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