Homemade Spa Quality Bath Fizzies

The thing I enjoy most about the Christmas season, is homemade / handmade projects. I enjoy making candies, fudge, savory treats, as well as other non-food gifts. This year I decided to peruse several recipes and suggestions on how to make DIY bath fizzies. I enjoy quality spa products, but don't necessarily enjoy the prices that come along with those products. With Oscar and Ella both loving every minute of bath time, I thought it would be nice to make some bath fizzies for them to enjoy. As well as letting them give some of them away to a few of their young cousins. 

So I experimented a few rounds and finally came up with a recipe that I feel works really well. One, that is no where near the complexity that the Martha Stewart recipe was. And one that is completely customize-able to your own aesthetics in color and essential oils used. In the end I had lavender ones, Cinnamon-clove ones, and Lemongrass ones. They all smell wonderful. 

 All packaged up in cellophane bags for gift giving.

 Complete with lime green bow.

 Another view.

Easy to make. And fun for adults and children alike.

Dan's Homemade Spa Bath Bombs (Fizzies) 

1 c cornstarch

1 c baking soda

1/4 c epsom salt

1 c citric acid

20-30+ drops essential oil

food coloring

water in spray bottle

soap mold or mini-muffin tin

Directions:

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl and mix. Add essential oil until desired scent is achieved and mix. I use my fingers and just mix it together really well. Add several drops of food coloring to water in spray bottle, to make a very concentrated color so that minimal sprays will give maximum tinting. Spray mixture with water bottle and mix with hands until barely moist. *Be careful not to add too much water as it will take all the fizz out of the bomb, so use barely as much as you need, just so that these hold together. 

Press firmly / pack into a soap mold or muffin tin. Let dry several hours or overnight.

Each batch makes about 12-16 fizzies in a mini-muffin tin.

Notes:

I did about 2 TBS water in the small squirt bottle, with 5-10 drops of food color. So it was really concentrated, and a little mist went a long way in terms of dying the solution.

Variations:

       Lemongrass essential oil, with yellow-green food color

       Orange / cinnamon / clove essential oils, with orange food color

           Lavender essential oil, with purple food color

Major Accomplishments!

This weekend we celebrated 2 major accomplishments, 1- Dan ran his fastest half marathon 2- I finished my quilt!!! Okay, so my accomplishment isn't quite as grand as Dan's but I'm still super proud of myself for FINALLY finishing it. I don't even want to tell you when I started this, honestly I can't even remember it's so embarrassing. I want to thank Kelly and Rebecca for helping me with lessons, advice and supplies I couldn't have done it without them! Here are some photos.

Homemade Holiday Bath Soak

There is the old saying, that gifts are nice, but "home made gifts are always nicer." Well, that has definitely become part of our Christmas tradition.



I was in the mood to make some orange-ginger bath soak. Who doesn't like tub-time? I mean, seriously...



I wanted to "kick it up" with the scent level, so I came up with this concoction. I added dried orange zest, cloves, allspice and dried ginger to the epsom salts, baking soda and citric acid.



Holly always makes amazingly beautiful labels to package our gifts up.



Such an easy project for a quick present, or hostess gift.

Craven Candies, A Christmas Tradition

I love the traditions at Christmas time that Holly and I are creating. I think my favorite tradition we do together, as Holly mentioned below, is the cards and candy. Holly has beautiful graphic design talent and always makes everything look so festive and nice.



We enjoy making candy each year to share with family and friends. A talent I learned from my mother, and a talent that Holly and I continue to learn and refine together with my siblings each year. We all have our twists we make on the basics we learned from Mom. I love the packaging labels that Holly made. She made them look beautiful in kraft paper boxes.

This way for soup!

Well, it is fall and that means that we've been preparing for our annual open house and soup party. This is a tradition that Dan brought to our relationship from his family, where his mom would make tons of soup and bread bowls to share with all the kids and their friends. So we've carried on with this tradition for the past 10 years of our marriage, with only a few exceptions due to sickness or moving.





This past weekend was the big event. We had 40 or so people at our home to enjoy Dan's culinary expertise in the form of 4 lovely soups. 1- beef stew (2 batches) 2- potato leek (my fav) 3- clam chowder (everyone else's fav) 4- chicken noodle.




While Dan slaves away in the kitchen making soup. I get the house ready with flowers, and prepping the dessert table.



I love this photo. This year we decide to make homemade suckers (root beer and orange cream), bringing one of my family traditions to the party. Growing up we didn't make homemade suckers, but we bought dum dums and decorated them with a white napkin and black yarn bow making little ghosts.



We also did spiced nuts in little orange boxes with stickers. I really enjoyed making the stickers and packaging up all the goodies.





We decorated our yard with our big teracotta pumpkins, tin can pumpkins, owl lanterns and ball jars with tea lights.






I think everyone had a good time.



Plus we just have good friends.
Thanks everybody!

Squeak, Oink, Baaah

Okay, I don't really know the noise a hedgehog makes, but I'm going with squeak. Here is the latest batch of onesies I made for my new nephew, complete with hedgehog, pig and sheep.




So I decided I had to come up with some other designs for baby onesies besides the flowers I've done before (see earlier posts here and here) since so many people keep having boys. I found some images online and traced them on the fabric with an erasable marker. For the hedgehog I outlined the face and legs with a split stitch then filled in the body with french knots.



Since piggies are smooth I kept it simple using the split stitch all the way around.



And finally for the sheep (which is my favorite) I used french knots for the body and straight stitches to fill in the face. I had started the face so it had a nose and mouth but it looked lame, and well kind of scary, so I filled it in with straight stitches. Luckily you can't really tell looking at the finished product.

My Precious!

As Gollum states in Lord of the Rings, I have finally finished "My Precious!" A few hours here and there over the past 18 months has yielded the Cookie Monster Christmas Tree skirt, to debut this upcoming holiday season. A childhood tradition was having Christmas trees in our bedrooms growing up. Little 3' ones on top of a dresser or night stand. Holly and I both share traditions in our families of growing up with hand beaded Christmas Socks that adorned the fireplace mantles during the holiday season. We both have decided to carry on this tradition. Since we are biding time in our adoption wait time, I decided to make the tree skirt. We have a plethora of holiday themed Cookie Monster tree ornaments. We'll enjoy the tree for a few holiday seasons, then it will make its way into our daughters bedroom.



I did hand beading and sequining around the inner and outer circle cutouts.



In between the four cookie faces, there are silver and red circles, a graphic representation of Christmas tree bobbles or ornaments. Holly designed all the templates for me to use on the computer.



A close up of the bead work. This will definitely sparkle under the tree with lots of white twinkle lights.



Another view of the beading etc.



Top down view of the finished product. So help me if our child doesn't like Cookie Monster. I figure if Cookie is forced on her from day one, she'll have to like him. I even jokingly state that she doesn't get to have a bottle or binky, until she plays with her Cookie Monster for a few minutes. Only kidding of course.

Mid-Century Mustard

For the past several weeks, we have wanted to change the color of our guest bathroom down on our main floor. When we purchased the place, we started with a blank slate of white. At the time this Ralph Lauren Blue was very tasteful. But as things get better with age, our tastes change as well.



This powder blue bathroom as I've lovingly referred to it as, finally met it's match last weekend.



After taping everything off, and removing the light fixture, the beveled mirror and the metal switch plates, we were ready to paint. With this said, taping off always takes about 10 times longer than I think it's going to take.



The first coat of dark mustard yellow. For those that have been in our house, we have a half wall in our living room behind our black leather chair that is this same dark mustard yellow. We decided to carry the same color into the bathroom to tie it more together. The lighter yellow walls in the kitchen, and the avocado green walls in our dining area make for a nice autumnal palette. I really like the dark greens and yellows from the 50s and 60s.



Taping, bagging and painting behind the toilet was a TOTAL BEAST. And the dark yellow against the white trim had to be painted flawlessly. Do we ever get a flawless coat of paint? NO!



Two coats of paint later, we let this dry for a day or so and removed the tape. Re-installed the angled beveled mirror and put our accessories back into the bathroom. We need to change a few things out to better mesh with the yellow, and not the blue. Our last project for this bathroom will be custom crown molding installed. By a professional of course, and not by us.

Our Cook Book Project

Craven Family 1972. Dad, Mom, Shawn, Shelly, Corinne and Melanie. Mom was preggers with Rebecca at the time. Gretchen, Gretel and Myself had not even been thought of yet. Funny! This was in southern California at Uncle Sam & Aunt Jeanne's house.



Holly and I have been gathering family photos, stories and recipes from the immediate and extended family members to put a cookbook together. I have been getting all sorts of classic photos I've never seen before from all the aunts and uncles. This project has been talked about for years [getting a family cook book established], and Holly and I decided to take this on when Mom died, all in our spare time! I'm almost finished with transferring all the handwritten notes to doc files. All the photos are scanned and returned to their rightful owners. We'll start laying this out in a professionally designed format [Holly is so very talented in this arena], over the next several months. This has and is a fun project that we both are working on!

Since You Asked

Many of you have inquired about how to make the embroidered flowers I posted about a few months ago. I finally remembered to scan the instructions, so here they are.



You should be able to click on this image and it will enlarge for you to print out.




The only thing I did different was making about 10 french knots in the center first instead of the small loop they do, then did the loops around it. After split stitching the stem, I also added 3 french knots at the end for the leaves instead of a small loop. However, I've done them both ways and either option with knots or loops looks great.

Have fun!

Silk Eggs

We usually dye Easter eggs every year, and every year I practically gag at the smell. All that vinegar really gets to me. I also get frustrated with my egg design, I always thing using the wax crayon will yield beautiful eggs and it never does. Anyway, this year I saw on Martha Stewart (yes, I watched it when I was home sick) that she dyed Easter eggs by wrapping them in old silk scarves and boiling them in water with just a little vinegar. I was intrigued!
So, on Saturday Dan and I tried it. We went to our local Deseret Industries and bought some old silk skirts for bargin prices. (Martha Stewart used her old Hermés scarves, yeah, like I have any of those hanging around)



Then you cut them into squares.



Wrap the silk around the egg and secure with a twist tie. You also need muslin to wrap around the eggs to keep the fabrics from bleeding into each other. We bought old pillow cases in stead, they worked just fine. Secure muslin with another twist tie.




Put them in cold water with 3 TBS vinegar and bring to a boil for 20 minutes.




Pull out of the water and let cool until easy to handle. Then unwrap!





I think they would have turned out more vibrant if we'd boiled them longer, but then you wouldn't be able to eat the eggs inside. They would also probably work better with silk that had less white in it and more saturated colors. But, we were pleased with our first attempt and will definitely try this again next year.