Trying to Find My Normal: Bombing Out

Once in a while, I'll visit a website called Cake Wrecks. I guess I experience a little bit of schadenfreude because it shows professional bakers' cake fails, and it makes me feel a tad better about my (lack of) cake decorating skills. I try to limit my visits there because like Pinterest, you can spend way too long looking at things if you're not careful.

Speaking of Pinterest...

My daughter asked me some time ago if we could make Bath Bombs. I confess to not knowing what Bath Bombs were when she asked. Once I looked it up, I discovered that they are just the old fizzy bath tablets we had when I was younger but bigger and fancier.

Oh, and a lot more expensive to buy than the old 3 for 99¢ tablets we got at drug stores back in the day. One Bomb at a site called Lush can run $8.95. Heck, for $8.95 I can make like 50 bombs!

Earlier this week, I wasn't feeling that great, so in an attempt to avoid doing anything, I decided to look for DIY Bath Bombs. Well, me, being the fairly crafty person I am, scoured Pinterest.

I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest.

Pinterest is a wonderful and terrible place where you can get all kinds of information, ideas, and instructions to set yourself up for falling way short of what's actually pictured. Oh, and spend way too much time finding the project that you want to feel like a failure doing. Still, confident in my DIY skills, I found a great recipe for Bath Bombs.

After my daughter got home from school, she and I went out to get the supplies, which required three separate stops at three separate stores. I am proud to say, I was able to make it through all 3 stores! Michael's for the molds and scents, Target for Epsom salts and corn starch, and Wegmans for citric acid. Also from Target, a clear glass container with an air-tight lid for storing our finished masterpieces,

to be proudly displayed on the bathroom vanity.

I dutifully printed out the “recipe” when we got home, assembled the ingredients, and we went to town.

My daughter carefully measured each ingredient, whisked the dry stuff together just as she should have.

Oh, I also have to tell you, several recipes recommended using olive oil, presumably for an emollient, so that's what we used. Then came time to mix the scent and the color, which you add to the oil and a tiny bit of water. The olive oil. The greenish brownish olive oil. Olive-colored olive oil. I'm not a color expert or a chemist, but I'm pretty sure unless you were going for brown chocolate scented or brown coffee scented Bath Bombs, you shouldn't use olive oil for your oil. Unless you actually want brown Bath Bombs. We were trying to achieve purple.

So, once the wet and dry ingredients are mixed in their respective containers, it's time to combine them. Some recipes recommend adding the liquid drops at a time to the dry ingredients while others tell you to just dump it in. We did a combination of both. Once the liquid is added, it's supposed to feel like wet sand, so you can pack your mold. Ours felt very dry, so we added a few drops of water, as recommended. It still felt dry, so we added more water. We added water until you could squeeze it in your hand and the mixture retained its shape.

To quote one of my favorite parts of “Pretty Woman”, big mistake. Big. Huge.

Let me repeat that: big mistake. Big. Huge.

As directed, we packed our mixture in the molds and set it aside for it to dry before we popped them out of the molds.

Um.