Plants for Soaping

For some of my soaps, I like to add in extras, like dried herbs and flowers. For my sister-in-laws wedding favors, I added bits of rosemary to the rosemary-scented soap, and I have been known to color soap with parsley, tumeric, paprika, and kudzu.

Pink and Red Rose Petals

Currently, I am growing some marigolds to cut and dry for calendula petals, along with loofahs, and I've been looking around to see what other plants I can dry...

My in laws have lots of plants and flowers around the farm, but this past weekend I had my eye on a deep red rosebush and a bright pink rosebush! My husband and I collected handfuls of rose petals, and we have laid them out to dry in prep for a layered rose soap.

Orange peels

We've also started looking at our groceries to see what we can use and reuse. We recently replanted the heart of our last batch of celery, and it is growing back more celery! Yum! We also just bought a big bag of navel oranges, and we're saving and drying the peels to use in soaps and bath teas. Dried orange peel can be found in the spice section of the grocery store, but it is WAY cheaper to dry out your own peels! I've dried orange peels before, and they got very hard as they dried, so I am going to run them through my food processor after they are dry to get them to a finer consistency. 


Happy Creating!

Reused Crayons

My little man, who turns 21 months old this week, is really getting into drawing with crayons! At least twice a day, he comes and gets me and asks "color, Mommy?" How can I resist that?!? And as much as my son loves to color, he's really rough with the crayons. Loads of them have broken tips, or have broken into two or three pieces, making them hard for him to hold.

So, this weekend, we took all of those old crayons, and remelted them into new ones!

You will need:
crayons

Crayon bits in the mold

a heat-safe container (like a silicone muffin pan or muffin tin. Fun shapes work great!)
oven

First, you will need to break up your crayons into medium-to-small sized chunks. You can mix colors together like I did (I mixed my yellows/oranges, red/purple/pink, and blue/gray), or you can keep your colors separate. Make sure that you remove all of the paper and adhesive from the crayons!

Next, just toss the crayon pieces into your mold. Put your mold into the oven and set it to the lowest possible setting. I melted my crayons at 150 degrees for 10 minutes, and they came out perfect!

Finished new crayons!

Once the crayons are completely melted, just remove the mold and let the crayons cool to room temperature before removing them. Your colors will blend together and make great patterns! My son adores his new football-shaped crayons... great for his little hands!

One thing that I notices after coloring with the new crayons, there was a thin layer of uncolored wax that formed on the top of the crayon while it was still in the mold . I just used a butter knife to scrape it away.

Happy coloring! :o)