One of my volunteer tasks this year was to make the lip balm for the goody bags that the participants take home. The bags have a lot of items in them - catalogs from bee companies, lists of local bee suppliers, resource lists of Internet and other resources (including this blog ;-}), a small jar of honey, a small candle, and a tube of lip balm - guess whose job it was to make the lip balm?
Mine.
So tonight I poured 100 tubes of lip balm. We already have a few more to make up the 112 or so that we need.
First I melted wax in the Presto Pot:
Then I set up my pouring tray with fifty lip balm tubes (I get them from Majestic Mountain Sage). I got orange tops for the tubes so they wouldn't get lost in the Goody bag!
So I melted the wax. In a Dutch oven filled with simmering water, I put my oversized measuring cup. I put into that 1/2 cup plus 4 T of sweet almond oil, 1 tsp honey, 1 tsp cocoa butter (had to heat it with my hair dryer to allow me to scoop out a teaspoon), 1 tsp vitamin E oil, 9 T beeswax, melted.
All of this sits in the hot water until I am ready to pour. Then I pour it in the tubes. Notice I set the pouring tray on a sheet of wax paper in a cookie sheet. This makes for a clean work surface and any drips can be scraped off of the wax paper with a rubber spatula and remelted, but you couldn't do that off of the counter.
I scrape off the excess from the tray and remelt it. Then I refill the tray, make the mixture again and fill another 50 tubes. The recipe will fill about 40 - 50 tubes.
Finally I capped the tubes with the cute orange tops:
Tomorrow night I'll print and put on the labels, but for now, I'm off to bed. If you try to make lip balm and have any helpful hints, please post them in the comments section below.
Good attempt. I like the learning. But I am very sorry for my inabilities to participate on this course because i am too far away from you.
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