Thursday, December 3, 2009

Thrifty Gifts - Bath Salt Set

Therese's post on felted soap reminded me of the bath sets my daughter, Francesca, and I made for a craft sale last year.

Each included a jar of bath salts, a vintage spoon, a handmade 100% cotton face cloth, and scented votive candles.

Each set followed a scent/color theme (citrus or lavender in this case).

Our bath salts were basically epsom salts, liquid food coloring and essential oil mixed together and packaged in recycled jars. (I happened to have several jars leftover from this outstanding product.) There are lots of recipes for bath stuff here if you'd like to branch out a little. (Note: we tried to make purple bath salts by combining blue and red food coloring and it turned out a shade of grey. Blue was much better.)

I reshaped some old (I mean vintage), mismatched teaspoons by bending the handles around a dowel to make them shorter and hook-shaped. This is the hardest part because they really don't want to bend nicely. If you don't use something (like a dowel) as a form, most spoons will probably just fold over in a less than attractive manner. I may have used a vice to help wrestle them into cooperating. A husband could be useful here also. The spoons were tied onto the jars with a matching ribbon.

The facecloths were made from free patterns from Ravelry, specifically "spiral facecloth" and "shell facecloth." (The gift is creative - these names ... not so much.) The yarn is simply Sugar 'n Cream, available for a very good price just about anywhere.

We can't remember what kind of container everything was put into, but matching copier paper run through our shredder was involved in the packing.

UPDATE: We remembered the packaging detail. I started with a smaller gift bag (the top opening was about 3"x5"). I cut the bottom off and re-folded it so the sides were about 3 inches. Basically, I made the the bag shorter.

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