What else is in your spa?

Handmade beauty includes a host of toiletries, everything from cosmetics to deodorant. What about soothing your other senses? Relaxation can go beyond skin smoothing soaps.

Candles

Candles are often hand poured and can be plain, or artistically colored, vegan or beeswax. They can be part of aromatherapy, or made for those with sensitive noses.

What they don’t have to be is from a big box store, or laden with chemicals. You decide.

Soap Dishes

Soap dishes are a great way to keep your favorite handmade soaps from melting. They can be traditional soap dishes or multi-taskers like the ceramic trinket dish from Karita at My Mother’s Garden.

Pottery

Thinking outside the soap dish, almost any small bowl can be a soap dish if you place something in the bottom of it as a drain. Or you can use handmade pottery to hold q-tips, sugar scrub, or your toothbrushes. (Just make sure that anything you put your toothbrush in is food-safe.)

Glass

Stained and fused glasses are only two of many choices of glass that can make your bath look more like a spa and less like the grocery store. Try pouring your shampoo into a decanter or hanging a suncatcher in the window to encourage you to get moving in the morning. Or hang a wind chime just outside.

Textiles

Handmade rugs, towels and lace can make welcome additions in the bath. Rugs can be made from re-used t-shirts, towels embellished with ribbon, knitted or crocheted. And lace can be sewn onto almost anything, or made by hand.

Textiles can be anything – fun and funky, or elegant and luxurious.

Don’t forget the plants

Plants can get in on handmade beauty too. Try placing flowers in hand blown vases, or plants in wheel-thrown stoneware, and beaded macrame to give yourself something interesting and natural to look at in the bath.

Have fun branching out a little with handmade beauty.