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DIY Bath Bombs are so Easy to Make You’ll Never Buy one Again – DIY Bath Bombs Without Citric Acid

04.29.17

If you love LUSH bath bombs, but don’t love the price, here’s a recipe for DIY bath bombs that’s easy and very affordable and doesn’t use citric acid, which I found pretty hard to find.

Growing up, I remember taking bubble baths all the time. Sitting in the tub in warm water with lots of bubbles was so much fun! But when I started watching YouTube videos with people talking about the Lush Bath Bombs I was so amazed! That was the reason I actually discovered Lush and fell in love with all their cruelty free and vegan products. However, I could never justify buying myself a bath bomb.

The ones at Lush range from $3-$8 if not more! Bath bombs were something you pampered yourself with or got as gifts for friends and family. This year for my birthday I was gifted a total of SEVEN bath bombs and I was very grateful! I’ve been using them slowly so I can make them last for a while. I was originally putting the entire bath bomb in the water and watching it dissolve into these vibrant colors for a while, but my sister told me people actually break the bath bomb into pieces to extend its use and that was been a valuable tip.

In today’s post, I will be talking about how to make your own diy bath bombs, because I’m sure by now you all know how much I like to make things myself! I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and read a lot of blog posts and this recipe that I will be sharing today, I found to be the easiest, quickest and very affordable!

So, one property of bath bombs, particularly the ones you get from Lush, is that they fizz once they come in contact with water and that is the challenge of making homemade DIY bath bombs. Citric acid is commonly used in DIY bath bombs recipes because there is a chemical reaction that occurs once baking soda and citric acid are mixed in which carbon dioxide is produced. This is what you see when you drop a bath bomb into water. The fizz and foam you see is a lot of bubbles of the carbon dioxide gas.

However, I found citric acid hard to find in stores. I’m sure you can purchase it online (amazon has it), but for the sake of keeping this post easy and affordable, we will be using common household ingredients. So, instead of citric acid, we will be using Lemon juice! The chemical reaction won’t be as strong as using citric acid, but it will do the job! You just want to make sure that you don’t add a whole bunch of lemon juice to your salts mixture. We will be using a mister in which you can add the lemon juice and use that to mist the salts slowly, so that the majority of the chemical reaction occurs once you drop the bath bomb into the water, not before!

As I have mentioned in the DIY Bath Salts blog post, Epsom salts, salt and baking powder have amazing benefits to your body, so once again we will be adding these into this recipe. Check out that blog post to learn more about their amazing properties!

INGREDIENTS

1 cup Baking Soda

1 cup Epsom Salts

1/2 cup Salt

Lemon juice – squeezed and placed in a mister

2-3 drops of Essential oil

Food coloring of choice

Bath bomb holds (I got these ones from Amazon)

DIRECTIONS

Mix together baking soda, Epsom salts and salt in a bowl.

Squeeze half a lemon and put the juice in a mister.

Mist the salts using the lemon juice until the salts pack together.

Now add in the essential oils and food coloring and mix.

Pack the bath bomb mix into a bath bomb mold and place in the fridge overnight.

Carefully, take apart the mold and marvel at the masterpiece of a bath bomb you just created.

Kamfy Living

March Lifestyle Favorites and Lululemon Run Course light speed Sock Review

04.02.17

March is over and I’m back again with my favorites from this month, a bunch being birthday gifts that I received in the end of February, the first being Lululemon socks!

FITNESS

Lululemon Run Course light speed sock: I LOVE these socks!! I bought a pair using a gift card I got for my birthday and they’re amazing and I thought I’d do a mini review of them as well. I have used them for Boot Camp classes, Zumba classes, running as well as walking large distances. They are designed so beautifully for all of these purposes. First of all, they have a tab at the back that prevents them from slipping down your feet which I think is brilliant. I have a couple of socks that start sliding down as I wear them throughout the day, but this tab makes it impossible for the socks to slip. Next, they are tighter is the arch area and this gives additional arch support, which is useful when running as it makes your feet feel very comfortable. And finally, they are made of this mesh material that prevents your feet from sweating when you wear the socks all day or train in them. And to top it off, I love the color combination of this pair as well as the design and they are just so beautiful as much as they are functional! Highly recommend. And they were $18 Cdn, which in Lululemon pricing, isn’t actually that much!
Zumba: I can’t believe I’m including Zumba in my favorites but I started taking classes after work at U of T and I am seriously enjoying it! For those who don’t know Zumba is a type of cardio-dance workout that is Latin inspired. The instructor dances along to the choreography and everyone in the class follows along as best they can. I am probably the most awkward and un-choreographed person in the class but I love that in this type of cardio you move your entire body. I also have been wearing the Lululemon socks to class and have experienced no slippage. One day my tailbone had been hurting super bad, I took the Zumba class that day and right after the pain had subsided considerably and the next day it was gone. I honestly think it was this class! I also recently listened to a podcast about the man who started Zumba and the story behind how it started is pretty impressive.

PODCAST

NPR How I Built This: Well now that I already mentioned the podcast, it makes sense to list it as my favorite. How I Built This is a podcast by NPR where they interview people who started companies and how they went about building their company. This was where I heard the Zumba episode as well. It’s really interesting how a lot of the successful companies you probably heard about, like Kate Spade, Zumba, etc. were actually people like you and I, that had a vision, put in the effort, went through hard times and finally saw their vision come to life. I find it super inspiring and have been learning a lot!

FOOD

Whole Foods Organic Chocolate Truffles: OMG These are AMAZING!!! These I received as a birthday gift from my sister and they are seriously the best thing ever! I think they are vegan as well, because I looked at the ingredients and I didn’t see anything with dairy and they say vegetarian on the box as well, so obviously don’t contain any animal product. But they are so creamy and they literally melt in your mouth. I actually went to the Whole Foods near us, but they didn’t have it, so I’m going to have to hunt these down or ask my sister to mail me some more from Vancouver!

TV SHOW

The Night Manager: We recently got Amazon Prime and with that you can watch shows on Amazon. Gursheel discovered this show The Night Manager and we have been loving it. It stars the doctor from House and the detective from Broadchurch, and the main character is new to me. But the acting, script and production is really good! I think this is a miniseries and has 6 episodes so far, but I heard it got renewed for another season!

BOOK

Mistborn Wax and Wayne Series: Once again I have a Brandon Sanderson book favorite for you. If it’s not clear, I love this author! I almost finished a trilogy this month, around 100 pages left! The books in this series start with The Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and then the Bands of Mourning. There is a fourth book in this series as well but it will be coming out in 2018! Wax is a lawman and Wayne is his sidekick and their relationship is so great! The book has action (of course), humor and a side of romance. My favorite book combination.

SKIN CARE

Whipped Coconut Oil: I have been loving putting coconut oil on my hair and skin and so has Gursheel! It’s been very dry here in Toronto, although the weather has been getting better. I made whipped coconut oil DIY this month and I think we are already halfway through the jar. It smells amazing, moisturizes the skin and is anti-bacterial!

PLANT

Giant Cactus: Gursheel got me a giant cactus for my birthday and we named him Pablo. This is our fourth plant and we love him. He is super tall and has this unique shape. Pablo is easy to maintain, just water him once a month and give him sunshine. We placed him by our bedroom window and he is looking healthy!

CRAFTING/DIY-ING

Copper Fabric Scissors: This month I have been altering Gursheel’s dress pants to make them tighter and shorter. We didn’t have a good pair of fabric scissors at home so I found this amazing pair on Amazon! They were super affordable ($10 Cdn and free shipping), beautiful and cut so easily. The perfect pair of fabric scissors. The best I’ve owned actually. I’m going to be doing a lot more sewing the next few months and this is going to make the sewing process that much easier.

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Kamfy Living

Easy Pantry Organization Update – Affordable Pantry Organization Ideas

03.26.17

I’ve been wanting to organize our pantry for a long time now and finally this weekend we started and got a huge chunk of it done. It’s not perfect yet and I still have a couple more things that I need to get done before I officially categorize it as finished, but I’m not sure when that will be, so I’m posting about an easy pantry organization update today.

I LOVE pantry organization videos on YouTube, in fact, they are some of my favorite kinds of videos to watch, after vegan recipe videos, that is. I have been watching a bunch of videos and scouring Pinterest for ideas for easy pantry organization ideas that also looks beautiful and are functional. So, today, I’m going to walk you through what I did to organize our pantry on a budget.

So this picture shows you how our pantry looked before we organized it. It was actually quite organized, in that we knew exactly where everything was. But, I wanted everything to look uniform and also wanted it to be visually appealing. A lot of the pantry items were stacked on top of each other, and everything was overly crowded. So, I thought it would be a good idea to build two more shelves to get some more working space. The original shelves were spread quite far apart, so I thought we could fit two more shelves. I measured the tallest item in our pantry and made sure that the shelves that we would build would accommodate this item.

I then took out every single item in the pantry and sorted them into cans, sauces, bulk items, teas, etc. and got rid of expired items and things we don’t use anymore. This was also the perfect time to wipe down and clean the pantry.

Next, we went to Home Depot and got a piece of wood cut to the size the shelves in our pantry were originally. This cost us $11 for 2 shelves! I then got Gursheel to install these shelves in the pantry. He did this by using the remaining pieces of wood and nailing them to the sides of the pantry and placing the shelf on top. Just looking at the empty pantry with the new shelves got me super excited that I went right away to Michaels to get some baskets in the dimensions I measured so that they fit perfectly into the pantry! I would have preferred lighter colored baskets, but these were the only ones I found that were the perfect width and height for our pantry. And I got them buy 1 get 1 free! Score!

I wanted to get clear, glass jars that would fit a lot of the bulk items in the pantry and I was able to find the perfect ones for 1-4 bucks at the Dollar Store (for the smaller ones) and IKEA (the larger ones) and spent under $100 for all the jars! I just took off all the labels, washed the containers with soap and water and dried them off completely before putting bulk items in them.

Finally, I bought this amazing white Sharpie Paint pen from Amazon to label all the jars for this easy pantry organization. I originally had bought these clear labels from Avery where you can print off a label. I tried this but I found that they would be too permanent, in that if I wanted to change out the jar for something else, I would have to peel off the label. This can get annoying because that glue gunk that remains always is so hard to get off. Although, I recently heard of Goo Gone which can help take that off pretty easily. Anyways, the Sharpie pen is amazing because first, it’s white and I love white everything. And second, it is easy to wipe off with a wet cloth if you want to re-name the jar or mess up when labeling the jar.

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I’m so happy with how everything turned out in this easy pantry organization! Everything isn’t perfect yet, but I wanted to post what I have done so far today and then post a follow up complete Pantry organization blog post where I give a short tour of what we have in there. I want to create labels for the baskets as well. Right now, two of them contain cans and sauces, 1 contains our tea collection and the last one contains miscellaneous items. But, I definitely want to organize these further before I create labels for them. I also need to get a couple more of the smaller jars to store some other commonly used items, but I’m really hoping that this pantry organization causes us to eat healthier, whole foods and try to make as much as we can from scratch.

I filled up all the jars with nuts, seeds, grains, pasta’s and any other dried goods. For pasta’s and grains, I already know how to cook them, however, you can cut out the cooking instructions and tape them behind the jar as well. I tend to purchase the same items over and over so I know exactly how to cook them. I also use up all the items in my pantry with a couple of months so I don’t need to worry about the expiration dates either. I like to keep cans and sauces in the bins and these I can easily check the expiry date. I never refill items in the jars until they are completely finished. Then I take the entire jar to the bulk food store and get it filled up. This really helps me cut down on my plastic waste as well.

I can’t stop staring at the pantry now and when I compare the before and after pictures, I feel like I accomplished something. It’s always been my dream to have a pantry that is functional and beautiful. I really want to see what your guy’s pantry’s look like and if you try some of the tips I mentioned in this easy pantry organization update today, please send me pictures! And make sure to take before and after pictures so you can see what you’ve accomplished! It really is quite satisfying.

Since I love organizing spaces and making them look beautiful, I’ve also organized our closet and under bathroom sink area that I think you all will love as much as I do!

I’ll keep you posted and happy organizing!