A Homemade Christmas Gift

Merry Christmas! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. We were blessed to share the holiday with all of our kids. I came across an idea I wanted to try for my daughters, kind of a 'spa' box, so I ordered tea bags and got busy looking at bath salt, fizzers and bath enhancers. The first thing I did was choose a pretty glass vase to hold the bags:

I wrapped some sisal around the glass.

I designed an instruction sheet. I actually used a CD Label template. Mine had a gingerbread house with gumdrops and candy. The coordinating colors were blue and red. I chose some blue gingham scrapbook paper (.29) and white and red stripe paper (on sale as Christmas merchandise for .20). I got the papers from Michael's.

I was going to make bath fizzers, but one day while out shopping at Gordman's, I found a handful of them already made, so I just went ahead and picked those up and placed them in a cello bag. Each girl got 2 fizzers. I picked up a package of travel size containers and added milkbath to each container and added labels to both the bags and the bottles.

I found a pretty little red and blue gingerbread house at Dollar General for a couple of dollars. Unfortunately, they only had one. I found another one and crammed stuff in, but it was smaller, and that turned out to be a huge error because everything got damp, so....at 3 a.m. on Christmas morn when I discovered it, I had to redo the tags and bags...lesson learned!

Since we celebrated with my youngest daughter the weekend before Christmas, she got the gingerbread house box, since it was the only one completed! This picture doesn't do it justice-you can't see the pretty silver glitter all over the lid or the cool candy cane stripes of the side.

I found two other red glittery boxes that were big enough to hold everything, and put tissue paper inside before putting the glass vase full of tub teas, cello bag of fizzers and bottle of milkbath.

I added the salts to a tea bag, then folded the top down, stapled it and labeled it with what it was. There were 5 tea bags in each vase with the following teas:

• Lavendar & Wild Orchid - Joint and Muscle Relief
• Eucalyptis Spearment - Relaxation
• Epson Salt Soak - Soothe and Sleep
• Coconut Oil - Purify
• Menthol - Calm and Relax

The bath fizzers where white and pink, spearmint and peppermint. The bottles had milkbath. They were lots of fun to put together and I think my daughters enjoyed receiving them. The idea is to (remove paper tags) throw the tea bag into a warm bath and relax for 20 minutes. The tea bags leave the tub clean.

Organizer Redo

I recently painted some chests for my bedroom. I wanted some kind of holder for books, glasses, remote, etc. I found an empty cardboard box at Walmart that had been a holder of sandwich bags. It was bright orange, so didn't really go with my bedroom décor. I did like the shape and size of it, though. And since it was free, I couldn't beat the price!

I chose some scrapbook paper and decided when I had a free minute, I would recover it.

When I started, though, the orange looked like it would be showing in some spots.

I decided since I had some paint left over from my chests, I would just go ahead and paint the box. It took about....15 seconds! I painted it right before I left for a visit to go see this little doll:

When I got home Sunday night, my box was nice and dry, and the perfect time to recover it.

Here are some shots of the finished product. What do you think?

While I am showing you my projects, here are the chests I painted:

All set for sweet dreams of organization now!