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One of the clever ways you can save a little money on your laundry supplies is to make your own liquid fabric softener. Homemade fabric softener is quick and simple to make and uses just three ingredients: water, vinegar, and hair conditioner. That’s right – the same thing you use to soften your hair can be used to soften your clothing!

How To Make Fabric Softener With Hair Conditioner

The good news is that when you make your own fabric softener with hair conditioner, you can buy any inexpensive brand of conditioner. There’s no need to pay big money for anything fancy! In fact my calculations are that this DIY fabric softener will cost you about half as much per load as the store bought brands.

I also calculated the ingredient amounts for this fabric softener recipe to make a batch that’s just the right size to fit into a quart canning jar. We’ll be using 2 cups of hot water mixed with 1/2 cup of hair conditioner and a 1cup of white vinegar.

To get started, pour the hot water into a mixing bowl. Hot water is used to help the conditioner stir into the water more easily, and hot water from the faucet will work fine. When you first add the conditioner it will look a little lumpy, but a whisk works wonderfully for getting the water and conditioner mixed together.

Next you’ll add in the white vinegar and stir to mix. You can then transfer your homemade fabric softener to a jar with a lid. I use a quart canning jar and I love to use these handy plastic lids for canning jars too!

Using Your Homemade Fabric Softener

To use my homemade fabric softener, I add a 1/4 cup per load in my softener dispenser which I think is a good amount. Sometimes people use up to a 1/2 cup per load with this type of recipe, and you can try increasing to this amount if you think it will work in your type of washing machine.

Most newer machines have fabric softener dispensers but back when I had an older machine that did not, I used a Downy Ball softener dispenser which also worked well.

So if you’re looking to save a little money when it comes to laundry, why not give this homemade fabric softener a try? You might have all the ingredients you need in the house already!