Pretty Hands From the Pantry

Hello! Yes, I'm still here! Between migraines, and home life craziness, oh and massive work deadlines and 12+ hour work days, I haven't had a whole lot of time for crafting, let alone blogging lately!

I've been feeling like my cuticles needed some TLC lately. Well, more like INTENSIVE treatment. Believe me, I have plenty of cuticle creams, softeners, removers, etc. But nothing seems to be doing the trick lately. I remembered from my BeautiControl consultant days, they had an amazing hand scrub that was really good for my cuticles and my nails.

Not one to pay full price when I can get away with it, I went to eBay. I found some listings but not a whole lot of savings after shipping. Then the light bulb came on.

This is not the first time I had done this. I went to my kitchen, where I gathered the following supplies:

• Vegetable Oil
• Coconut Oil
• Olive Oil
• Brown Sugar
• Cinnamon
• Table sugar
• Table salt
• Kosher salt
• leftover side dish container from Kentucky Fried Chicken

I put the dry ingredients in first, about a tablespoon or so of each. Probably twice that much brown sugar. Then I started adding coconut oil by the tablespoonful. I think that one might be the most expensive oil, so I moved on to the others, adding a tablespoon at a time and stirring it together to a nice, thick, pasty consistency.

VOILA! Ladies and gentlemen, I just saved myself about $27! I now have my very own yummy smelling, skin softening hand scrub! I look forward to fresh, beautiful cuticles in the next few days!

There are SO many hand scrub recipes and tutorials online. The bottom line is, throw together some natural oils, scrubby stuff (can be coffee grounds, lavender, herbs, you name it) and get to mixing! Keep it in small batches. Unless you use something to keep the grodies from growing in it, you want to keep the batches small to keep your scrub from going bad. I think Vitamin E oil would do the trick, but I need to research it first!

Happy Hands! 

We made a Mai Tei Wrap!

Miss M is getting to be quite a handfull! She's a little over 20 pounds now. Due to this fact, I was needing to do something to save my back and neck! I wasn't sure what type of carrier would work well for her (we were given a Snugli and it didn't go well when she was itty bitty), so I didn't want to invest a bunch of money into something I didn't know if we'd like.

We had tried a Mai Tei on in a store one time and she did OK in it. I decided to research and see if I could find a pattern online. Low and behold, there are quite a few! I found some of the directions to be a little confusing for me, so I ended up using bits and pieces of two or three different patterns.

I will probably use my infomapping/instructional design skills to create my own pattern/directions someday! Not with the holidays looming, though!

Anyway, the same home ec major helped me sort it all out and guided me through the parts that were confusing me.

Here is the end result!




By the way: The fabric was basically free too! I had the black stretch denim on hand, and my friend had the black floral from the stash she inherited from her grandmother!