Thursday, December 9, 2010

Epsom Salt Holiday Craft Extravaganza Parts 2 & 3. Bath Salts and Home Made Ornaments

I decided not to keep you waiting and go ahead and post the other quick projects I did using Epsom Salt recently.  I have been amazed at what you can do with Epsom Salt!!!!

The First project I am going to share with you is so so so easy.  Aidan has a little Christmas tree in his bedroom and we needed a few extra ornaments on it.  He was asking for something with snowmen on it and I had a few small glass ornaments hanging around that I figured I would just hand paint with some snowmen to add to his tree. 

I just took some craft paint and started painting little snowmen.  This one is a little fuzzy I apologize.
 Aidan helped make a few ornaments.
 Check out his snowman.
 After I painted the snowmen and they had dried,  I gently removed the tops of the ornaments and used a small funnel to add a little bit of Epsom Salt to give the illusion that the snowmen were actually sitting in the snow.  Aidan loved them! He stops by his tree and takes them off and shakes the "snow" around a couple times a day.

Some of the finished project.



Cute right?


The other project I did with my girlfriend Moment was making scented bath salts for Christmas gifts.   We altered the steps a little to better fit our needs. 


If you are in a hurry to get yours done (we were meeting a deadline for Moment's internship so we had to speed ours up) you can preheat your oven on it's lowest temp. 
Then coat your muffin pans with vitamin E oil. We used the little capsules and used a needle to poke holes in them.  Just use your finger to rub the inside of the pan.
Next, you will take a large mixing bowl and add 4 cups of Epsom Salt and 2 tablespoons of water.  Mix them up.

I added about 6 drops of Lavender fragrance.  You can get this fragrance at your craft store in the soap making section! DO NOT BUY the fragrance in the candle department.  We don't want anyone to end up with weird breakouts.
Then I added purple food coloring to make the salts look they are actually lavender.   You can make them any color you want.  Purple just made sense for this scent.
Once you have mixed in the fragrance and color, scoop in to muffin trays.  "Bake" for one hour.
They should pop right out of the pans when you pull them from the oven.  They will look dried out which is exactly what you want. 
The reason we decided to make ours in a muffin pan was so that we could stack three in a mason jar for cute little gifts (and so they would be easy for Moment to take to her internship).   Add a small simple Christmas ornament to this ribbon and you are set to go!

Typically, I would have just left them loose and put them in a wide mouth mason jar and added a little wooden scoop like this...


Happy Crafting!!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great ideas! Thank you for sharing! I do have one question.... Can or should you use just normal food coloring or do you have to have a special coloring to use. I have search and search and I get equal options of do not use normal because food color because it will color the bather, but on the other hand the special soap coloring May color a porceline tubs. I was wondering with all your experience have you had any problems with using normal food color......thank you so much -Renee

Bon said...

What temp did you bake them at??

Anonymous said...

you can preheat your oven on it's lowest temp

Anonymous said...

Love the bath salts!! So if u just pour some in jars, then you dont need to "bake" them?

Unknown said...

Can bake them in 200* or 300*