When the Bloggers Get to Your Head...
Spring break here... which means it's time for my "cruise director" roll in the household. Kate is 10 years old now, so we occasionally dabble in some more advanced craft projects. Somehow, lip balm ended up on my radar this week, and here is what I learned:
- There are 9.4 million craft bloggers out there. Some have poor instruction and excellent photos. Some have excellent instruction with key points missing.. some write instructions that are like....wait...whaaaat?
- Regardless of the caliber of photo and website, you can't always trust you will be getting home-run advice (in our case, content).
- Just because you can make something at home....I don't know if it is actually a good idea to make things at home. Catch my drift?
Bottom line for the lip balm excursion is this:
It was fun to try. The girls learned how to melt wax, add essential oils, and they thought about packaging and re-sale. Was this cost effective? Maybe in Beverly Hills.... ingredients like these are very expensive at the start-up... I guess the girls can recoup my money if they actually sell the tubes, but I think the tubes will probably end up being passed around at school.
Once we figured out a consistency that we liked, this process was very easy. I made about 7 or 8 different batches of lip balm one day....each time using a different ratio of wax to oil and flavoring. We liked 3 T of beeswax to 2 T of coconut oil the best.. but there really isn't a way to camouflage the smell of the coconut oil. Next time, I would try it with another type of oil as a base so that the essential oil scent was more prominent.
Finally, Amazon is your friend for a project like this. You'll need pipettes for sure (don't try to pour hot lava wax into tubes as suggested online...mama mia) and various area craft stores (yes, the big ones you already know) do not stock lip balm tubes. We found a couple of lip balm kits which were cost effective for little kids...but they didn't look like they would yield the results we were hoping for.
My neighbor really liked the final version of balm we ended up with, I actually think it's pretty good too... so when all is said and done, I am happy we tried this project. The girls liked adding labels to each tube... they also decorated them with washi tape and sharpie markers.