Something I’ve wanted to do for the past few years at Christmas time was to make my own gifts using coffee - and as anyone in the coffee industry will know, when it comes to coffee you produce some coffee waste with pucks from the espresso machine.. and although there are so many other uses for them, a lot of coffee gets chucked away.
So I decided that this was the year that I’d make things out of some coffee grounds, and what better thing to do than to make an entire hamper entirely using coffee grounds.
- Coffee Scrub
- Coffee Oil
- Lip Scrub
- Exfoliating Soap
- Flannel
After calculating all the costs (I mean I’m a bit shit at maths but I gave it a good go) each hamper averaged around £4 which ends up being a really cheap but really personal gift. I would love to receive something like this especially if I knew it was all handmade by the person
So what will you need to make all of this?
Coffee grounds (and a lot of them)
Organic coconut oil
Organic coconut sugar
Cacao powder
Organic soap base (I used this one off amazon)
Vanilla essential oil
Rapeseed oil
Almond oil
Cute little jars (I mean you don’t even need these, just little containers will do)
Soap moulds (or if you’re me, use a silicon cake mould, diy queen)
And finally ... a lot of patience
We’ll start off with the coffee scrub, by far the easiest when you know what kind of recipe you will be using, there are so many recipes out there, so it’s best to play around with some recipes until you like what you get
My recipe
* Coffee Grounds
* Coconut Oil
* Coconut Sugar
* Cacao Powder
* container/jar to put product in
(Also a bowl and a spoon)
So to make it a little easier, I melted my coconut oil slightly just to make everything easier to mix, and so there weren’t just big clumps of coconut oil in the scrub. And basically just mixed everything together (boom easy)
You can also add things like Himalayan salts or Epson salts if you want it to be more of an exfoliater, but since my soap was going to act as an exfoliant I didn’t bother.
Some benefits to using a coffee scrub
- the caffeine found in coffee typically helps increase blood flow, and may reduce the appearance of cellulite and help give your skin a more even complexion.
-coconut oil is a great skin softener and helps flaky and dry skin. It can also delay the appearance d if wrinkles and sagging of the skin and helps in preventing the skins connective tissues getting weaker.
- coconut sugar contains glycolic acids, an alpha-hydroxy acid that is crucial for maintaining healthy skin. The natural glycolic acid in sugar not only helps to condition and moisturise the skin, but protects it from harsh toxins.
Coffee oil
Back in may I wrote an entire blog post (read here) about coffee oil, the benefits, how to make etc.
To make the coffee oil, you will need
* Coffee grounds (you can also infuse it with the whole beans, it just takes a while longer)
* Rapeseed oil
* Almond oil
You can infuse the coffee with the oil anywhere from 5 days to 6 weeks.
To read the benefits of using coffee oil you can scroll the bottom of the coffee oil blog post and read them there.
Coffee soap
Now, this was the recipe I was most anxious about, and it did take me about 6 attempts of remelting the soap base so it was how I wanted it, this is where that patience comes in.
* Coffee grounds
* A few coffee beans for decoration
* Organic soap base (between 1-2kg)
* Vanilla essential oil
So short hand what you want to do is melt down the soap base so it's workable (I did it in the microwave in 30 second intervals)
Add in whichever essential oil you want (I found vanilla works great, but feel free to use something like lavendar or ylang ylang, whatever you have to hand) add in some coffee grounds (I wanted to make my soap as an exfoliant so I added quite a bit) and then whilst it's still melted (you gotta be hella fast, it solidifies real quick) pour it into the moulds, and let it set for around an hour.
Lip scrub
This was a kinda last minute thing, just because I actually really needed a new lipstick scrub, but I think it's a cute addition to add just to bulk out the hamper
And it's super easy to make with just two ingredients
*Coconut oil
*Coconut sugar
I'm sure there are a thousand more complex recipes for this, but I wanted to keep it simple and as natural as possible.
You basically just whip the two ingredients together and bam, done.
And it's edible if you don't want to wash it off (hands up for laziness)
I hope you guys enjoyed this post, I love doing DIY's and making my own products, so I'll most likely be doing a lot more posts like this soon.
