Lip balm success

****Update as of 2011: Visit my beekeeping page.****

Today, my youngest child and I made lip balm. I’m embarrassed to say that an acquaintance sent me the recipe one week short of three years ago today. Call me slow.

I was spurred today by my sister-in-law, who asked if I wanted to order some lip balm tubes. Containers were holding me back from making my own lip balm all this time. Sounds lame, I know, but containers were a dilemma for me. Once I got the empty lip balm tubes, I used Kristie’s recipe, found in her Herbs for Kids e-book (look for the Second Grade Curriculum, I think).

With only three ingredients — sweet almond oil and, from my own backyard, honey and beeswax — I can easily make 15 tubes of lip balm. (And as a bonus, I can leave a very light carbon footprint. I don’t think about carbon use very often, but my conscience is very attuned to overseas shipping. But I don’t know about the source of the empty tubes.)

Making lip balm took about 20 minutes from start to finish. Now that we’ve done it before, I think we’ll take half that time in the future. Making lip balm was a little messy, but very manageable to clean up.

We set up our empty tubes between the wires of an icing rack/cooling rack.

We began pouring with a funnel, but got rid of it quick. It slowed down progress a lot.