DIY -- dryer balls

I know some of you are laughing. When you're done, keep reading

I forget where I heard of these, but I found a website selling them and bought a box of half a dozen for less than $13.

A couple days later I sprinkled essential oil of sweet orange on two of them and threw them in the dryer with six bathsheets.

The towels came out terrific, just as soft as with those dryer sheets full of chemicals. IIRC, if you use more balls, things get softer.

I had actually washed another 4 bath towels and nine kitchen towels, and those went in the next load.

This is a DIY post because there are instructions on the web to make your own. You start with all-wool fingering weight yarn, which means dryer balls don't shed plastic that gets into the ocean.

You wind them up, put them into pantyhose to keep them from unwinding, and put them through a hot cycle in the washer. This makes the wool hackle together; you're basically turning the balls into felt.

But I don't have any pantyhose so I bought my balls.

The next question is do they pay for themselves. They cost about 2/3 the price of a 250 count box of Bounce. You'd have to do more than 300 dryer loads for the dryer balls to be cheaper than the Bounce. The dryer balls would have to last at least six years at one load per week.

If you're just starting out with your first place, or you have to do more than one load a week, or you can't put up an umbrella clothesline like the one I have, they probably would pay for themselves. Because of the clothesline, I don't always use my dryer.

But you can customize the fragrance of your fresh-dried laundry by using different essential oils with your dryer balls -- lavender, bergamot, cedar, davana, frankincense, myrrh, geranium, neroli, patchouli, rose, ravensara, sandalwood, vetiver, and ylang ylang are all available. Some of them are pretty expensive, but it only takes half a dozen drops to scent your balls.

You can resume laughing.