Make | Homemade Bath Salts

Just a light sprinkling of these soothing salts will turn bathtime into a luxuruious treat

You will need:

120g Epsom salts

120g pink Himalayan salt

¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

10 drops each of your choice of essential oils (we used Moroccan rose, lavender and chamomile)

1 tbsp dried flower petals (we used rose, lavender and chamomile)

Airtight glass jar (a Mason jar

or apothecary jar look pretty)

Equipment:

Bowl

Spoon

For giving:

Ribbon and gift tag

1 Mix the salts and bicarbonate of soda in a small bowl.

2 Add 10 drops each of your essential oils and mix together, ensuring everything is evenly distributed. Then add the dried flower petals.

3 Decant the bath salts into your jar and decorate with a ribbon and gift tag with your message and the following instructions: “Dissolve a handful of salts in a hot bath. Store in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight.”

These bath salts are just one of the makes from our feature, The Personal Touch, in our November issue, taken from The Art of Gifting Naturally by Angela Maynard (Hardie Grant).

Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

More calming bathtimes…

More from our blog…

How to | Give Living Gifts

Ideas for gifts that will keep on giving… and living!

PLANTS
Rehome house plants: the plantlets on spider plants are simple to snip off. Start them off in shallow water in a jar, before transferring to potting soil and a pretty pot. Works for Devil’s Ivy and Swiss Cheese Plant, too. Take seed: if you’ve had time to collect and dry seeds, pop them into decorated envelopes with instructions. Give a tree: £5 contributes one sapling to the National Trust’s Grow A Tree fund: nationaltrust.org.uk/features/plant-a-tree

PROBIOTICS
Have a SCOBY (aka a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast): a necessary part of home kombucha cultivation culture. To share, slice around 2cm off the top of the wobbly disc that forms on batches of kombucha, before popping into a fabric-covered jar. Likewise, kefir (an edible, yoghurtstyle probiotic drink) needs a SCOBY: to gift, put a small quantity into a jar of whole milk and seal. Spread the dough: prep your sourdough starter for passing on by feeding it up, before dividing and placing half into a jar. Treat the spinoff to a daily 1:1:1 mix of starter: water: flour (max. 100g each), until it’s ready for use.

PEOPLE
Give skills or time: pledge to take on a tedious job for someone or simply offer to babysit (or pet-sit), a gift to be redeemed at a point of their choosing.

This guide to Living Giving is from our December Miscellany pages, where you’ll find lots more seasonal fun, facts and puzzles to amuse you all month.

Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

More from our Christmas Miscellanies…

More from our blog…

Playlist | A Christmas Gift

Listen here

I don’t want a lot for Christmas
There is just one thing I need…

Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

Christmas | How to wrap awkward presents

This nifty gift wrap bag trick can be scaled up or down to fit your gift

1 Place the pressie in the middle of the paper, making sure you have enough paper to go around it.
2 Pop your present aside. Fold the paper edges to meet and overlap in the centre (ideally hiding ‘raw’ edges) and tape down the overlap.
3 Fold up the bottom of the paper. This will be your base, so make the fold at least as wide as your pressie.
4 Unfold and bring each open ‘side’ towards the centre: you’re creating two triangles that touch to create a diamond shape. Tape.
5 Take the top and bottom points of the diamond and fold them onto each other and tape into place to make a secure base.
6 The pressie goes inside the newly formed bag. Fold the top over to hide raw edges for a pro finish.

The December issue features a cracker of a Miscellany Christmas special (page 99), packed with puzzles, games, stocking fillers, bad jokes, amazing facts and forgotten wisdom, including:

• Mix a great martini 

• Secret Santa gifts

• Make sweet frumenty 

• Christmas i-spy

• How to carve turkey 

• Fizzy amaretto sours 

• Make invisible ink

• Froebel stars

• Wrapping awkward gifts 

• Beat the family at games

• The Simple Things’ sprouts & crackers board game

• Identifier: Bestseller toys 

• Bah humbug word search

Get hold of your copy of this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

View the sampler here

More from the December issue:

More Christmas posts:

Give: Pots of joy

Our pick of homemade gifts for gardeners

1. Plant bulbs into pretty vintage ‘tea cup’ planters. Collect single teacups, sugar bowls or small milk jugs from charity shops or car boot sales. Use a ceramic tile bit and carefully drill a hole in the base. Add a thin layer of gravel then a layer of compost. Varieties to go for: miniature daffodils – ‘Tete a Tete’, ‘Minnow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’; violets – Viola odorata types which are hardy and long-flowering; grape hyacinth – muscari are delicate little blooms with a wonderful fragrance.

2. Herbs: you can’t go wrong giving pots of rosemary, thyme, basil and parsley as they can be used straight away and then planted out in garden in spring.

3. For that rare winter thing – a hit of floral scent – try forcing hyacinth bulbs or buy them forced. They put on a terrific show and smell divine. 

4. Beautiful and rose-like, pot up pretty Hellebores niger (Christmas rose) in an old tin planter to make a striking display that can be planted outdoors once it’s over to flower again the following winter.

Plenty more festive ideas for gifts, food and fun in December's issue of The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe now. 

Photograph: Alice Hendy Photography

Passing on traditions: The emergency present drawer

Kate Pettier explains the art of the emergency present drawer.

Tag-along cousins, pop-up neighbours – surprise guests over the holiday season are as inevitable as leftovers on Boxing Day. And leftovers, in the gift department, are exactly what you need. Not having bought someone a gift is one of those faux-pas that’s hard to laugh off. Emergency present drawer to the rescue!

In essence, it’s a stash of borderline impersonal gifts ready for dispatch. My mum’s was kept in a box in the under-stairs cupboard: gift-wrapped Elizabeth Shaw Mint Crisps, Yardley powder puffs and multipack men’s hankies were its staples. As a child, how I hoped there’d be unclaimed Orange Matchmakers...

The gifts may have changed, but for my own spare-present haul, I stick to Mum’s principle that it’s the thought that counts. Emergency gifts are less a display of wealth, more a social polyfilla with which we smooth over the awkwardness of someone having been overlooked by Santa. Notelets, scented candles, V&A hankies, truffles and gift-set toiletries wait in the wings to be given away at the last minute. And of course, ever the optimist, I leave the Orange Matchmakers till last.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:

1. Soy scented candles from Anthropologie, £14
2. Liberty print handkerchiefs, £5.95
3. Belleville Bakery body wash and body Lotion, & Other Stories, £14
4. Matchmakers, widely available, around £2.50
5. Letterpress pencil correspondence cards, Meticulous Ink, £20
6. Black Forest gateau truffles, Prestat, £12

Do you have an emergency present drawer? Leave your top tips for emergency gift ideas on our Facebook or Twitter.

And there are plenty more festive ideas for gifts, food and fun in December's issue of The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe now. 

Seriously stylish, seriously ethical

Fashion-Conscience is an online store selling the best in Fair Trade, organic, sustainable, recycled, up-cycled and vegan clothing, accessories and gifts. From well known brands to small independent brands all showing us it's stylish to be green. And best of all, they're giving us 15% off until 31st May if you use the code: SIMPLE at the checkout. A great excuse to treat yourself over the bank holiday!

* Terms and Conditions:

To claim your 15% off please use code SIMPLE at the checkout. 15% off only valid on full priced purchases. Offer does not include delivery charges. Not to be used in conjunction with any other offer/s. Valid until and including 31st May 2013