Peppermint Sugar Scrub – for kids to make!

My middle child, Reid  has seven preschool teachers. That’s a lot!

It’s because he is in a lab preschool at our local university. There are a few consistent teachers but the rest are student teachers that rotate through throughout a semester.

I wanted to give Reid the opportunity to show his appreciation this Christmas, with a project he could mostly do himself and that would be useful. We came up with one that is both those things and easy on the budget which is nice when we have so many people to thank.

First, I found this pin for some vanilla sugar scrubs in a baby food jar. Loved the idea!

Well… we happen to have more than our fair share of baby food jars lately. So this project works well for us. You can also use small canning jars if you don’t want to use baby food jars.

I adjusted the original recipe and came up with a ratio of sugars to oil so that you can make a batch in any size. Then I added a fun festive scent and got little hands involved.

This is great for kids to make, because it is technically edible (because they always seem to sneak a taste of craft projects anyway) and almost impossible to mess up.

1. Collect your jars. Try to collect ones that don’t have sweet potatoes or carrots in them. Those turn the cap an unattractive orange. You know it’s clean but the recipient doesn’t. ** I am using stage 2 baby food jars.

2. Don’t worry about removing the adhesive residue. You will be covering it up with paper in a minute anyway. Just run them through the dishwasher and you’re good to go!

3. Prepare your lids by painting them or covering them in paper. I hot glue it to cardstock.
4. Cut a circle around it.
5. Cut slits around the circle.
6. Glue the slits up and around the lid’s sides.

A. You can trim the paper down to the lid (I prefer this method).
B. Or you can trim the paper down with a little overhang. Simply glue the over hang down once you get it all even. This is more polished looking in some ways but can make it hard to close the lid.

I do all the jar and lid prep myself, lay out the ingredients and then call my son over to do the rest with me.

7. Now for the recipe, the ratio of brown sugar to white sugar to olive oil is 2:2:1. We used:

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup olive oil
10 drops of essential oil.

This makes 6-7 baby food jars (stage 2 sized)

Mix your olive oil and essential oil together first and then proceed.

8. Mix your sugars.
9. Add your oils. Reid just dumped it all together before mixing the sugars so it made a lot of clumps. But that’s okay! As I said before, it’s really hard to mess this recipe up. Just mash up the clumps. Reid enjoyed the clump destruction efforts anyway. 😉

10. After you have it all nice and mixed together, spoon it into jars.

At this point, I set Reid up to draw pictures for each of his seven teachers while I finished up the packaging.

Clean those jars up a bit. Add your lids and slice up some fun paper to wrap around it. I cut my strips about 1.5 inches wide (ever so slightly wider).

I hot glued it on and then used a tapestry needle to string baker’s twine through a tag and a little star light mint candy.

I had Reid sign the back. He lost steam after a few, so I finished the rest.

The head teacher got a little extra something and Reid was so proud to give the rest of his teachers gifts that  he made!

It was such a success that we just might do it for their contribution to the grandparent gifts and for all their Primary teachers. I used some of the leftover scrub from the dregs in the bowl. It is so soothing. I want them to make some for me too! 🙂

It’s a great scrub for hands, feet, elbows and rough dry patches.

For Owen’s teacher we plan to do one of these ones featured on KSL News. It’s a list of things that teachers have said they really want. It’s an interesting read. We’re leaning toward maybe giving a classroom book and maybe a handmade bookmark.

If you need another fun teacher gift idea go here for a free sanitizer bottle printable.

Happy Monday and happy holiday gifting!