Make your own Goo Gone?

I came across an interesting pin on Pinterest that I’ve been wanting to try out for awhile now.  Goo Gone is such nasty, chemical stuff that the idea of making a natural formula with common kitchen items was pretty appealing!   But can you actually make your own Goo Gone?

Budget Savvy Diva recommended 2 parts baking soda to 1 part vegetable oil and Rosy Blu Handmade recommended equal parts coconut oil and baking soda.  I don’t have coconut oil so I went with regular canola oil.

In the end, I needed to use equal parts Canola Oil and Baking Soda to get it to work.

Equal parts Canola Oil and Baking Soda

I didn’t want to make a whole lot, so I started by using 1 tsp of oil and 2 tsp of baking soda and it looked like this:

I’ve had this shadow box for about 5 years and it has always had the most awful label that I’ve never been able to remove:

So I put a glob onto it:

And used a regular kitchen cloth to rub it in:

At this point, the results were not impressive.  Barely any change at all:

I decided my mixture was too dry so I added the 2nd tsp of oil to make it equal parts oil and baking soda:

I put another glob on it, and let it sit for a minute (maybe it would have worked better if I had been more patient and let it sit for longer?):

And worked it in with the cloth.  I got impatient so I also scratched it off with my finger nails a little bit:

Still not great, but I couldn’t leave it like this so I did another go around:

And afterwards surprisingly, most of the gunk was gone and it just had some adhesive left on it:

So the fourth time using the DIY Goo Gone mixture:

And the adhesive rubbed off REALLY easily.  If you have adhesive stuck on things, rather than a whole sticker it looks like this would work really well:

I Windexed my frame, and I was satisfied that finally after all these years I can take out the stock photo from the store and actually use it for something:

I still had a little bit of the mixture left, so I tried it on our IKEA kids table:

Leah does a lot of colouring here and she’s not the greatest at keeping the crayons on the paper:

The crayon came off with a little bit of scrubbing.  It was definitely easier than just using a wet cloth, but I think the baking soda might have scratched up the surface a little bit?  Either way, at least it looks clean now:

My conclusions about making your own Goo Gone:

• It’s cheap
• It’s non-toxic
• It takes a little extra elbow grease, but it gets the job done – without wearing rubber gloves!

As long as you don’t mind a little extra effort I definitely recommend this.  Next time I need Goo Gone I will definitely give this another try!