DIY: Dryer Balls

Long time, no blog! I've been slacking, I know. But I wanted to finally write about how I got rid of dryer sheets with our nifty DIYed dryer balls.

I shared in this post about how and why I got rid of all my cleaning products and made my own. I knew then that I wanted to stop using dryer sheets, I just needed to find the right tutorial and get the supplies. Here's the tutorial I found on Pinterest, and even though my post will pretty much be a carbon copy from hers because we followed it exactly, I figured I should give credit where credit is due.

Materials needed:
-100%, non-washable wool yarn
-panty hose
-essential oil (optional)
-an incredible amount of patience

So here's the total and honest truth: I couldn't make these stupid dryer balls to save my life. Maybe if my life was literally on the line I would have been able to pull it off, but every time I tried I ended up making some grunting noises, sighing heavily, and throwing it down within about seven minutes. The tutorial I followed made it seem so easy...and maybe it is for everyone other than me, but it was no fun at all for this girl. So once again I called on my wonderful and ever-patient hubs to help me make them entirely for me. You'll notice that it's my fingers in all the demo pictures, which is really misleading because I've already confessed that the hubs did it all for me. Those were taken during a brief stint in which I thought I could make them myself.

Step 1:
Wrap the wool around your fingers (about as much as what's in the picture).

Step 2: 
Wrap the wool around in the other direction. 

(This is where I would start to lose it. I still have no idea what my issue was.)

Step 3:
Bring the ends together to form the small spherical center of the ball.

Step 4: 
Keep wrapping the wool, alternating directions as you go to eventually build up a tennis ball-sized ball. 

You will notice that this picture doesn't show much, and certainly doesn't show a tennis ball-sized ball. That's definitely my fault. Between my frustration and the hubs actually making this entire project for me, I failed big time in the photo opportunities. Womp womp.

Step 5: 
When you finish each ball and it's the size you want, tie a knot in the end of the wool and tuck it under some other wool. This is a pretty important step, which you'll see later in the post. 

Step 6:
Put the balls into the panty hose, tying a knot in between each one. We made four balls because that's how much our 400 yards of wool got us.

We did make four, but as you can see one was a little bit teenier than the others.

Step 7:
Wash and dry the balls, in the panty hose, at the highest temperature. According to the tutorial I followed, this helps fuse the wool together so it won't unravel. Also key to the prevention of unraveling, as it turns out, is that knot and tuck I mentioned in Step 5.

We lost one - the smallest baby one, thankfully, in the first run through, but the rest are still kicking, and they're working well! Once you put them through both the washer and dryer one time in the panty hose, you can cut them out and they're good to go. I just keep mine in the dryer.

Here they are! (except for that baby one which is no longer with us. No way I was going to rewind it again.)


The essential oils I mentioned as optional in the materials needed is just if you want the fresh scent of a dryer sheet. You would probably need to apply the oil to the dryer balls every four loads or so; I have opted to not use any at this point and I haven't really missed the scent.

They were a pain to make - and it's possible I'm exaggerating...I don't want to scare you away from making them because I have such a short fuse - but they've been pretty awesome little additions to our home in the weeks since. And the best part is not having our clothes, sheets, and towels covered in the chemicals of a dryer sheets.

One last thing: I have heard that the more dryer balls you have, the faster the clothes dry. I'm using three and I think everything is getting dry at the same rate as before, so maybe someday when I'm feeling extra patient I'll make a couple more just to see if it makes a difference. Until then, though, this is working well.

Requiem: a brief review

from Goodreads.com

When I finished Lauren Oliver's second book in her Delirium trilogy, Pandemonium, I was eager to plow ahead right away and read her conclusion as soon as possible. Pretty soon after I started reading, though, the Olympics started and then I got a stomach bug where I just wanted to watch 30 Rock on Netflix instead of read my book...and then came the shocking email reminder from my library that my book was going to disappear from my Kindle in two days. Oh right...it's a library book. After a little research I discovered that I can't renew it because there's a hold on it. But the great state of Virginia decided to be blasted with snow for the 47th time this winter, and the 15+ inches (it's still snowing) outside have allowed me the gift of a reading day. And I finished before the library took it away from me. Boo-ya.

I really want to try to give a minor description of the book without giving anything away, but just like I said last time, that's hard. So all I'll say is that the plot picks up right where the last ends, and this time the chapters switch back and forth between Lena and Hana, her best friend from Portland who doesn't appear at all in the second book. There are a couple of truly great "whaaat" moments, a couple twists that you see coming but that still make you smile when they happen, and plenty of action and suspense. There's even a love triangle, and even though the fact that there seems to always be a love triangle started to annoy me years ago, it works well enough.

I talked quite a bit in my last review about how I didn't love the first book in this trilogy, Delirium, but I enjoyed both Pandemonium and Requiem a lot. The action and suspense kept me hooked, her tactic of switching perspectives between chapters (through place in time in Pandemonium and through characters in Requiem) kept me really engaged, but I think the discussion of what love is and how it really affects us is what puts the trilogy on a deeper level than some other dystopian novels out right now. In the end, both Lena and Hana see the pros and cons of their very different situations and question their life choices to the core. Lena certainly learns that having freedom doesn't make life as simple and ideal as it seems. They're good books: entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking.

Delirium and Pandemonium: brief reviews

Okay so this post is going to look a little different than most of my book reviews. I read Delirium, Lauren Oliver's first book in her YA dystopian trilogy, about a year ago. I was in a blogging slump, though, and a review was never written. So since I just finished the second book in the series, Pandemonium, and since I'm freaking out about it, I figured I might as well do a really short review of what I remember from the first one too.

In Delirium, the stage is set: Lena lives in a world where love is a disease to be feared above all. According to her government and the new system they've set up, love - the delirium - is the source of all of our world's problems. Any strong emotion, whether negative or positive, is unnecessary and dangerous. So all 18-year-olds receive the cure, which removes your ability to feel those emotions. You are matched with a spouse and you raise children, but no emotional attachment exists. Everyone does their job and follows the rules and become good, complacent and content adults. Lena is a strong believer just months away from her own cure when she meets Alex, an uncured boy living in plain sight in Lena's community. It doesn't take long for Lena to begin questioning everything she's been taught her whole life...no matter what the risk.

When I first heard about this book, I was really intrigued with the plot. I thought it sounded like a great new worst-case scenario idea on what the distant future might hold. I was a little disappointed with the book, though, and when I finished I was curious enough to continue reading the series but not in much of a hurry. I thought some of the writing was a little slow and over-detailed, and I just didn't think it was as mind-blowing as a plot as I had anticipated. The second one, though...

taken from Goodreads.com

I finished Pandemonium this morning, and I'll be honest...my mind is a little blown.

This one picks up almost right after the first one ends. (So I'll try not to spoil too much but it might be a little impossible.) Lena is in the Wilds, and has been found and nursed back to health by some people living in a settlement nearby. As she spends more time with these people, she joins them in an underground resistance movement against the government so determined to keep everyone in their robot-like state of complacency. Eventually, Lena gets caught up in a kidnapping gone slightly wrong, and is locked in a cell with none other than the son of the leader of the Deliria Free America, poster boy for all things cured. (I told you it was going to be super hard to keep from spoiling something.)

Whoa. I might not have loved Delirium, but I really enjoyed Pandemonium. I didn't notice the slow-moving plot or too many details like I did in the first book; the plot flowed smoothly and fairly quickly. But the plot itself was so much more interesting, I thought. I felt like Delirium was a little slow because of the foundation of plot that needed to be set, whereas in Pandemonium she was able to zoom forward to new information. The most important part, though, was that she split the book into two different places in time: Lena as she's being rescued and nursed back to health in the Wilds, and Lena six months later working with the resistance in New York City. By flipping back and forth with each chapter, my interest was so piqued. I was being given little breadcrumbs into what would happen eventually, but yet at the same time there were so many gaps in information I needed to keep reading to find out what was really going on. I got hooked pretty quick. And with the mind-blowing ending she left me with, I'm pretty stoked to start book 3, Requiem.