The Baking Soda Adventures...Part 1

So I've recently seen a lot of different DIYs on Pinterest that involve baking soda...I'm intrigued!
I've seen beauty products, cleaning products, and air fresheners among other things, which gave me the idea to do a series of blog posts about the many (potential) uses for baking soda.

I got together this weekend with my favorite blogger (and my favorite older sister) Sarah@MarriedToMedSchool (www.marriedtomed.blogspot.com) and we had some craft time...here's what happened!

Baking Soda Adventure #1: Shower Disks
With the frigid winter weather comes the enemy of all...stuffy noses.
The idea behind these shower disks is to imitate those Vick's shower disks you used to (?) be able to find at the supermarket (I have heard that they don't sell them anymore but I haven't actually looked so I don't really know).
You put them on the floor of the shower and the steam and hot water dissolves them releasing the soothing scent of eucalyptus and clearing up your congestion.
 I've seen these shower disks done on a couple of different blogs and all of the comments have been pretty positive so Sarah and I decided it was time to give it a try.

Ingredients:
1 cup Baking Soda
1/3 cup Water
5-10 drops Eucalyptus Essential Oil
5-10 drops Lavender Essential Oil
Muffin Tin
Muffin/Cupcake Liners





Steps:
(1) Mix the baking soda and water in a mixing bowl...with a spoon. Pretty easy. You want it to form a thick paste. It will end up having almost the same consistency as oobleck. (If you don't know what I'm talking about google it...super cool science experiment for understanding non-newtonian fluids! Oobleck is actually cornstarch and water, but similar...)

 (2) Add your essential oil and stir. I've seen varying numbers of drops of essential oil but it's really a personal preference thing. We just kinda winged it. I think we ended up using 8 drops of each.
Some recipes I've seen call for eucalyptus, lavender, and rosemary, but when we started adding the rosemary it smelled like a roast chicken...delicious in the right context but not necessarily what you want to smell like when you step out of the shower.

 (3) Line the muffin tin with muffin/cupcake liners and spoon the mixture into the liners. We weren't sure exactly how many disks this recipe should make so we just made it up. We ended up making 8 which is about a heaping tablespoon in each.

(4) Bake for 20 minutes on 350. We put these in the oven and you could really smell the essential oils. I feel less congested already just from baking them! And here's the final product. Store them in an airtight/watertight container. 

I haven't had the chance to try these yet but I can't wait! I'll update with a review once I've tried them out!