Well, Valentine's Day is approaching fast, and one of our activities this week was making Lip Balm to give as a gift, although many of the kids informed me that they are going to keep their lip balm. I guess that is a good sign...they loved them! A little while ago I read what was in lip balm and was shocked that even "natural" companies loaded up their products with harmful chemicals, so I began looking for natural recipes and I found this recipe on Wellness Mama. She has a ton of great recipes for natural remedies, you should check out her link:
It is a simple recipe:
1 tsp Coconut Oil
1 tsp Cocoa Butter or Shea Butter
1 tsp Bees Wax Pellets
Optional: 20 drops of essential oil (we used grapefruit oil)
I was able to purchase these materials at the health food store and Trader Joe's, however I purchased the chap stick container from Mountain Rose Herbs. You can also purchase all the ingredients from Mountain Rose Herbs as well if you cannot find them at you local health food store, here is their link:
Here is our experience with it, I was surprised by how simple the process was, and we only had one little hiccup, which we remedied the next day when we made them.
Before we started we went around and smelled all the ingredients and tried to guess what they were.
The children added the bees wax pellets first, then we added the Cocoa Butter and Coconut Oil to our mason jar.
We tripled the recipe to make 7 lip balm containers.
I placed the jar in a pot and heated it on low, then switched it to simmer as the ingredients start to melt.
Add the essential oils after the ingredients have melted down, we forgot the second day, so the lip balm smelt more like chocolate from the cocoa butter which was still nice, but the grapefruit essential oils have a lovely refreshing smell, in fact grapefruit is suppose to energize!
While the ingredients slowly melted, the children worked on their tags for their lip balm.
Last year for Valentine's day we made beautiful hearts using homemade paper, washable markers, and eyedroppers of water to make the colors "melt" into each other. This year I cut smaller hearts that we could use as tags for their lip balm. Here they are filling in their hearts and then "melting" them with water.
If you would like to see more of what we did last year, click below:
If you would like to see more of what we did last year, click below:
I love how these come out, when we do this technique on handmade paper the colors stay rich and the paper holds up a lot better then coffee filters, which are often used for this process.
Back to our Lip Balm
You will need a glass eye dropper for this next part, and here is where we had our only problem the first day. Because I would call the children up one at a time, and they took their time with the process, the lip balm started to solidify in the eye dropper. So the second day we did it, I kept a cup of hot water near by, and as each child finished with the eye dropper, I soaked it in the cup to avoid this problem.
the children opened up their chap stick containers, writing their initials on the bottom with a sharpie helps.
I moved the melted lip balm to a trivet, but kept the water on simmer near by so it didn't harden.
The children then proceeded to fill their containers with the balm. It is not hot like melted wax, so do not worry if it drips a little.
Have the children try to hold their containers as straight as possible, and fill till it is above the stick inside.
They take about 15 minutes to harden, but a couple hours to be ready to move up and down in their containers.
On sticker labels they made their own lip balm labels, and then I tied on their tags.
Puckering up to put on her lip balm!
Too Cute!
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