Monday, July 29, 2013

Tea Tree Oil: A Miracle Cure for Almost Anything

Tea Tree Oil

I use tea tree oil everyday for so many different things.  I first found out about it in the equestrian world about 10 years ago.  I had a horse who was very sensitive to flies especially around his face.  Normal fly spray wasn’t working to keep the flies off him, so someone suggested I put a few drops of tea tree oil into the spray and it worked like magic!  Ever since then I have been learning and discovering new ways to use the oil. 

 Tea Tree Oil History

Tea tree oil is from Australia.  It comes from the leaves of the Melaleuca alternifolia tree and was used as a traditional medicine by the indigenous Bundjalung people of eastern Australia.


tea tree oil plant


Where to Buy

I buy my tea tree oil from my local natural food store.  It can also be purchased online.  It comes in a little glass bottle sometimes with a dropper and sometimes not.  It’s a little expensive, but one little bottle goes a long, long way and is totally worth it!


This Stuff Works for Everything!

Some of the suggested medicinal properties of tea tree oil include antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal, and antiseptic properties.  In particular its antiseptic properties can help cure acne.  That’s what I use tea tree oil for mostly.  Topical application can help with a wide variety of things including fighting bacteria, viruses, fungal infections including athlete’s foot, mites like scabies, and lice. 

One of the things I have found about tea tree oil is to be very careful when using it on or around pets, especially dogs.  It is toxic to dogs when they ingest it. 

Out of all the uses for tea tree oil I found during online research I didn’t see recommended use on insect bites or allergic reactions.  The first thing I grab when I get a mosquito or chigger bite is tea tree oil.  I also use it at any sign of a rash.  It stops itching immediately, and the smell does prevent future insect bites.

I have been suffering from acne since puberty.  There are so many different things I have tried to stop breakouts!  As an adult I have found that a vital part of my skincare routine is using tea tree oil on my face either at night after a shower (a few minutes after the shower to avoid a Home Alone aftershave moment) or in the morning before applying makeup.  My husband has even started using it and has seen amazing results!


Tea tree oil


P.S.  I work online and from my home. You can, too!  It’s not a get rich fast scheme, but a real job that I work hard doing.  Click here if you’re interested!

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Tutorial: Liquid Soap from a Bar of Soap

 Turn a Bar of Soap Into Liquid Soap!

In this tutorial I’m going to turn a bar of soap into liquid soap.  I chose to do this with my face wash for a few reasons.
1. Bars of soap at my house get hairs on them and get soapy gunk all over the shower.
2. Bars disappear faster than liquid soap.
3. I use an awesome face scrubber much like an electric toothbrush and it just doesn’t work when I’m using a bar of soap instead of liquid.

Many of the other online tutorials for making liquid soap require glycerin in the ingredients list.  I chose not to use glycerin since this is face soap, but when you do this a TBP or two of glycerin is optional.  You can find a small bottle of glycerin at the drug store.  It is also very handy stuff for making bubbles with kids, but that’s for another post.

Let’s do this:


First, grate your bar of soap with a fine cheese grater.  We are going to be dissolving the soap into water, so the smaller it is and the more surface area it has the better it will dissolve.


Grate Bar Soap



Then boil a cup of water on the stove.  I guess you can also do this in the microwave; I prefer the stove. 

Boil Water To Dissolve Bar Soap


After you grate all your soap which takes just about forever pour it into your boiling water and stir.  Bring it back to a boil.

Mix Bar Soap Into Boiling Water


At this point I was noticing some clumpy-ness.  I had originally turned the heat off, but then brought it back to a boil so it could dissolve better. 

Add some more water as needed.

Add Water To Bar To Make Liquid Soap


There were still clumps of soap happening, so I pulled out the hand mixer.  This made an awesome frothy mess! 

Mix Water and Soap


I chose to add tea tree oil to my face soap.  I put this on my face pretty frequently for it’s many benefits.  I’ll cover how awesome tea tree oil is in another post soon.  This is the brand I use from the local natural food store.  Tea tree oil is a natural antiseptic, so adding it to your soap makes it anti-bacterial!

Tea Tree Oil


I put in about 25 drops.

Let your soap cool overnight.  Get the hand mixer whisk out and go to town.





You can dilute your soap some more to achieve your desired consistency.

Carefully pour or funnel your liquid soap into its new container and enjoy!


Make your own liquid soap

 P.S. I work from home and make money online!  If you want to learn more about how I do this click here.

Friday, July 26, 2013

DIY Watercolor Wedding Invitations

When Ben and I set a date for the wedding invitations were the first thing on my mind.  Our date was just over a month away.  Crazy, I know.  We wanted an informal, outdoor, dreamy wedding that was a celebration of us.  I looked everywhere for a tutorial on simple invitations that expressed our style. 

I grew up with an artistic mother who had a great attention to detail and loved unique things.  She would take me into little boutiques to find perfect gifts for people and then take me to stationary shops or paper stores to get beautiful handmade paper and stamps with embossing powder to make the sweetest cards.  Everything she does is like this, so thoughtful and beautiful.  I wanted something like that for my invitations, so I started looking at hand-stamped invitations that I could kind of copy to get the look I was going for.

Months earlier I had pinned these cute floral border invitations that combined two floral stamps that you carefully intertwine to make the border and a big stamp in the middle with invitation wording.  There is nothing like the look of hand-stamped words.  I loved it! But I was the only one who did, so I kept looking.  I landed on these amazing watercolor/stamp combo save the dates with a tutorial.  Oh my god.  Perfect!  Here they are. 

So the elements of these invites were the paper, watercolor, invite stamp, envelopes, and return address stamp.  So simple, right?  I totally underestimated the loads of work this would be.

The paper recommended was thick watercolor paper that wouldn’t ripple after it had gotten wet.  That stuff is expensive!  The tutorial mentioned buying big pads of paper and having them cut down.  The people at my local paperie balked at me.  Wasn’t going to happen.  So I went and bought enough paper to make 250 5x7” cards.  $70 later I had no way of cutting this stuff.  Luckily I’m a teacher and, after some brainstorming, realized I have access to those big paper cutter things that totally scared me as a kid,  the guillotine looking ones.  So Ben and I went to go do this one evening after work.  This was the easiest part of the whole process.  It just worked!  I didn’t mess up any of the cards and they were all perfect and straight and everything!  Here’s a pic of them.  Sorry it’s blurry, but I was too excited to worry about taking a good picture.



The next part was ordering the envelopes.  This was also ridiculously expensive, and shipping took a while, but turned out easy.  I ordered the same envelopes as the tutorial used.  They are gorgeous and come highly recommended.  Here’s the link.  I used the color curry.

I want to make something clear at this point in my invitation process.  I am not an artist.  Crafty, yes, but my art skills are lacking.  I had to watercolor all these invitations so carefully.  When I went to buy the paper I asked the sweet woman at the art supply store, The Art Location in Fayetteville, about the watercolor process.  I had a mental image of the watercolors I used with my preschool kiddos and that stupid little brush that comes with the blocks of color.  Boy was I wrong!  The woman told me about these, I didn't get this particular brand, brushes that you put water in the handle and squeeze out as you need it.  They’re amazing!  And she sold me some tubes of watercolor I previously didn’t know existed.  This woman saved the whole project for me.  I was lost and then I was found.




The watercolor process was waaay easier than I expected.  I only had to practice a few times and then had the whole process down!  250 cards and 3 days later all my invitations were painted.  They looked AWESOME.  Just what I wanted.  Only messed up 1 or 2.





My timeline is off a little bit because I worked on the invitation stamp before all this, but didn’t get around to getting it or doing anything with it until now.  I bought some stamp pads at Hobby Lobby, StazOn teal blue.  The color of the pads is what I matched the watercolor to so that the colors would match.  My oldest friend, Elizabeth, who is an artist, did the calligraphy for me for the invitation stamp and return address stamp.  Amazing.  The reason I didn’t go with the stamps from the website the tutorial used was that they were expensive and took 4-6 weeks to be made.  I didn’t have time or money, so I used simonstamp.com.  The stamps were less than half the price, and I could upload a custom image.  Oh yeah, and they shipped the SAME DAY!  My invitation stamp was 4.5”x4.25” and the return stamp was about 3.5”x1.5”.  When I uploaded the image of the calligraphy it didn’t work right, but I emailed the image to their help email, and within an hour got a perfect upload image right back.  These people have timely awesome customer service perfected! 

The stamping process was a little tough because you only get one shot at making the words go on right and making sure there is the right amount of ink on the stamp.  A few got messed up, but no biggy.




250 watercolored invitations and 1 day later, they were all stamped!

Then my envelopes came in the mail! Stamping those was the most fun!




A lot of custom invitations have the mailing address handwritten.  For all the work I had done on making these the most perfect and beautiful invitations ever I didn’t want to ruin everything with my handwriting.  I also didn’t want to beg Elizabeth to write them all either.  She had been so nice to do the invitation and return address calligraphy that I didn’t want to ruin our friendship with asking her to write on each envelope.  I decided to find the perfect custom font online and print addresses on the envelopes.  I finally found the font and made a little template, worrying about character spacing and placement on the envelope.  Then I stole borrowed my mom’s printer to print all these off.  Exactly 32 envelopes printed perfectly, then they stopped.  I spent the next 30 hours of my free time trying and failing and wasting envelopes with other people’s printers.  I exhausted my groom-to-be by crying and getting mad at him because this wasn’t working.  Did the same thing with my parents, grandparents, aunt, groom’s parents, and best friend.  It wasn’t going well.  I broke down and decided to buy my own printer.  I hate printers.  And after I had been going through printer hell I really didn’t want to let another one in my house.  But I did.  I researched all the current models at all the stores online and landed on a canon from Sam’s.  Best purchase I’ve ever made.  The thing just works!  It was my invitation miracle!

I had forgotten about stamps, but managed to find these darling vintage flower ones from the post office.  They were super easy to buy!  Just went in to the post office and got 200 of them.  After the printer hell this was a welcome break!

Here’s the final product.




This post is more a review of the tutorial I found and linked above than my own tutorial. 

P.S. I work from home at an online job.  You can, too! Click here to learn how.

How I'm Making Money from Home

 Make Money from Home Scheme

I’ve recently learned about some different online strategies to making a living from home.  They are related and simple, but have some differences.  One thing that all the strategies seem to have in common is a gimmicky approach to getting people signed up.  It doesn’t seem to matter how many people are interested in this or how much traffic I get to my “capture page” because the look of these websites screams SCAM!  I’m also not a web developer.  I’m brand new in this field and don’t know everything yet.  But I did find out that a lot of these business models or offers or whatever you want to call them aren’t scams.  They are easy and make complete sense. 

The How

The foundation of these systems for making money is that companies use a part of their ad budget to pay people who get others to try their product or service.  They do this in a predictable way.  There will be a website that has many different trial offers, maybe a credit score free trial or a product trial that the consumer has to pay shipping and handling to receive.  These websites bridge the gap between the companies and the people who will get paid to refer others to completing these offers.  So the next step is that people who are signed up for these websites can be paid cash or prizes for referrals, people who go in and actually complete offers.  No one gets paid to complete the offers, just paid for referrals. 

The next step of the process is where different make money online systems split from each other.  The common goal is to get referrals.  Some websites pay $60 a referral, so it’s lucrative to get as many as possible. 

Some systems use a step 1 and step 2 system where people are either referring or being referred.  In step 1, a consumer completes free offers and gets paid by the referrer themselves.  In step 2, the referrer pays people to complete offers using their referral link.  So if a website will pay $60 for every referral the step 2 person may pay $30 to someone they can get to complete offers for them.  Both people make $30 from one person competing offers.

Other systems take the paying for referral step out.  They advertise a business where someone starts by watching a video or reading literature on this same process.  Then to get signed up that person must complete a couple offers, get a referral link, and start getting others to complete offers for them. 

 Where do I fit in here?

This all sounds confusing until you do it. Then it is very transparent what is happening.  So I’ve been working on both these systems for about a week now.  It’s hard.  I’m not making much money yet, but I’m trying.  I have craigslist ads up for make money online jobs where people can complete a couple offers for me then get on the same track of finding people to complete offers.  I also have ads up where I’ll pay people to complete offers for me. 

The Catch

The key to the whole thing is to find people to do this for you.  I don’t know how to get web traffic to my pages.  I feel the same way I did when I had a lemonade stand in front of my house as a child.  There weren’t enough cars driving by, and I wanted to go to the big road just down the street and sit on the corner. That way I could make some real money! Well I never figured a way to get on that big road, but I hope I can fare better this time and get some online traffic.  Being an out of work teacher is not the best position for a newlywed whose husband is a full-time student. 

You Might As Well Try it!!

If you’ve read this and would like to get paid to complete offers or become part of a business plan that has someone, not me yet, making $19,150 from July 1 of this month to this morning, I can help you. 

Click here and then here to complete some offers for me for cash.  Or click here to watch a video that explains how to make actual money working from home.

Tags: Make money online, make money from home, referrals, offers, going green, free trial.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Herbalife Review

 Herbalife Review

I recently found out about a nutrition company called Herbalife.  It’s been around since 1980 and has a good track record with responsible nutrition.  Herbalife is a company with distributer opportunities for people to become their own boss and make a living selling the product.  The company has a wide range of products including weight management, energy and fitness, targeted nutrition, and personal care.

Herbalife Weight Management Products

Herbalife has a weight management program to help people reach their weight-loss goals.  There are quickstart, advanced, and ultimate packages including products like shakes and snacks.  Each program contains a customized meal plan to maximize the product’s potential.
Herbalife Shake mix weight loss

 Herbalife's Energy and Fitness Section

Energy and fitness products are all over right now.  Herbalife has some specialized products to help its clients.  Energy boost stands out to me.  It is tablets dropped into water that are convenient for on-the-go energy.  Other products include supplements, shake mix, and drink mix. 

Herbalife's Targeted Nutrition

The targeted nutrition products include solutions for heart health, digestive health, healthy aging, immune solutions, men’s health, women’s health, stress management, and kids’ health.  These solutions are not only pill supplements; they include concentrates, powders to add to shakes or other drinks, and others.

Personal Care by Herbalife

The personal care section of herbalife includes body washes, shampoos, conditioners, and lotions.

The Herbalife company has good products and good business opportunities for people who are looking to be their own boss and sell quality products.


P.S. Do you want to learn about how I was able to start an at-home internet business and make more money than my day job? Click here to learn how.

Origami Owl Review

Origami Owl Review: Amazing product or scam?

Design your own jewelry that tells a story about yourself.  This is the message you get when you look into Origami Owl, a company created by a 14 year old girl to pay for a new car.  The signature item for Origami Owl are its Living Lockets with fully customizable lockets, plates, charms, chains, and dangles.  When I first saw the company’s products I thought they were targeting adolescent girls, but adults are all over this craze. 

Origami Owl Living Locket

Jewelry Bars

The company offers women a chance to sell Origami Owl jewelry through being a hostess at a party, or jewelry bar.  Hostesses can earn free jewelry and get discounts and rewards for inviting as many people as possible to their parties and getting them to order jewelry. 

Is Origami Owl too good to be true?

This all sounds great! I’d love to have jewelry that expresses who I am to everyone who sees it.  I’d love to earn free or discounted jewelry by getting other people interested.  Unfortunately when I started researching Origami Owl’s track record with customer service for women who attended parties and even women who have hosted the parties my enthusiasm turned into disappointment.  There are sites with consistent and real reviews over and over that say the same thing: I ordered my jewelry months ago and don’t have it.  Or when I received my order it was wrong, and I can’t get anywhere with customer service about fixing it.  Needless to say I won’t be signing up to have my own jewelry bar or ordering my very own living locket any time soon.

P.S. Do you want to learn about how I was able to start an at-home internet business and make more money than my day job? Click here to learn how.