Body Scrub and Coasters

So you cut your paper, and the put Modge Podge on the back of it.

I've been in the process of creating many gifts for various family members. The fiance has three older siblings, who as of last year, were all married. This particular posts is about the gifts I made for the second oldest brother and his wife - they have the adorable girl who I made the play make up for.

I will start with my future sister-in-law's (SiL) gift. She's a big fan of make up and pampering herself. I suspect I will be too when I become a mom. After thinking vary carefully about what to send her, I concluded that she might need some body scrub. I found Under the Table & Dreaming's blog post about this great Brown Sugar Vanilla Body Scrub. In other blogs people recommended various oils, including olive oil, but she recommended using something like Bert's Bees Mama's Nurturing Oil. I found some of it when I went to the store and it wasn't badly priced but I was trying to stay on budget. If you have not hit up the dollar type stores lately, you should. I found generic baby oil that worked great. I used Under the Table & Dreaming's recipe and used the baby oil for the majority of the ingredients.

 I used her amounts of brown sugar (2 cups) and cane sugar (1 cup) and mixed them together. I then added the prescribed 1 cup of oil, using the entire bottle of baby oil and then some of the Bert's Bees.

 I combined them together and then added in 1 tablespoon of Pure Vanilla Extract. In the future, I would recommend more extract, less oil. It would allow the vanilla to stand out more and not let the oil smell take over.

 I combined all the ingredients, like so:

 The ingredients sort of looked like mush until I packed them into the sealed jar I purchased at the craft store.

If you notice very carefully, the rubber seal on the jar turned a golden brown. That was caused by the oven. The oven you ask? Yes, because I used those lovely paint pens from the Love Map to paint the jar. I tried my good old oven to dry the paint trick. I learned that heated rubber does not smell great and turns the rubber a golden color.

In any case, I simply painted some bubble type things on the jar and then loaded in the scrub. Hopefully my SiL likes it when she opens it up on Christmas morning and can put it to good use.

The gift I made for her husband, to be honest, was a dry run at something the Mr Fiance and I are thinking about giving away as favors at our wedding. My future brother-in-law (BiL) is getting into sport fishing and likes to drink his beer. I thought I would combine those two ideas and tweak my chalkboard coaster idea some with a little inspiration from pinterest.  What the heck does that mean?

I found some "river/stone" looking scrapbook paper, cut it to be 4x4" and modge podge it onto some tiles. The only supplies I actually had to purchase for this was the paper itself, more of the felt circles for the coasters bottoms, and some clear spray paint to create a seal. 

So you take your Modge Podge, put it on the back of your paper...

 

The Modge Podge the front side..

Cut edges as necessary after the paper dries.

 Take it to a well ventilated area... and put down a covering underneath it to protect the surface you aren't planning on sealing.

 Use a clear spray paint

 and seal your coasters.

Add those lovely felt furniture circles I have been talking about and boom! You have made some handy-dandy beer friendly and fishermen liked coasters.

The above project took about a half hour from start to finish. That does not include the final dry time for the spray paint. I should mention that the finish from the paint, combined with the Modge Podge, creates this great water look. The final product really does look like the water is passing over the stones on the paper.