A fun gift to make a loved one are these cute mason jar bath salts.

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A fun gift to make a loved one are these cute mason jar bath salts. Add in some lavender buds and tint your mason jars and you have a fun craft project that you’ll be proud to give as a gift!

Everything You Need to Make Mason Jar Bath Salt Gifts

Mod Podge
Foam brush
Food Coloring
Mason Jars (or use old spaghetti jars)
Essential Oil – I chose Lavender
Lavender Buds
Epsom Salts – make sure to choose natural salts with no added oil or scent.

Tinting Mason Jars

Step 1:

Make sure all of your mason jars (or you can even use spaghetti jars!) are cleaned and dried.

Step 2:

Mix 1/4 cup mod podge with 1/4 tsp of water and a few drops of food coloring.

How many drops of food coloring depends on how strong of a color you want your jars to be. I wanted a light purple so you could see the lavender buds through the jar. You can play with the consistency and color, you will want it watered down a bit. There are lots of different recipes out there but I liked this one the best.

Don’t worry if at this point the color looks all wrong. Once you paint it on and it bakes in the oven it will look a different color.

Step 3:

Begin painting the outside of the jars. You want the outside painted for this project because the inside will be filled with Epsom salts for a bath. To keep the contents as natural as possible, I preferred to only fill the inside with pure ingredients: the salts, buds, and essential oils. I didn’t want to add glue to the inside and risk having it leak into the salts.

Use a foam brush to paint the outside of the jars. As you paint it will look streaky. Just keep painting because when it bakes in the oven it will all even out – trust me on this one! In fact, I had my 10-year-old daughter and her friend paint all 12 of the jars and they all turned out great!

Step 4:

Once they are all painted, place them upside down in a preheated oven at 200 degrees. I opted to place them directly on the rack. They were not dripping wet at this point so no paint dripped into my oven. If you are worried about this, then place them on a cooking sheet with wax paper under it.

Leave them in the oven until all the Mod Podge turns transparent. This can take about 40 minutes, but just keep an eye on it.

Making Bath Salts

While your mason jars are in the oven, mix up your bath salts! Depending on how many gifts you are making or what size jars you have, you will use different amounts of Epsom salts and essential oil.

One tip:

Don’t be stingy with the essential oil! It’s for a gift and you don’t know when the recipient will eventually use the bath salts. I’ve found the longer the essential oils sit in the bath salts, the scent is absorbed into the salt. I regularly use my empty oil bottles to make bath salts and because there is a large percentage of oil to Epsom salt, the essential oil scent lasts much longer!

Lavender bath salts:

Other Ideas:

Rosebuds with Germanium or Ylang Ylang Essential Oil
Sore muscles Epsom Salts using Panway
Detox Bath using Epsom Salts, Baking Soda, Frankincense Essential Oil

Putting the Gift Together

Once your jars come out of the oven and are cooled off, begin scooping the bath salts into the jars. Give them a good shake or bang them on the counter so it all settles and you are able to get as much as possible in the jar.

For fun, I made very simple purple labels from purple cardstock and tied a purple ribbon around the lid. I applied a little bit of hot glue to make sure it wouldn’t move.

In the end, they turned out very pretty. They went directly under the tree as is! I know I would have loved receiving this as a gift and it was a fun gift to make with my daughter.