DIY Chlorox Wipes with Bonus Color Safe Bleach Recipe

I know I promised to have this post up for y’all ages ago, but being sick really put a damper on my blogging. I’m sorry for the length of time that has passed, but it’s here now!

As many of you know, I love to make my own homemade cleaning products. This came about initially as a means of saving money, but I’ve always been interested in using as few chemicals around my house as possible. I already use Starfiber to clean the bulk of my house and have for years, but I began to grow more interested in MAKING my other products as I began to see how much money it can save and how much better I can control the chemicals used in my house. Having sensitive skin means that it’s always ideal for me to know what I’m using.

I started with laundry soap and have since been making my own for a year and loving it! Not to mention loving the money I save! I’ve now moved onto a number of other products, which leads me to my latest DIY: Cholorox Wipes. I’ve always been a big fan of this product. I’m not big on disinfecting everything regularly, but I do like being able to conveniently being able to disinfect small areas (like a counter I’ve cut raw meat on). But Chlorox Wipes are expensive, not to mention pretty wasteful. Enter: One Good Thing by Jillee. She has a fabulous DIY wipes recipe and I’ve been waiting to try it.

Here’s what I did:

1. Gather all suppies: Dawn Dish soap (no substitutions, it has to be Dawn), Rubbing alcohol, tap water, ammonia (optional, so I left it out), a container of some kind, and an old T-shirt.

2. Cut shirt into pieces about the size of a baby wipe. You can make them bigger if you would like, but I found that my husbands large T-shirt made roughly 15 baby wipe sized pieces. But I hate to waste, so I cut up the remaining shirt pieces and sleeve pieces for a handful of smaller ones too.

I use my fabric cutting mat and a rotary cutter, but this would not be a hard project to do by hand if you don’t have these things. No need for anything fancy to do this project.

3. 1 cup of water

1/4 cup of rubbing alcohol

1 Tbsp. Dawn dish soap (Jillee’s recipe calls for 2, but I found that to make it much too soapy for my personal taste. But feel free to play with the recipe as needed)

2 Tbsp. ammonia (optional)

Stir and pour over cloths

I personally saved an old container from my purchased wipes to use for this project. You can use an old baby wipes container or anything other container you might have. Be sure it has a lid and seals pretty tightly as rubbing alcohol evaporates very quickly if left in room air.

Test out your new wipes!

It takes just a few minutes to do this project and the best part is that the cloths simply get washed and then reused!

I have now tested these out and made more batches of them and I will NEVER go back to store bought. 1. Since I use a scented Dawn for this project I have control over what they smell like and I LOVE the way my house smells after. 2. They actually work BETTER than the store bought ones. I tested this out by cleaning my dogs pee pad tray (I spared you the act of having to look at before and after pictures LOL!). You can say ew if you want, but my little one is paper trained since it snows here and gets too cold for her to walk outside. I regularly cleaned it with Chlorox Wipes, but never felt like I could get it clean enough, even if it was “technically” disinfected. These wipes took off ALL of the staining and the tray looks brand new now! I find that I use them way more than I ever did the store bought ones since they work so well without way less elbow grease needed.

Please note that 1. the rubbing alcohol helps disinfect, so you can’t substitute it for hydrogen peroxide or anything else. 2. The Dawn helps cut any grease on the surfaces you are cleaning, so again, no substitutions allowed.

*****

Bonus recipe!

I have had a number of people ask me about my color safe bleach recipe. Yes, I do, in fact, make my own color safe bleach to go along with my laundry soap. It’s so easy it’s should be illegal. (sorry, there are no pictures because it’s so easy, it’s ridiculous to take the time to take pictures of it)

I make my batches in 32 ounce increments because I used a left over 32 ounce laundry soap bottle to store it in.

1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide

The rest water to for a TOTAL volume of 32 ounce

It’s that simple. You can adjust the amounts to make any volume you would like though.

Now, I use the cap from the soap to measure it out for the laundry, but it’s likely roughly 2-4 TBS per load (or 1/8-1/4 cup) depending on the size of the load. I use it on EVERYTHING, including my delicates like my bras. I hear you can use it on wool and silk, but I don’t own anything made out of either of these materials, so I can’t personally vouch for that.

I can, however, vouch for it being HE machine safe. I have an HE machine and it works just fine in it.