Saving My...: Pretty & Practical Laundry Room Solutions

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Pretty & Practical Laundry Room Solutions

As you may know, I'm on a mission to "clean" our house - basically remodeling and reorganizing things to make them easier to use and easier to keep clean. I have grand plans for our pantry/mudroom/laundry, but 3 rooms in one requires a bit of money so I'm doing things in fits and starts. At any rate, I found myself requiring a laundry-type project when all of the outgrown shoes were brought to me at the end of the school year. Even after a good laundering, a certain child's sneakers were still rather, shall we say, odious...

I had recently read an article about using coffee grounds to deodorize shoes, and I thought it was a great idea! No one in our house drinks coffee, and I had some for visitors in my pantry which had expired so this was a perfect use for part of it. (I hate to throw away anything usable!) Of course I couldn't just toss the grounds in the shoes, so in looking around for something to put them in, I remembered I had two of a 3-pack of muslin drawstring bags left in my craft room. (Hooray!)

Since they'll be hanging around when they're not stuck in some shoes, I wanted to make them pretty and match the future colors of the pantry/mudroom/laundry. Since I may feel the need to wash them at some point, I made sure to use products that won't wash out: Staz-on ink for stamping and alcohol markers for the coloring.

I used Timber Brown Staz-on to stamp my images. I colored the bumblebee with a set of Honey alcohol markers.

And I used a set of Indian Corn Blue alcohol markers to color the dragonfly. As you can probably see, alcohol inks flow further and more quickly than usual on fabric. I worked as quickly and lightly as possible, so any halos around my images would be as light as possible.

After making my bags pretty, I just filled them with coffee grounds. You could also use baking soda, but I thought the strong smell of the coffee would help compete with the sneaker stink!

Here they are all filled, tied up, and ready to do their job!

And here they are in action! I am happy to report that this expensive pair of shoes (that the child helped pay for by the way - I'm not crazy) are now de-stinkified and ready for some other lucky kid to wear!

These bags would also make beautiful sachets filled with your choice of herbs and/or essential oils. (What a cute addition to a bridal or baby shower gift!) If you'd like to reproduce them, here's a list of the supplies I used to make them: