DIY Life

Make your own car shampoo and save a few bucks. It's easy! Remember: there's nothing very magical in the store-bought bottles of car wash solution. All you need is some detergent that will remove dirt and oil residue without damaging paint. Here are some suggestions:

The site MakeYourOwn recommends the following recipe:

• 1 cup liquid dish detergent
• 12 T powdered laundry detergent
• 1 large bucket of water

If, like me, you want to avoid washing any harmful substances into our waterways, here's an environmentally-friendly solution from About.com:

Problem: you want to live green. You don't like using these products, but you can't stand the thought of going back to messy, slippery bar soap. You're not alone -- yuck! So how about going the DIY-route and concocting your very own eco-friendly liquid hand soap? You can store your finished product in the regular old pump-action bottles, but you'll have peace of mind knowing it's Earth-friendly.

The website Green Living has a suggested "recipe" that, mercifully (for those of us short on time), sounds pretty straightforward. You basically use a cheese grater to grate all-natural bar soap, which is then melted into hot, distilled water. Click here to read more, including ways to gussy up your DIY-soap with herbs and other sweet-smelling substances.

When my father hears, "Woodworking project," he comes a-running, so I am lucky to have all the soap molds a girl could ever ask for. But if you love to make cold processed soaps and haven't figured out a good mold, you may want to try to build one yourself.

North Country Mercantile posts their ideas for making wooden soap molds, which are very similar to the ones my dad makes for me.

Need more details than North Mercantile gives? Try the directions for a Mitre Box soap mold at About, or RJ's instructions for making wooden soap molds.

The best thing about making your own molds? You can make them any size you'd like, based on the size bars you'd like to produce. North Country lines theirs with plastic wrap, I use plastic grocery bags (reduce, reuse, recycle, don't you know) but either one will keep your soap from sticking to the wooden mold.

For a small investment in lumber, you'll reap huge rewards when you use your completely customized wooden soap molds, made by you.

As an all-natural soap-maker, I don't use any synthetic additives in my soap. All scents, flecks, swirls and other textures are made from natural materials.

Maybe you've been wanting to lose the FD&C colorants for a more skin and environmentally friendly choice but you just aren't sure what to use. Try clay!

Clays come in an array of colors and will add "slip" to your soap, along with some detoxifying properties as well. Moroccan Red clay is a burnt orange, Rose clay a medium pink, French Green clay a mossy gray-green and Australian Midnight Black clay a dark gray-blue.

My favorite thing about using clays as colorants is that you can get an infinite amount of shades depending on how much clay you add. If you are using Rose clay and add a teaspoon per pound of oils to the amount of raw soap you'll be swirling, you will get a light pink swirl. Add a quarter cup and a deep berry appears.

You can also experiment with the lovely earth tones and spa properties of Rhassoul clay and Dead Sea clay.

The possibilities are endless, but you are sure to create some lovely swirls using clays.

Crafting has become a hugely popular topic on the Internet in the last few years. With so much to choose from, we wanted to tell you which of the hundreds of great sites out there impress us the most.

These are in no particular order, because it's difficult enough to narrow a long list down to ten worthy sites, blogs, and communities without having to rank those ten once you've arrived at them. Between these ten sites (and a few also-rans), there's something for almost everyone.

• Craftster - Initially tagged as a craft site for hipsters ("No tea cozies without irony"), Craftster has emerged as one of the web's most popular, varied, and busy craft communities. Any craft topic you can imagine, and probably a few that haven't crossed your mind, has been addressed by Craftster members, at almost every possible level of workmanship. And they've probably written a tutorial about it, too.
• Etsy - An online mall stocked with handmade goods, patterns, and craft supplies. People sold their crafts on the Internet before Etsy came along -- via eBay, their own sites, and private sales, all places where such items can get lost in the shuffle -- but this site seems to have hit the magic combination that allows its sellers to be successful.
• MAKE and CRAFT - Both are magazines from beloved tech publisher O'Reilly, but it's their blogs that will probably be of most interest to anyone reading this list. CRAFT started out as a MAKE subcategory, then grew into its own thing. MAKE skews electronic, but still has the occasional bit of craft content worth checking out, and CRAFT includes occasional projects with LEDs.

Want to see the rest? They're after the break!

You are to DIY what Billy Idol is to '80s rock.

The reigning king. The standard by which all others are judged. The person most likely to be wearing something you made yourself.

Of course, that was in high school. Now you don't have time to tie your own shoes let alone make a sweater? That's where Etsy comes in. Etsy is a website which focuses primarily on providing the general public with a way to buy and sell handmade items. They carry handmade furniture, handbags, accessories, clothing, paper goods, and toys by large and small-scale designers, artists, and crafters. Clutches made from yarn? They've got it. Toilet paper cozies? Grab a couple and (if your desperate) tell everyone you made them yourself. It's DIY done right. Which means you - thank goodness - don't have to do it at all.

It's not so bad, yes, you are purchasing items, but they're still handmade -- just not by you -- and that you have time for.

If you love sushi and make soap, then keep reading, very closely. I'll tell you how the two connect.

Take-out chopsticks.

Chopsticks are the only tool I will use to make swirls in my soap. They are the perfect size, you can keep them attached and use them double-strength for thicker batches of soap, and they are free.

After pouring layers of non-colored soap and soap with added herbs or clays for color, I insert a chopstick and move it in small circles across the length of the mold until the top layer of soap looks swirly.

It honestly solves a problem in my household, too. It seems that for three people, we order an absurd amount of sushi, because we always are given at least six sets of chopsticks. Rather than waste them, or dedicate an entire storage unit for them, I swirl. It's a win-win situation.

If you need a swirling tutorial, try Teach Soap.

If you make your own soap as I do, then you probably get a hankering for creating some fresh, clean scented soaps for summer.

And again, if you are like me, you only use essential oils and other natural essences to scent your soaps.

Sometimes creating blends can be tricky, especially for beginners, because you aren't quite sure how to balance the different scents out, or maybe your scent blends evaporate too quickly out of the soap because they aren't grounded well.

Here are some classic and some not-so-familiar blends, kept simple, that you might enjoy this summer.

How many times have you heard your kids tell you that they are bored? Shake them out of that whiny boredom on a rainy day by getting them into the kitchen and making some cool colored decorative soaps. They will enjoy this easy project, unless they really want to be out in that lousy storm. Here is a great idea for making glycerin soap.

First, gather all the materials you will need:

• 1 bar of glycerin soap (melt and pour)
• 1 box of food coloring
• Aerosol cooking spray
• Plastic mixing cup with spout and handle
• Utility kitchen knife
• Wooden cutting board
• Microwave
• Plastic candy or soap molds
• Wooden mixing spoon

All your materials can be found at an all purpose store or at your local craft store. Next, how you actually make the soaps:

One of my favorite crafts is making melt and pour soap. Melt and pour is a soap making method in which you buy a ready made soap base and then melt it on the stove top or in the microwave and add fragrances, colorants and/or exfoliants of your choice then pour into a mold to cure.

There are many how-to books available in craft stores with step by step instructions and recipes for melt and pour soap-making. However, there is one tool that I have found indispensable in the soap making process that you will not find mentioned in any of those books.