Author Archives: Lisa

Essential Oils…I have an oil for that!

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For quite some time, a friend of mine, who is a nurse, has been telling me about Essential Oils. She is always sharing with me the benefits of this and that oil. I am always excited to try natural alternatives in diet and health. In the past, I have used Garlic/Eucalyptus oil directly in the ear to treat an ear infection. The Garlic/Eucalyptus oil helps sooth it and speed up the recovery. However, I just bought a pre-made mixture at the health food store or grocery and never imagined I could make my own.

 

I finally signed up to be a Doterra consultant and have been studying Aromatherapy. Although I have barely scratched the surface, I am loving it.
click on picture to order oils

I have been doing my own independent study and research aside from Doterra. I like Doterra oils, however they are not the only source of Therapeutic Grade Essential Oils. And because their company is a MLM then some of their their products can be overpriced.  The industry standard cheaper oils like Lavender and Lemon are more expensive from Doterra than other suppliers I have found. But the expensive oils like Rose Otto and Helichrysum are expensive no matter where you buy them.

Note: If you click on the above picture, this website  Aromatics International has the best selection of
Helichrysum varieties and some are reasonably priced.

Doterra has some issues I think people should realize.

  • They try to sign up everyone who wants to buy something as a consultant.
  • There is no required training for consultants.
  • The extensive training they do have is in Utah and includes a lot of sales training
  • They are not listed with the National Association of Holistic Aromatherapy as an approved school for getting an Aromatherapy Certification. Some of the schools seem like small operations, so I do not understand why Doterra does not have their own school (even if it’s just online) and get approved. Then they could require their Consultants to get Certification. But they do not do that because then they could not sign up the masses onto their MLM program as consultants.
  • The consultants are independent, so the claims they make about essential oils are not necessarily the company’s official stand
  • They lead you to believe that they are the only company that does Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS)testing on their oils. I am not sure they do an independent test on every batch of oil. More likely they buy from many of the distillers and wholesale distributors that do this testing on all the oils they sell.
  • I could not find batch numbers or CG-MS analysis sheets available for any oils for sale by Doterra so we are only taking their word for them.
  • There are many other companies that sell GC-MS tested oils and provide the results to the consumer
  • They freely recommend ingestion of essential oils when most  other companies have disclaimers about ingesting essential oils and say it should be done under a certified Aromatherapist direction or under a doctor or health practitioners care. I will write more on this later. 
  • Doterra says they are the only Certified Theraputic Grade Essential Oil. However……

They made up and trademarked the CPTG® 

So yeah they have the only oil that bears that seal but it is not an FDA certification. The FDA does not certify or regulate essential oil at all. Well, except for the fact that that Essential oil can be labeled 100% pure if it contains at least 1% Essential oil. So that means you could buy a 100% pure essential Oil bottle that has 5 or 6 drops of real essential oil in a 1oz container of coconut or Jojoba oil.If you are comparing Doterra to what you can buy at Target or even the drug store then yes it is pure, tested, Therapeutic Grade oil.  But you can order online from a few other places and get the same quality oil maybe even the same oil since many companies buy it from the same distiller or overseas distributors.
That being said, Doterra is still the place to buy their blends if you find they are useful and I do really like all the blends I have tried. Even when buying oils cheaper from one of the other companies, you could not duplicate the blend making it yourself because all the blends have some expensive oil in it that is expensive no matter where you buy it.
And if you sign up to be a consultant with Doterra (with no obligation to sell anything) you can get a discount and use the Loyalty rewards to build yourself a collection by slowing ordering a little each month and get points to use to get free oils. Thus making it even cheaper.

Now for my experience with the oils. I am in love with using essential oils. I love studying and learning about Aromatherapy.
My favorite saying is “I have an oil for that” My family loves it too.
The three year old loves the foot massages and asks for “oils” in his little three year old voice.
I have been having so much fun making my own blends.

Next post I will put up links to my favorite schools, books and supply sources and some other places to buy Therapeutic Grade oils. When you purchase the oils from the other sources, you have to re bottle them because they don’t come in dropper bottles. That can be a pain because you have to buy bottles. If you are going to make your own blends that would not be a big deal because you will  need to buy bottles and droppers and labels anyways.

I think to get introduced to Aromatherapy and have an out of the box working relationship with Aromatherapy, then Doterra may be the place to start.
But is is an expensive route.
Email me if you want to sign up as a consultant.
However a cheaper route would be check out some books from the library. Buy some of the books you like used on Amazon and order a few oils to try from my etsy shop or from our website.
Then read the 2 posts we have on essential oils suppliers if you want to buy oils in bulk and larger sizes.
PS: Did you notice the fresh lavender and a few products from the Lavender Farm? I visited them yesterday. I will have a blog article about that soon.

 

How to Make a Scrabble Magnet Message Board

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I was inspired by Twice Remembered Cottage’s Magnet Board which I first saw on Pinterest. We love to play Scrabble around here well let me say I love to play scrabble. 
It is hard to get others to play with me and super hard to play last few years with my barely three year old around who likes to upset the game when we are well into it. 
I thought this board would be perfect to hang on the wall where DS age 3 could not reach it and where we could have a perpetual game going all the time. I ended up having to limit each person to one word a day. 

I put a twist on mine by decoupaging a scanned scrabble board to the front so we could play an ongoing game. 
First I purchased the Sheet Metal from Lowe’s. It was about $12. Online it says it is $8.94. But at our Lowe’s I know it was more than that.  
And we just got door frame molding and little corner wood rosettes so we did not have to do miter cuts. We have a miter saw and can certainly do miter cuts but this was easier and cleaner edges. The molding was already primed white. 

First we glued with Liquid Nails the metal to a piece of Masonite we already had. Personally next time I would use 1/2″ plywood because it warped a little. 
  after putting the glue on my DH put a bunch of heavy objects from the garage on top of it and let it dry overnight. 

Next I selected pages from a 1920’s Dictionary I just knew I was saving for a great project!!!



 Then I Decoupaged them to the sheet metal. 
  Okay note here I am not the best decoupager (is that a word?)
I always have bumps and bubbles this process took forever to get the worst of the bubbles out. I especially have this problem when I decoupage with antique papers. They have a tendency to absorb the glue and tear super easy and then ripple as they dry. It is really difficult. Most of the time when I use actual vintage papers I coat them with decoupage and let them dry because then the tend to tear less. However these were super thin pages and I did not want to wait. So I spent what seemed to be hours smoothing re-smoothing carefully without tearing. And it still was a little bumpy and had a few bubbles. My remedy for that is several coats of varnish. It just added charm to it. You can tell it is real vintage paper. 



You can see in the Dictionary picture above that I painted the trim molding with black acrylic craft paint. then I distressed a little with sandpaper to let a little of the white show though. Then I varnished it with the same sparkly varnish I will tell you about below. So this molding was liquid nails glued onto the board and clamped overnight. 

Then came the hardest part to get the Scrabble board on the board so the Magnets would still stick. 

My scanner is legal size so I had to scan and rescan I even cut a board up and scanned it to get rid of any shadow and distortion. I did Photoshop the images a little cuz my 1945 board was more grey than I liked.  I then cut scanned images up and pieced them back together like a puzzle. 
Now the dictionary pages had a good 2 coats of decoupage and varnish on them you can see the shine in the picture. So I was able to put the board on and if I didn’t like it after it before it dried completely I could peel it of and start over. I did this a few times till I got it how I wanted it. 
You really cannot see the seams on the finished board. A little Tim Holtz antiquing stamp rubbed on it and coats and coats of varnish and it is all great. 
Below is the Sparkle Varnish from Micheal’s I love this stuff. I am not sure the camera does it justice. It is subtle. I use it on everything. It does not give a great shinny protective coat so I usually use Minwax acyclic gloss coat over it. 

 

Well that is it here’s the finished board.

Right now it is just leaned against the wall and propped up on top of my decoupaged desk, sometime I may just screw it directly to the wall. 

Well hope this helped you if you want to make your own. Feel free to comment or question. 

Also I will share my scans for you if you want to make one. 

so check back. 
  a few tricks… I sprayed the scanned image with an art fixative before decoupaging it. Helped it from smearing when I was smoothing the bubbles out. Still had issues with the pink bleeding. Clear spray varnish (cheap stuff) worked better. 

When gluing the Earth Magnets on the “craft” super glue was a little runny it worked but the magnets are super strong and hard to work with if the tiles were close together they would “jump” together or drift to the corners of the tiles. I preferred the Gel glue. 

I got the earth magnets from eBay. I ended up getting the 1/4″ x 1/16″ rare earth magnets.

Here are the first set of scrabble board scans…
Page 1
 Page 2 
Page 3
Page 4

Happy Crafting and Decorating
Love,
Lisa

Launch of The Watermelon Stand Blog

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Welcome to the Watermelon Stand Blog!!! We here at the Watermelon Stand are excited to share our Blog with  you. We have had many projects going on here..
We recently have been sewing up some printed Bunting Flag Banners. 

These banners were printed on the computer!!! We used Bubble Jet 2000  to set the ink into the fabric.
This has been really fun being able to print on fabric!
We have printed on Pillows and towels!!