Wax and Bubbles

With the chemicals that are in the room sprays on the market currently, making your own with the ingredients you know are healthier and contain no lung harming products. You can experiment with your own blend of oils and see what works best for you or your family’s smell. Essential oils are important in everyone’s sense of smell. Finding what scent is best for you, is a task that will take you on a great journey that will take your senses to places they have never been. Once you find that perfect scent, make a room scent or spray and use it whenever you need to refresh your house or car. Here’s how:

Cleansing Room Scent For Your Home or Car®™ BeeSpa Naturals

2 cups distilled water
20 drops lemon essential oil
10 drops thyme essential oil
40 drops geranium essential oil
20 drops manderin essential oil
20 drops grapefruit essential oil

Place distilled water in a pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Meanwhile, place essential oils in an aluminum or glass spray bottle. After distilled water begins boiling, pour, very carefully, using a funnel into the bottle with the essential oils. Shake vigourously for several minutes. Place mixture in a dark environment till it has cooled down quite a bit. Once it is cool, spray in several locations throughout your home. To see a drastic scent change in your home or car, spray everyday for at least a week. Be sure and shake several times before use each time.

This recipe can even be used as a perfume on the body. Try it out and experiment with different essential oils till you find one that smells great on your skin. You may find that making your perfume or cologne is a lot easier than buying it at one of the name-brand stores. Just have fun with it.

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The basics to skin care are; cleanse, tone, moisturize and treat. With that knowledge and some of the over-the-counter products out that contain a lot of ingredients your body and your face don’t really need. So why not make your own. Here’s a recipe that uses green tea as the main ingredient. Green tea is an antioxidant and is an all-natural astringent. It also contains witch hazel (Hammamelis virginiana), which is an inexpensice and excellent gentle astringent for oily skin. With the addition of peppermint (Mentha xpiperita), lemon juice and thyme, and three fight bacteria.

Green Tea Herbal Astringent:

1 cup distilled witch hazel extract
1 tsp. dried green tea leaves
1 tsp. dried comfrey leaves
1 tsp. dried peppermint leaves
1 tsp. dried thyme leaves
Juice of 1 lemon

Combine witch hazel extract, lemon juice and herbs in a glass jar. Stir well and cover with a tight-fitting lid. Place in a warm, dark place and allow the mixture to cure for a least one week. Gently shake the mixture in the jar every day to agitate the herbs in the liquid. Strain herbs from liquid and pour inro a clean bottle.

To use, soak a cotton ball in the herbal astringent, after washing face, and gently wipe over your face. Use also during the day as a quick face refresher or after working out to kill bacteria that may get on the face from sweating.

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Another great addition to a bath — bath salts! These salts are soothing and relaxing, as well as skin-softening. All you have to do is throw a handful into your bath water, and they dissolve away leaving a terrific smell and softened water. The best part is that they’re really, really easy to make.

All you need are the salts themselves, some liquid glycerin (which is optional), and your scents and dyes of you want to use them. You can also add baking soda, which gives a bit of a fizz to the bath and helps to absorb excess moisture in the salts. Liquid glycerin is moisturizing, and can be purchased at health food stores, drug stores, or online.

Mix up the salts for a variety of textures and properties. Dead sea salts are terrific for the skin, for example.

Here’s a very basic recipe, which can be tweaked quite easily depending on your desired results and what you have on hand to make the salts with.

• 1 cup coarse kosher salt
• 1 cup Epsom salts
• 1 cup baking soda
• 2-3 tablespoons liquid glycerin
• 10-20 drops of fragrance oil or essential oil
• a few drops of liquid soap colourant

Mix the salts and baking soda together well; add glycerin and colour and stir well to combine. Add the scent, a few drops at a time, until desired fragrance is reached. If the salts feel clumpy or moist to the touch, spread them out on a flat covered surface and allow them to air dry for several hours. Break up any clumps before dividing the salts and storing them in airtight containers or bags.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to turn your homemade bath salts into a beautiful salt scrub bar of soap!

bath salts, making bath salts, salt scrub, homemade beauty products, craft projects

Bath tea, which is also called tub tea, is just what it sounds like. A mixture of herbs, salts, dried flowers, powdered milk, and/or essential oils is packed into a large tea bag and steeped in the bath to release all of the healing properties of the ingredients. Use whatever combination of ingredients and scents you’d like to create unique fragrances and benefits.

To make bath teas, you’ll need either heat sealable tea bags, or small muslin bags that allow the water to circulate and release the goodies inside. Try Brambleberry or Mystic Mountain Sage for the tea bags - both sites have reasonable prices and high quality products. Just fill the bags and then use heat from an iron or hair dryer to seal them.

Muslin bags should have a drawstring to keep them closed in the bath. If you choose to go this route, you can package the “tea” in a jar, and include a small scoop along with the muslin bag. The bag itself is reuseable, and the entire package makes a pretty presentation. Include a tag that tells the user to add a few scoops of tea to the bag, tie it off, and place it under the running water of the bath. After use, discard the contents, rinse out the bag, and allow it to air dry so it’s ready to be used again. You can find muslin bags for sale at Mountain Rose Herbs, or The San Fransisco Herb Company.

Ready to try your hand at making tub tea? Here are a couple of recipes to start you off with!

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Lotion bars look like soap - in fact, you can make them in the same molds you use for melt and pour soap making. But, as their name suggests, lotion bars are solid bars used for moisturizing rather than cleansing. The heat of your body warms the bars as you use them, leaving a trace of nourishing butters and oils on your skin. The process of making these bars is very similar to making melt and pour soap.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 4 ounces shea butter, mango butter, or cocoa butter* (see note)
• 4 ounces beeswax
• 5 ounces sweet almond oil or jojoba oil
• 1-2 teaspoons essential oil or fragrance oil, any scent

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I was searching around last night for some new candle project ideas, and I stumbled on this project from CandleTech - Wax Dipped Plush Animals. You take a teddy bear or other stuffed animal and dip it in melted, scented wax to create a sort of air freshener. This is a neat idea!

They recommend using 1.5 ounces of scent per pound of wax, which should give a strong fragrance. If the scent starts to fade, you can warm the animal up with a hair dryer for a few minutes to refresh it. They don’t mention this in the instructions, but it would be best to remove all ribbons and other adornments from the plush animal before dipping, and then adding them back in after the wax has set. I would also guess that plush on the shaggy side would work much better than the short, velvety kind of plush which would likely be stripped of the wax entirely when combing.

I’ll definitely have to give this one a go, with a variety of different types of stuffed creatures. I’ll post my findings when I can figure out how to get my kids to part with some of their old stuffies! Sounds like a great way to give them new life, and a good idea for holiday gifts for teachers and hard-to-buy-for aunts.

plush animals, craft projects, air fresheners, candle projects