Cloves, Breast Milk, Dish Soap and DIY Thank You Cards

What do all of these things have in common? They are my obsessive projects of today.

For the cloves:
My favorite scent in the world (next to my children of course) is the smell of cloves. No comments from the peanut gallery on how cliche goth that is. But, seriously. I love the smell of cloves. I even go to my spice cabinet about once a week just to take a big whiff of those wonderful little things.


I will be buying this clove soap very soon - Clove Soap - I think this store is absolutely fantastic and can't wait to try their products.

I bought this lip balm months ago (see previous blog post about "For Strange Women") and have been in love with it. - Clove Lip Balm - I need to order more soon

Toothpaste has always bothered me. I don't like all the chemicals in it and honestly I don't like how it burns my mouth. I found this gem and am anxious to try it. - Clove Toothpaste - I ordered it in the bag to save on shipping and so I can decant it into my own gorgeous container.

As for the Breast Milk part of this blog:

I have a never pumped and stored breast milk before Dacian. Since I am exclusively pumping (with a once a day comfort at breast feeding) I have found that I make a pretty decent stash. Since I am/was pretty new to this gig I was just putting the milk into the freezer storage bags and setting it upright. This caused for a lot of space to be used up in our very little freezer.  Then I found out you can actually lay them down flat to freeze. This has made it so much easier space wise. The problem now is that i have run out of room. I don't want them to fall and chip and then we have a mess and worst of all wasted milk. That stuff is liquid gold!

Enter in gift bags!! We have a lot of paper gift bags around the house and we just seem to get more and more. So last night I put all the milk into the gift bags and put it into the freezer. I am now much more organized. I am also freezing everything I pump now and defrosting the older milk to feed Dacian. This way I am slowly reorganizing my breast milk stash. Once it is all flat and organized I will be doing this.
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As for the dish soap:
It seems we are always buying dish soap. Freddy does the dishes so I have no idea how much he is using but if we are always running out to go buy some I imagine he is using a lot. I was a big fan of 7th Generation until recently. Their products seem to have taken on a very strange smell that neither Freddy or I like. There aren't really many other ones that I like out there and since I am looking to be more self sustaining why not make my own dish soap.

I will be making this recipe this weekend. I have some spare wine bottles that I was just going to toss since I really had not much use for them but now I get to salvage them!! You should make your own dish soap too. :D

DIY Thank You Cards:

I mentioned earlier about all the gift bags we have in the house. I don't like having them around. A few OK, but we. have. a. ton. I also need to make out some thank you cards for Valeska's birthday gifts and also for all the stuff we have been gifted for Dacian. I really hate spending money on things like that. Yes, I can be cheap but I would rather spend money on things for the kids (or myself) than on cards that will just get tossed anyway. So I was thinking on how I can do personable cards without spending money AND how I can use all these gift bags. LIGHT BULB!! Make cards out of the bags. Here are the steps:

Take bags and cut them up to make cards.

You can make them even more awesome by getting some scrap booking supplies or just print out a pretty little "Thank You" and put on the front.

Write your personal thank you note.

This way you can save money and be very personal. I love this idea because the bag that the gift came in is also the thank you note. You can even make your own envelope out of the bag if it is big enough. Money saved!!

Well that's all today darklings. I hope you have as much fun with all of this as I did. Now I am off to make more t-shirt bags, thank you notes and breast milk :D