Homemade hot cocoa & Bath Salts ~ After Thanksgiving Craft

This is the 3rd year of our "new" tradition of making a craft after Thanksgiving dinner...though this year my husband didn't have to help with decorations - becuase he had to go back to work :( For a flash back go here and take a look at the last 2 years of creativity!

This year we stepped it up and we did two projects. I really like doing these projects for the following reasons...

- Spending time with my Mom
- Being creative
- Getting a few gifts out of the way

It is nice to have a few gifts laying around the house. Some of these I already have people in mind for...some I don't. I also want to figure out about how much per gift we spent...because I bet it really wasn't much...more on that in a different post!
This year my Mom gather the ingredients for one project and I the other.

Bath Soaking Salts - Mom's Craft

There are SO many options for bath salts out there. All of the recipies are pretty similar. We decided to go for a bath soak which is a dry bath salt. You can also make bath scrub which is the 'wet' kind...I still might try some of those!!

We made two varieties: tea tree and ginger. For the tea tree we used essential oil and for the ginger we (to my surprise) used actual ginger that we smashed and took the oil out!

For the base mixture we mixed together 4 cups of Ebsom Salt, 1 cup of Sea Salt, 1/4 cup baking soda to make one batch. We then added about 5 drops of tea tree oil to one batch and about 1/2 a stock worth of ginger oil to the other batch. We then packaged them in glass containers my Mom got at the Dollar Store, tied them with some tulle, and added a cute little card that was actually made from cutting out pictures from Christmas cards my parents got last year...yeah for recycling (and free)!

Mom cutting the ginger...

Making labels/tags out of old Christmas Cards!

COST ANALYSIS of 1 gift. Total - less than $5 out of pocket

Glass container - $1 @ Dollar Store

Epsom Salt - $4 - we used 2 3lb bags

Baking Soda & Salt - already on hand

Essential Oil - about $10 per container. We used 5 drops...

Tulle - already on hand

Tags - made out of recycled Christmas cards

Homemade Hot Cocoa Mix - Annie's Craft

I found a recipe that seemed really good - many different ingredients - here. We followed the directions for making the powder but we put our own little spin on another indgredient! As an after thought I realized that I hadn't even tasted this before we made it...I confirmed today it was delicious!!

Ingredients you will need the below ingredients for 1 batch.

• 2 cups nonfat dry milk powder
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1/2 cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup powdered nondairy creamer
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

The above recipe made about 4 baggies, measured 1 Cup each. We added a hanfull or two of mini peppermint marshmellows...yummy!! We tied wth some rickrak and cute gift tag I made.