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In the spirit of the season (grumble grumble grumble), there have been increased opportunities and necessity for hot steamy warm-you-to-the-bones baths. Enter another DIY project from a couple weekends ago.
So you have a lot of little empty bottles and a big bag of epsom salts. What do you do? Make bath salts of course! With some creative back-up from Mom (okay, the whole idea was hers), I spread out some simple kitchen ingredients: a cinnamon stick, some star anise, coffee beans, a dried lemon peel. Alright. Four down; seven to go. What else? It needed to be something easily catchable (i.e., wouldn't go down the drain or make a horrible mess), and good-smelling. Well, how about tea bags?! Every flavor (caffeinated or herbal) in the house went in to a bottle.
And ta da! A veritable treasure chest of bathroom goodies.
We let them steep for a couple weeks, and this weekend Bill got to try the inaugural bath. The verdict? Fun, although the tea bags mostly make the water look like, um, well, you're taught not to do this in the swimming pool when you're little. But this smells (faintly) much better and you can imagine all the good herbals refreshing and replenishing.
But the best part is each little bottle has a silly surprise hiding in the bottom:
So far we've gotten an ant, a wasp, and a butterfly. And the test capsule was a beetle.
