Soapnuts!

When I started thinking about ways in which I could replace nasty chemicals in my home, clothes washing wasn't an area that seemed immediately easy. Sure there are products like ecover that claim to be gentler on the environment, but I was never quite sure exactly how much so, and what exactly they were made up of and what effects those ingredients had, and so on...


So, when I came across this post over on the ever-informative Tiny Choices, I was pretty excited. It sounded almost too good to be true - a natural and compostable product that will wash just as well as detergent?! (Soapnuts grow on trees in Nepal and India, and produce Saponin, a natural detergent which can be used for all kinds of cleaning purposes.)


So, I had a quick look around for a UK seller and found Soapods selling on Amazon. I've now been using them for a month or so and am happy to report they really do work - and well! The little nuts themselves don't have the most pleasant smell in the world, but the washing (washed on 30C) is clean and smells super fresh - B was impressed at how fresh-smelling his stinky sports gear came out.

They're super easy to use too - you just pop them in the little cotton bag (see pic) and put them in the washing machine with your clothes. (NB make sure you tie it up properly otherwise there are little bits everywhere on your clothes! Same problem with string bags - don't do it!)

The only slight problem I've had is with storage in between washes. The leaflet advises keeping them in a closed container with a little water, if you run more than one wash a week. I found on one occasion however, this invited some nice mould to grow on my little cotton bag, so have taken to leaving them to dry out instead.

The instructions advise using for three washes, but advice I've read elsewhere suggests running the bag under a little water and rubbing it to see if it's still slippy and sudsy to see if they've still got the cleaning power. Using this technique I've had no problems and think I will get a lot more use out of a £5 bag than I would out of a £5 bottle of liquid detergent.

Apart from the fact that the water you are washing away should be less toxic and the production process is certainly going to be a lot greener, soapnuts are also compostable. (I am a little ashamed to admit that currently we don't compost our green waste - we live in a flat with no outdoor space, and though I have been researching indoors composters and seeing if I can find anywhere locally I could freeze waste and take it to, and asking the Council for help, so far I still have not found a solution. I will attempt to up the ante on this and report back at a later date...)

The only slight drawbacks then, in a green sense, are the plastic packaging they come in (my package is shown in the top pic) and the shipping from India to UK.

How excited was I then, to find out today that the native Horse Chestnut also contains saponin, and is a potential soapnut equivalent!?!? See this thread on the Money Saving Expert forums for more information. When it comes round to conker season, I am definitely going to be collecting me some free natural and local detergent and trying that out!


Another option to keep it local and free, is to grow your own soap nut tree. An account of how to do so from someone who's had success in this feat is here: http://exeterra.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-grow-soap-nut-trees.html . You just need to watch out for stray seeds in your soapod batches to get going. Awesome!

Have you tried soapnuts yet? How do you find them? And I'd be really interested if anyone's tried horse chestnuts or growing their own?!...

a cushion cover

I'll tell you about the cushion cover I made a couple of weeks back. Not because it's an exemplar cushion cover - it certainly isn't! - but just because it makes me kind of pleased to see it each day.

I went to Bangladesh a month or so ago, to visit a friend, L, who works out there. (And I loved it, beautiful green and crazy country.)

Anyway, whilst I was there, L had a dress dropped off by Mr Ali the dressmaker. You pay for the fabric and the labour, so the offcuts of fabric get dropped off too as part of the parcel, and L offered the shiny gold and red silk leftovers to me (god I wish people in London would dress as brightly as they do in Bangladesh; it would cheer things up so much!).

Previously I'd been using a cushion cover which my older sister K had made in a school textiles class, back in about 1993. Now, whilst this was obviously a superb example of scatter dye and machine-sewed patchwork, I must admit to a hankering to replace it. Still, I really couldn't bring myself to spend money on a new cushion cover when this one did the job perfectly well.

But with my shiny silk being just about the perfect size, it seemed time to indulge in a little house vanity and set off on an afternoon craft project.





I cut out a square and folded it in half to make a rectangle, which I pinned in to a smaller square, big enough to fit the cushion (double strength as it was really quite thin. This helped with edges as well.)



Not owning a sewing machine, I took up needle and thread and did my neatest backstitch all the way round two of the open edges.






I turned it inside out, and magically enough, it looked like a cushion cover!








At the moment I just tuck the open edge in like this, though I'm going to scout around for a spare button to fix in the middle.



And here it is in all its glory.

PS - fear not, the old cushion cover wasn't just chucked in the bin. It's in the fabric box, where it can be back-up lest the silky one fails, or from where it may be taken to be used in another craft project or as a cleaning cloth.

PPS - I was yarn shopping in Liberty the other day and happened across these super cushions whilst waiting for the lift - they don't have a picture on their website but they had an embroidered cityscape of the city of London on. And I was thinking, 'I could do that', which is probably nonsense as I've never really embroidered, not since 4th year juniors when Mrs Allen let us sew pictures of Victorian houses whilst she read the afternoon story, but still, it's another idea I'll file under possible projects I think...