A while back I found
this awesome tutorial on Little Birdie Secrets. I love this blog...three crafty friends who do cool things together. How fun is that?!! The site is full of
inspiring and thoughtful projects to tackle and I have many bookmarked that I want to try. So, anyway, I found this tutorial, and later my co-worker, Casey, and I decided to host a Women's Christmas Craft night at Carol Joy
Holling. The hope was to get a bunch of crafty-types in a room for a night of food, creating and childcare done by camp counselors. Genius. So this Friday night we have 20 women coming to make three different projects, one of which is the Fizzy Bath Bomb. Today I did a trial run of this project and basically decided that I have the best job in the world.
First I gathered all of the supplies. This was the hardest part of the entire process. I had to track down five cups of citric acid. And figure out what witch hazel was (it's not a vitamin, so don't waste your time looking in the vitamin section in countless stores across
omaha...just head over to your local
walgreens and go to their face wash section. who knew?!! not me, obviously.) But once I gathered all of the ingredients it was a pretty simple process. I told Rory that by the time the ladies actually come and do the crafts, it will only take them 10 minutes because the prep work has already been done for hours, and if I were really honest, days. It reminds me of watching someone on a cooking show and they say, "simply toss your chopped vegetables in the pan" and you think to yourself, 'well who chopped those vegetables?!! All recipes would be easy and simple if your ingredients were premeasured and ready to dump into your pot!' Basically, this is what I have done for craft night.
So from there it was a pretty straight forward process...mixed the dry ingredients first and then added the oil and coloring. Apparently the citric acid and baking soda are the two things that really make these babies fizz. Again, if you want the actual instructions with step-by-step pictures,
click here for great easy to follow directions from Little Birdie Secrets.
Adding the witch hazel was maybe the trickiest part, but it would be hard to screw this up, so I use the word tricky quite loosely. The key is that you don't want to ever saturate your dry ingredients or it will activate the fizz prematurely. So you spray on the witch hazel until the mixture clumps easily in your hand.
Then I packed the mixture into the cupcake cups seen below. The stuff hardens really fast, so I filled them fast. I plan on making mostly cupcakes, but wanted to try the actual "bomb" like you would purchase at
LUSH.
For the cupcakes, I made a lotion frosting to go on top. It actually is a pound of powdered sugar, meringue powder and cream of tartar. I was sort of weirded out about bathing in powdered sugar until I realized that lots of people use sugar scrubs, so it can't be that horrible for you.
It stiffened up really quickly, so we filled the icing bag fast and decorated our fizzy bath cupcakes. This is my friend, Gina, who showed serious skill in her use of the piping bag. Very impressive, Gina.
They hardened up within two hours. Hard as rocks, actually. I was still curious how they would react in the water, unsure if I had done everything exactly right. So we tested one. I can't explain how thrilled and relieved I was that it worked, because I have been promoting this entire event based on these things, raving about how cool they are when they fizz up, while thinking, "Lord, please let them fizz up!" Not only did it work...but it fizzed like a
hottub jet shooting up out of the water. Well, I mean, like the little spits of water that shoot up from a hottub jet. Not really like a gushing fountain. I'm just trying to say the fizz was impressive!
We wrapped them up and are all set for Friday night. If you're in the Omaha area and want to come, drop me a line. We'd love to have you!
We had a fantastic turn out for our first Christmas Craft Night on Friday night. The hope of this evening was for women to come and make classy gifts to give to teachers, babysitters or coworkers. We had 30 ladies come, and had a really great time. I had the room set up with six different stations and the ladies moved around the room as they pleased. We had great food, great childcare and Bing Crosby singing us into the season.
Our craft stations included: Christmas Cocoa cones, Fabric covered magnets and tacks, Scrabble Tile Necklaces, Gift Tags and pretty gift wrapping, and Bath bomb cupcakes. Click on any of those titles for the link to the tutorials, where I found all of these fabulous ideas!
I hired a few camp counselors and co-worker's kids to be our babysitters for the evening. They were awesome. When I went to check on them I found the crew having a snack in their fort. Love that.
I enjoyed another day of 
