Happy Birthday! Look who's 8!

I really believe this kid knew more about the universe than me the day she was born. That look of knowing and wonder never ceases to amaze me.

We had a great birthday week filled with friends, fun, The Nutcracker, and wild parties. Here's to being 8, and so far it's been great :)

Handmade Holidays: Bottle Cap Candles & Lotions

There's nothing like last minute crafting! We were scheming for quite some time about what we would create this year, and we are so excited to share!

Our first gift was born from our love of essential oils. We have been reading about the healing effects and health benefits from certain oils and decided to mix up some of our own concoctions.

We chose peppermint and lavender for it's calming effects from tension and stress. Peppermint is also great to use for headache relief. Plus, they do mingle very well together. As coconut oil as our base, we had all our supplies on hand!

We've been using DoTerra oils lately. However, when making bulk gifts, I'm quite pleased with the Aura Cacia oils, they are good quality and much cheaper. They can be found at any health food store. 

Since I save every single container I've ever used, we had plenty on hand at the house. We found these in our mountain of empty containers and felt they would suit us well. 

We heated the coconut oil over boiling water and mixed in the peppermint and lavendar oils. Our ratio was 1 teaspoon each essential oil per every cup of coconut oil. 

Once everything was in liquid form and well blended, we ladeled it into our containers. 

With fancy new markers, we just made the easiest gift ever!

We knew we wanted to make candles this year but weren't sure which direction to head with them. We usually mass produce the gifts we give to neighbors. (Click here for last year's gifts.) I didn't want to use large containers since that could get expensive. We settled on bottle caps as tea lights. There seems to be plenty of beer bottles in our recycling each week, so I know we could gather enough bottle caps in plenty of time. Just in case, I had a friend help me out saving his bottle caps as well. Between the two of us, there was an ample supply of materials! Yikes! Here's a very, very small excerpt of our collection.

I got supplies at AC Moore. You can get premade wicks, but for a fraction of the cost, you can make your own with the wick tabs and a roll of the wick material. The instructions were printed on the wick tab package and it was easy to assemble.

We simply melted the wax over boiling water, spooned the wax into the bottle cap and placed the wick inside. This was a little more time consuming as I didn't want the girls to pour the hot wax into such a small container. 

The results were awesome!

We are super excited about handing out these gifts this year!