*Side Note* Don't throw out those soap bar slivers (or hotel bar soaps)!

If your soap bar is down to a little "unusable" sliver, try these ideas to get the full life out it!

Our favorite bar soap. Smells soooo good!

• Slit a sponge to make a pocket to hold the slivers. Wet and squeeze the sponge for foamy suds. Or fill a sock with soap slivers and use it the same way 
• Place soap slivers in a sock to use as a body scrubber in the shower
• Toss leftover soap bars into a blender with water and transform them into a creamy, liquid soap. Pour this substance into empty squeeze bottles, and keep one at each sink.
• Use the soap to write on windows (i.e. on your car window if you have a car for sale)
• Leave the slivers in your sock draw to keep everything smelling fresh
• Keep them all in zip-lock bags and use for travel
• Shave it down to a powder and use for hand-washed clothes

Some ideas taken from "Emilie's Creative Home Organizer"

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*Side Note* What to do with leftover beverages

If you have extra lemons or leftover lemonade, squeeze fresh lemons and juice in ice cube trays. Transfer the frozen cubes into freezer bags. Defrost for fresh lemon juice anytime, or drop a cube in a glass of water for a lemony kick.

Freeze extra coffee in ice-cube trays. Add the cubes of iced coffee for an extra-strength brew. Or whirl the cubes in the blender with ice cream, milk, or chocolate milk for a coffee slush. You can also enrich meat gravies with coffee for a robust flavor. Coffee in frosting makes for a luscious mocha cream.

Most any beverage can be frozen in an ice cube tray to use later as an added kick to any drink. Good luck experimenting!

*Several tips taken from Emilie's Creative Home Organizer*

What do you do with your leftover liquids?

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Once again, my apologies

For those of you who are sweet enough and supportive enough of me to notice that my postings have dwindled, thank you SO much for your patience and understanding. This blog brings me an incredible amount of joy and like an old friend, I think of it often when I am away from it for too long. I have a long list of excuses (moving, a 21 month old, full-time school...) but I know life isn't going to slow down and I want to make this a priority.

That being said, I think I am going to have to cut back on the amount of products I am making for awhile. With 8 weeks 'til sweet baby girl #2 gets here, I don't want to over-commit and under-deliver. I haven't decided what the perfect balance is yet, so for now, I will take it one product at a time and kind of set finish dates as I go. Thank you all again for your support and encouragement. It means the world to me!!

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.  ~John Lubbock

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What I will be making next... tinted lip-gloss!

Let's try this again :) As you may or may not remember, I have attempted to make this before. Unfortunately, 99.9% of these recipes call for grated bees wax, which I couldn't find, so I hunted around and I think I will use a combination of a few recipes I have found (below)

RECIPE IDEAS #1
RECIPE IDEAS #2
RECIPE IDEAS #3

I will post my exact recipe (and process) once I make it. Look for that post around 7/15/11!

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Final Review on Body Spray

Due to my EXTREME tardiness on making this one, I combined the "thoughts on process" and "final review" below...

image from: expressandstar

My Final Thoughts:
Cons- Not sure I love the smell of the essential oil I used (lemongrass). 


Pros- Easy to make, inexpensive, makes a boat-load. As long as you like the essential oil you chose, you could probably make this body spray (with the first round of ingredients you purchased) for years to come without having to refill your stash.


Overall- If you are looking for a light, refreshing, inexpensive DIY body spray, this is for you. It is relatively inexpensive to collect all of the ingredients ($10 max) and as I mentioned before, once you purchase what you need, you shouldn't need to re-purchase for a very long time. The downside is experimenting with the different essential oils and finding which one you like. If you have a favorite scent already, this will probably come very easy for you but I have the hardest time when I'm in the EO aisle picking a favorite. I chose lemongrass because it has a slew of properties (click the links to read more) that are fantastic! Some include: relaxer/nerve-calming, insecticide = great for summer, anti-depressant, etc. -it even reduces gas in the intestinal tract! I mean, what more could a gal ask for? I also decided to use lemongrass because I wanted something unisex that (if he so desired) could be used by both my Husband and I.


I decided to combine a few of the recipes I found and make mine with 1 tablespoon witch hazel, 1 cup water, 10 drops lemongrass, and 1 drop rose otto for fun. I then just shook it all up and voila! If you are looking for a very light, fresh, and well, "lemony" scent then you will love this combination. I have found that I don't like the smell very much when I first spray it, but once it has settled in I love it. By the way, this scent seems to linger for quite a while, much longer than some of my store bought ones. My biggest complaint with the lemongrass is that it's not strong enough. I decided after making this that I kinda want a spray that makes me smell like I just got out of a Grecian bath of rose petals and lavender... too much? Ha, either way I want something strong and beautiful, this is more light and fresh (which is normally right up my alley!) so I may give it another go with a few different essential oils until I find the perfect combo. Until then, I plan on keeping this in my fridge to make it extra refreshing to use throughout the summer.


*As a side note I will say that after using my bronzer with rose otto for awhile, I really like the scent that it leaves me with and have gotten kind of spoiled with the bronzer/ perfume duo.*

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Just a little more motivation to grow your own fruits and veggies...

First let's get one persistent canard out of the way. Yes, the tomato is technically a fruit, not a vegetable, but for purposes of economics the USDA classifies it as a vegetable, and as such it is the second most popular vegetable in the nation after that other burger staple, lettuce. This is surprising in only one respect: A vast majority of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. every year ($5 billion worth), are devoid of the flavor and nutritive value they once had.

Sure, that plant your neighbor gave you that's just beginning to enjoy the summer heat will produce lots of delicious, succulent tomatoes come August or September. But in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook tells us why the modern factory-farmed tomato in most grocery stores is a poster child for nearly everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture. A recent USDA study, he points out, says that the average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has "30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium."

This is because the tomatoes grown in the fields in and around Immokalee, Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it's not flavor, and it's not nutrition. It's shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

Click here to read the rest of the article from Huffington Post

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