My Reality

Tonight I made lavender honey. I came home with an immune system booster with astralagus, rose hips, ginger and raw honey. You could take that every day to support your immune system health long term. Kiddo loves lavender so I thought I'd just start some and see if he uses them. I ended up making three jars, 1 with lavender and chamomile and the other 2 straight lavender.

The basic idea of a medicinal honey is to make up a powdered herb mix and fill the jar about 1/ or less full.

Warm the honey, but do not let it boil. It only needs to get hot enough to work with or not be crystalized.

Pour the honey into the jar over the herbs.

Stir (a chop stick works really well for this).

Seal the jars. (If the jars are clean/sterile and are the 2 part lid mason jars, they will self-seal as they cool.

They need to sit 2-4 weeks for maximum potency before eating. Turn them over twice a day to keep the mix moving.
They last a long time. Honey never goes bad, so these will last at least a year (which is the shelf life of most powdered herbs. But these should get eaten up! Yum!

Elderberry syrup is for head colds and mucus in your head and stimulating immune system response. Elderberries smell strong and some people don't like them. I like them, but this is a way to get kids to take this without holding them down.

3 c wanter
1/2c elderberries dried or 1c fresh
handful of elderflowers (dried)
handful of rose hips (dried)
about 2 sticks of cinnamon
raw honey

Boil down herbs down to 1.5 cups (ish)
Add half of the tea volume in honey (or molasses, maple syrup, fruit concentrate, simple syrup or agave)

Dose: Take as often as possible as needed. 1 Tbls 4-6 times a day. The best way to take this is in small doses several times a day so that the medicine part gets into the body a little at a time.

Why?
Elderberries are great for head colds. The perfect cure, if you will.
Elderflowers are cooling which is great for the flu, it brings the heat down and for immune support
Rose hips are great for vitamin C. The vitamin C is very available for absorption in the body
Cinnamon is great for digestion, to move energy and to release heat in the body.

Some of the are easier than others.

Calendula is super easy. Cardamom is harder, but I'm gonna do it!

http://www.ehow.com/how_7224624_extract-cardamom-oils.html

And I'm starting today!

It's not vegan, it has beeswax in it. But here:

1/3 c Cocoa butter - mix of refined and unrefined because that's what I have. But unrefined is fine and it smells like chocolate
2/3 cup bees wax
1/3 c grapeseed oil, sweet almond oil
1/2t vitamin E oil
1/3c coconut oil

I remember now that it's the unrefined cocoa butter that smells so good. And of course those last oils could be nearly any liquid oils.

So basically the recipe could be:

1c solid stuff (cocoa butter, beeswax, etc)
1/3c liquid oils
1/3c coconut oil

I think I want to play with this so that it has more coconut oil and a little less liquid oil and see what happens.

Anyway, on to body butter!

1/3 c Cocoa butter - mix of refined and unrefined because that's what I have. But unrefined is fine and it smells like chocolate
2/3 cup bees wax
1/3 c grapeseed oil, sweet almond oil
1/2t vitamin E oil
1/3c coconut oil

I'll have to try this again to get down the exact quantities. But the one I made is lovely. It has a very smooth and light feel and I love it. The shea butter is heavier than the coconut oil and that latter is a lot smoother and lighter. So yummy.

Also, the vitamin E oil that I have appears to be in a base of olive oil and so it has a smell. Many of the oils are pretty neutral and that's been interesting to learn how these all effect each other in a new way. To be honest I don't care about having vitamin E, it was something a friend wanted so I thought I'd give it a shot. But the experiment went well and that's exciting.

1 part beeswax
1/2 part shea butter
2 parts grapeseed oil (some of it is the calendula oil)
1 tsp sweet almond oil
1 Tblsp honey

Turned out that the recipe is great, but there was to much honey. It's not a problem because the honey stayed at the bottom out of solution. As it turns out it's the shea butter that was much better than adding more grape seed oil. Downside: shea butter is much more expensive than grape seed oil.

My guess that it doesn't matter what kind of oil is used (to a certain extent) because in this case they are for softening.

So today I'm going to make another batch.

I'm also going to try to trade out the bees wax for cocoa butter - it's also solid at room temp and smells like chocolate. I'm hoping for chocolate lip balm that has a lovely consistency like the first one. We'll see how it goes.

Also I made a salve that it rocking my world. It has the same basic base with the oil doubled, but it has no honey, and all of the oil is calendula in a grapeseed base. I added 40 drops of lavender essential oil and about a tea spoon of st. john's wort oil.

So the recipe is...
1 part beeswax (which for me was 1/2 cup)
2 parts calendula essential oil (grapeseed oil base)
40 drops lavender essential oil (which is very strong)
1/8 part St. John's Wort essential oil
1/2 part shea butter

The salve is super healing for skin. It has the properties of an antibiotic ointment (go lavender), but it's incredible for skin. I stabbed myself with the giant safety pin on my keys last week (accidentally) - it was intense and I bled all over the place - the damn thing went into my skin about 1/4in. I used the salve and the injury is totally gone in less than a week. I've also been using on my feet and they are not cracked any more (after about 4 days).