Happy Easter! Kaolin Bath Bombs Recipe

This recipe uses a fabulous British product - Cornish Kaolin Clay - and makes a ROCK hard bath bomb. Perfect for novelty bath bombs such as the massive Easter Egg shell pictured here.  

Colourful & calorie free, this was made using a cracked effect chocolate egg mould (you can now buy one here) which we filled leaving a hollowed out centre.  Doing so enabled us to "fill" the egg with 60mm bath bomb eggs.  The two halves were then simply tied together with curling ribbon so that the inner contents could be seen.

Using the clay appears to speed up the drying time and in turn helped with moulding such a large form.

In combination with Witch Hazel, this is a fairly easy recipe to use for all situations and one that you could adapt to make any kind of bath bomb fizzer.  

INGREDIENTS:

600g Sodium Bicarbonate
300g Citric Acid
50g Corn Flour
75g Kaolin Light BP Grade Clay
10ml Coconut Fragrance (any of your choice)
Acid Red water soluble powder colour
Witch Hazel spritz to bind 

METHOD:

Combine all of the dry ingredients thoroughly in a plastic or glass bowl kept for the purpose.
Add the tip of a teaspoon of powder colour and mix well. The colour will not be apparent until you add moisture, so don't be tempted to add too much.
Add your fragrance whilst mixing constantly with (gloved) hands
Spritz 5 or 6 sprays at a time with Witch hazel, repeating 6 or 8 times or until the mix holds together when pressed in the palm of your hand. The correct consistency is the same as is needed when making successful sandcastles - damp but not over wet.
Press into the mould with fingers, spreading evenly and leaving a hollow in the middle of the mould.
Set aside to dry for 15 minutes before removing carefully and allowing to dry completely (1 hour)

You can of course use the mix in any mould and adapt the colour and fragrance to suit.

Enjoy!



#NatClean2012 Challenge - Week 5 - Lavender Carpet Freshener

This week's recipe is a really simple one, and our thanks go to Sam who recently reminded us about this fab recipe in a conversation on the Bathbomb.biz Ltd Facebook page.

Using just two natural ingredients you can create your own version of the commercially available carpet fresheners - without chemicals!

All you need is a quantity of Sodium Bicarbonate and some natural Lavender flowers.  Because you can make this ahead of time and keep some for later use, (and we recommend this because the aroma deepens over time) we would suggest that you find a suitable container just for the purpose.  Something like an old ice cream tub or a large coffee jar will be fine.

How much you make depends on the area of carpet you want to clean.  For an average sized rug you will need around 250g of Bicarbonate of Soda and a handful of Dried Lavender.

Simply mix the Bicarb with the Lavender and use immediately.  Sprinkle onto the carpet liberally - if you can leave it overnight so much the better.  If not, try to leave for a couple of hours and then vacuum up.  A definite plus is that your vacuum will also benefit from a Lavender aroma too!

If you don't like the idea of using Lavender flowers, or if you have a particularly light coloured carpet/rug then you can just use Bicarb on its own.

Alternatively add 5-10 drops of your favourite essential oil per 250g of Bicarbonate.  Stir the oil through the bicarbonate and leave overnight.  Before use, stir the mix and crumble any lumps.

Again, if in any doubt about the effects on your carpet please do a small test.

We hope you have been finding these #NatClean2012 recipes useful.  If you, like Sam, would like to share a recipe that you've found to be useful, do get in touch.  You can comment here, email or catch up with us on Facebook.

Enjoy :)

Fragrance Freebie! (Kinda!)

As many of you know we've got a whole new range of Designer similar fragrance concentrates

And they are fab!  You can find them here

But for one lucky Facebook liker, we're sending out a set completely free... with one little catch!

We've asked you to comment if you'd be happy to write a description for us on each fragrance that we can then publish to the website.  Lots of you said you would and your names have gone into the hat so to speak.

The randomly generated winner of the set is...

Drum rolls pleeeease...

number 40 - Jo Wright!

Well done Jo, hope you're feeling wordy!

February's Fan of the Week Winner

February's Fan of the week winners were...

1)Celine Blacow 2)Chrissy Wilson 3)Jimi-James 4)Suzi Rahmann

All four numbers were popped into the random number generator

And out popped number 1!

Well done Celine, your virtual tenner to spend on the website will shortly be winging its way to you :)

If you'd like a chance to grab a free tenner, all that you need to do is take part in our Facebook page - post comments, like photos, join in with the chit chat...

Every month we enter the weekly winners into the random number generator to choose a winner.  Easy as that and great odds too :)

See you there!