This year I’m making up ‘wartime hampers’ for Christmas pressies. The food component is going to be ration book themed but also the hampers will contain a variety of homemade household goodies as gifts so today I experimented to see if I could actually make some of the things I wanted to include.
The reason I chose today to do it as I received three packages through the post this morning for beeswax, glycerin soap base and some material off cuts from my friend Sarah for decorating jam jar tops. I knew I just had to put everything else on hold why I played…
Homemade goodies now decorated with off cut material Sarah sent me~!
First of all I melted small cubes of opaque glycerin soap (10 cubes for each bar) to which I added some colour and essential oils once the cubes had melted (about 4 drops of essential oil per 10 cubes and a drop or two of pigment). I made two lavender soaps and two lemongrass and bergamot soaps. Once it was mixed together (I just used an old non-stick saucepan and wooden spoon) I poured the mixture into a latex mould and one hour later the bars were hard enough to remove!
Homemade lavender furniture polish recipe
Perhaps my biggest excitement was making some lavender furniture polish. I have a couple pieces of furniture that I wanted to use an old-fashioned type of polish on without any horrid chemicals. Having done a little research on the web I purchased a small amount of beeswax off eBay and grated that into some olive oil from my cupboard. 2 parts olive oil to 1 part grated beeswax. The easiest way to do this is fill a jug with olive oil up to 200 mls and grate enough beeswax into it to bring the measure up to 300 mls (which makes 200 mls of olive oil and 100 mls of beeswax)
Place the mixture into an old saucepan and melt very slowly… it really is quick to do. Add your essential oils. I added about 12 drops of lavender. You can try to add pigment if you like but olive oil and beeswax naturally solidifies to a pale green/buff colour so you’d have to add a lot of pigment and that could then stain your wood so personally I wouldn’t add colour.
Next I took it off the heat and stirred gently and left it to cool for a few minutes, stirred again then poured it straight into a shallow wide mouthed jar (I used a salsa jar my eldest daughter had finished using).
And that’s it! It smells great and makes a wonderful nourishing polish free from nasty chemicals and the whole jar probably cost me less than £1 to make!
This will definitely be going in my Christmas hampers!!!
C xxxxx
just a thought but how about making up wartime Christmas hampers to sell? Would be a very unusual gift and I would not mind betting you get more orders than you can cope with. Could be the start of a business venture.
Ooooo now that sounds good!!! 🙂 It definitely would be unique and I have not only goodies to put in the hampers but ration books, recipe books, replica newspapers and loads more!! 🙂
xxxxxxxxxxx
brilliant idea…just in time for the xmas market….make one up and post on here Carolyn to get your first orders…maybe individual jars of polish and jams,chutneys etc would sell well too….have a selection available at your popup nights too for some add on sales on the night
yes that’s a great idea! xxxx
That is a fantastic idea. I love the lavender soaps.
So things I’ve read about in some of my magazines:
– Home made fabric flowers for pinning to lapels (very) popular
– Although Christmas cakes and pudding had a shorter shelf life due to lack of sugar, brandy etc other cakes such a trench cake were designed to survive the post
– Small packets of flower, vegetable or herb seeds to plant on the spring.
– Savings bonds – could do lottery tickets or premium bonds for your personal gifts
– nice stationery. You could single-handedly restart letter writing and then I would love you even more!
– torch batteries (just what every girl about town needs!)
– and a bottle of Evening in Paris for me, please
Oh, and of course you could bottle up home made mincemeat. I loath modern mincemeat but the wartime one padded out with apples (and carrots?) is lovely.
Oh no, I feel some cooking coming on. Look what you’ve started! :0)
Clearly I was joking about the torch batteries!
Hi C, just had another idea … Rosehip syrup – very big in the 1940s. In “World War II clinical scientists discovered the healing potential for rose hips. Several medical studies were performed in the 1940s which showed the high levels of vitamin C contained in the tiny fruit. When Britain experienced difficulties in getting citrus fruit into the country during WWII, the British government began collecting rose hips to make rose hip syrup as a source of vitamin C”.
I’ve found a recipe for Rosehip syrup here at UK home front (there’s also a recipe for Rosehip sweets too). Just search for the word Rosehip on the main page. http://www.ukhomefront.co.uk/6.html
Bev 🙂
That looks like fun! And so many ideas… I wasn’t planning on making Christmas hampers but now I might be 🙂
Just found this blog and am very interested in the war time Christmas hamper idea. As a tribute to an uncle who lost his life in the war I was doing the wartime diet thing myself – lost 3 and 1/2 lbs in 2 weeks but never went hungry. Looking forward to finding my way round the site.