Tag Archives: diy

DIY Body Spray

Leave a reply

IMG_1045About a year ago my friend Kim shared a DIY room spray recipe with me using essential oils. It was an awesome recipe and smelled amazing, but I honestly just never use room spray. A few weeks after I made the room spray, I saw it on my bedside table, mostly unused, and decided to spritz it on myself rather than in the air. I don’t remember why I decided to do this… maybe I wasn’t feeling fresh? Who knows?!?! But guys, it was awesome! Who knew making your own room-spray-turned-body-spray, void of weird chemicals, could be so easy!? I use this DIY body spray everyday and it literally takes less than 2 minutes to make!
Here’s what you need:
– glass spray bottle
– essential oils of your scent preference (more on that in a minute)
– witch hazel
– waterIMG_1044 Drop 15-20 drops of essential oil into your spray bottle. Fill the rest of the bottle half way with unscented witch hazel and the rest with water. Soooooo easy, right?
You can create numerous different sent combinations using essential oils! The best and most difficult part of this DIY is choosing your scents!
Here are a few of my favorite scent combos:
Lime & Peppermint (for mojito vibes)IMG_1038 Cedarwood & TangerineIMG_1037 Lemon & Lavender IMG_1040When choosing your oils, always avoid your eyes and be aware that some essential oils are considered “hot”. A few “hot” essential oils to avoid in this recipe since they will be spritz onto skin (but great for other diy projects or recipes): cinnamon bark, clove, oregano, thyme.

I like that these are natural and void of any weird chemicals! Also, they all smell really good and last forever!

hydroponic lettuce!

Leave a reply

lettucelettuce 3 For Valentines Day my mother-in-law gifted us a hydroponic lettuce growing station. I’m not sure what the proper name of it should be, but it’s essentially a tub holding water with a styrofoam piece floating on top. Small holes are drilled into the styrofoam where the plants are inserted. It’s so cool!photo (9) As you can see in the top left photo, in February our lettuce plants were teeny tiny babies. We haven’t had the best of luck with gardening (see here) so we didn’t have super high hopes. To our surprise, our baby lettuce continued to grow and flourish, even though we literally did nothing to promote this. Yay for easy, am I right?lettuce 2 A few weeks ago we were able to harvest our first lettuce heads!
We have several different varieties and I have no idea what they all are, but they’re really tasty!
What are you growing this season?

Gocco Process

Leave a reply

A few weeks ago one of Ray’s Big Brown Record Town clients, Josh and Brittany Nettles, asked me to create/print some album art for their cd. I did this using my Wacom Intuos (blogged here) and Print Gocco. I thought I would share a little bit of the printing process because, well, Goccos are kind of weird.
First off, a Gocco is a self-contained Japanese screen printer. Or something like that. It was originally marketed as a toy in the 70s and discontinued in 2008. According to Wikipedia, it’s estimated that 1/3 of all Japanese households own one. Whaaaaat?! It’s recently gained popularity with American crafters. My mom gave me mine for Christmas a few years ago and I believe she purchased it from ebay. gocco 11. I created the images for the front and back of the cd sleeves using my Wacom tablet. I went with a look that felt handmade and used handwriting instead of font. When I finished creating the images I had them scaled down to fit on a cd sleeve and printed it on a xerox printer (an important step because you want carbon in the printed image).gocco 22. Next, I trimmed the image to fit the size of my gocoo, which is about 3.5 x 5. Different Gocco models come in different sizes, but they are generally small and have similar sized print surfaces. Mine is the perfect size for printing on cd sleeves.

gocco 33. The next step is where it gets kind of wild. The way the Gocco burns your image into the screen (meaning, allowing ink to pass through ONLY those areas on the screen that you want to create a print from) is through some crazy black magic process involving one-flash light bulbs and carbon (hence the xerox copy) melding together on the screen. 2 crazy light bulbs + gocco lamp hood + pressing down on the contraption = burnt screen!gocco 44. Then, I squirted (squirted?) some gocco-specific ink onto my newly burnt screen.gocco 55. I placed my black cd sleeve onto the gocco sticky pad, brought the screen down and printed. This part is similar to stamping an image on to paper.

I ended up with 100 of these bad boys!gocco 7gocco 6Gocco prints are usually NOT perfect. You will almost always have to touch up your image in spots, but it’s just the nature of the process.
Check out Josh and Brittany Nettles on their Facebook page and on itunes!