compartment for each full machine load. Use rose vinegar for dark laundry and mint and lavender vinegar for colored laundry. For white laundry, it’s best to rely on essential oils for scent.
Tip!
Try different herbs or flowers in your laundry vinegar. Choose your favorite scents—for example, rosemary or sage are good options. Any fragrant flowers are also great for scenting laundry vinegar. However, avoid getting pollen into the vinegar, as it will dye the vinegar and can stain fabrics.
Laundry vinegar can also be used as a general household cleaner, window cleaner, or ironing spray: fill a spray bottle halfway with vinegar, top it up with water, shake, and spray!
Materials needed for bottle labels:
- A laser printer and copy paper
- Acetone-based nail polish remover and cotton pads
- Tape.
How to make labels for the bottles
- Design the text for the bottles using a word processor and flip them horizontally. (For example, in Microsoft Word, you can do this by creating text boxes, selecting “Format Shape”, then “Effects”, and choosing “3-D Rotation”. Enter 180° in the “X Rotation” box.)
- Print out the texts and cut them into pieces.
- Tape the text pieces onto the bottles with the printed side facing the glass. Press the text using a cotton pad soaked in nail polish remover. Remove the paper and check that the text has transferred onto the bottle. If you wash the bottles later, avoid scrubbing over the transferred text with a brush.
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