Homemade Gift Idea: Bath Salts

-
Bath salts are an easy and inexpensive homemade gift. The basic ingredients can be found in most any store such as Walmart or Target. The exception to this is the essential oil or fragrance oil. If you are doing small projects such as this one the best way to find the fragrance or essential oil is on ebay.com. If you plan on making a lot of items that need these types of oil then you can also try SweetCakes ( http://sweetcakes.com/ )for a nice variety of scents.

Basic Bath Salts
Crystal Miller

1 ½ cups Epson salt
1 cup baking soda
½ cup sea salt
Essential oil or fragrance oil, your choice

Mix all ingredients together well. I find using my hands to do this does the best job. Put in glass canning jars or zip-type bags for gift giving.


Now, lets make some bath salts!!


Gather your ingredients together…



Measure the Epsom salts into a bowl…



Then the baking soda…



And the sea salt…



Stir it around real well to make sure it is combined…



Now add your fragrance oil (or essential oil). I used warm vanilla sugar from sweetcakes.com for this batch. The amount you add depends on how mild or strong you want the scent. Add several drops at a time and then use your hands to mix it in. Otherwise you will end up with tiny lumps of super strong bath salts! :) Smell it and see if you want to add more..





When you are done you can spoon it into any type of container for giving away. The basic recipe will fill 4 half pint canning jars. You put a lid on the jars and decorate with ribbon, fabric, a homemade label, etc.. This recipe can easily be doubled or tripled to make as much as you need.

 
 

Comments

  1. MonicaNovember 28, 2011 at 8:15 AM

    I absolutely love this idea! Thank you so much!

    ReplyDelete
  2. MonicaNovember 28, 2011 at 9:06 AM

    Oh I am so excited about this recipe. Most store bath salts irritate me...:( Looking forward to sharing this as a gift!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 4, 2011 at 10:37 AM

    How much do you suggest for a bath?

    ReplyDelete
  4. CrystalDecember 4, 2011 at 12:28 PM

    Anon.. about a 1/4 cup or so..

    ReplyDelete
  5. BrandiDecember 8, 2011 at 6:07 AM

    These sound wonderful!

    A word of caution though:

    In some areas one might need to be careful with labeling these. Where I live in Ohio, there have been recent crack-downs on the use, buying and selling of drugs called bath salts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All messages are moderated. After approval your message will be posted. Thank you for your comments!! Crystal :)

Popular posts from this blog

Canning Chicken Noodle-less Soup

-
Image
Today was one of those busy days that it seemed I was moving from the time my feet hit the floor until this evening.. But, I got so much done and that is a great feeling! :) One of my accomplishments today was canning 14 jars of chicken noodle-less soup. I call it “noodle-less” because you can’t can noodles. They end up falling apart. So I canned the chicken, veggies and broth. When I go to use the soup I will bring it to a boil and then add a handful of noodles (any type of pasta will work) and cook it until the noodles are done. Because I plan to add the pasta after the fact I wanted to make sure there was enough chicken broth to do this. So I only filled my jars about half to two thirds with chicken and veggies and then filled with chicken broth. Here is how I did this…. I started off with 2 chickens that were a total weight of about 10lbs. I put them in my 14 quart stock pot… I then added 2 gallons of water.. And 3 tablespoons salt.. I brought this
Read more

Canning Cabbage

-
Image
I had 4 large heads of cabbage that weighted about 25 pounds. We had some really hot days and I figured I better get the last of them picked soon. My daughter Sierra and I ended up processing 3 of them yesterday and I have one left for a meal on my menu this week. I made pickled cabbage and then canned up the last of the cabbage. Here is the recipe for the pickled cabbage (according to how I made it)… 8 pounds cabbage 1 large onion 1 ½ red peppers 1 lb carrots ¾ cup salt 9 cups water 12 cups white vinegar 10 cups sugar 1t mustard seed 1t celery seed Slice cabbage thinly. Slice onion and peppers. Grate carrots. Mix all veggies together in a very large bowl. Sprinkle with salt and mix in well. Let sit for 2 hours to soften veggies. Rinse veggies well.  In a large stock pot (mine was 14 quarts) combine water, vinegar, sugar, spices. Bring to a boil. Add cabbage/veggies. Bring to a boil. Fill hot pint jars with veggies using a slotted spoon. Fill jar with brine to
Read more

Canning Beef Stew

-
Image
In my last blog post I shared that I had bought 10 pounds of beef roast. I cut it all up and used 4 pounds in 2 crockpot freezer meals ( http://homesteadinghomemaker.blogspot.com/2012/02/two-more-crockpot-meals-for-freezer.html ) . I used the other 6 pounds of meat along with potatoes, carrots, onions and celery to can beef stew. Here were the general proportions I used in canning 7 quarts of beef stew.. 6# beef 2# potatoes 2# carrots 1# onions 1# celery After I cut up the meat and got the freezer meals done I moved to the beef stew. I peeled and cut up the potatoes and carrots. I chopped up the onions and sliced the celery. I pulled out 3 quarts of veggie stock from my freezer to use for liquid in the stew. You can use beef or chicken stock or you can use water. I did not add anything to thicken the liquid as usually thickeners don’t hold up in canning. You can thicken the broth after it is opened if you would like. I added 1 teaspoon salt to each of my
Read more