 a good morning everyone welcome back to my channel I hope you guys have had an amazing day so far or amazing evening or wherever you are amazing day night early hours of the morning hope it's going well now today I want to share with you something I'm so excited to share with you actually is my homemade calendula recipe now this is something I've been wanting to make for a few months now I want to make my own I thought it'd be a cool experiment to give it a go I've never made it before so this is the first time you're seeing this so hopefully fingers crossed it goes well I have pretty high hopes it'll be right but I'm so so excited to share this with you now this is the calendula flowers that I bought at by me stores back in my Queensland blog when I was up in the God Coast they had a store for biome is like my hub there's all plastic free toxin free ethically made ethically sourced natural products in there which is just like it's my place to be so I'm so excited to visit that place it's probably on my heart of the trip to be honest now I'm going to use dried calendula leaves today because that's what I have vegan alternatively opt to use just some calendula oil because that will skip a bit of the process however if you don't have that and you have leaves like I do you're going to make the oil to then make the cream with so let's get to that but if you already have the oil you can just skip this step and move straight onto the cream part I'm going to get started on making the calendula infused oil so to get started on the oil you're going to need some calendula leaves now optimally want to get dried calendula leaves because if you make the oil and the leaves have that moisture still in them it'll make the oil go rancid just like you don't want that so you want to either if you have fresh leaves dry them out to ensure that there's no moisture left in them or to get dried calendula leaves already then you're going to need some olive oil because that's what the leaves are going to soak in to infuse the calendula wheel in that then you're going to need a glass jar to keep it in while it sits for a few weeks alternatively again another thing you can do I'll just show you another thing you can do is actually to do the fast version and use a slow cooker however my mom is using the slow cooker today to make some soup with so I will be showing you how to do it with the crock pot tomorrow but for now I'll just show you the oil version and then I'll show you the crock pot version but if you want to do the slow cooker one it is much quicker because oil needs to sit for quite a few weeks whereas the crock pot is only 24 hours and I'll show you both to give you some choice so we're going to get started on making the infused calendula oil so let's get started and so about all that tweeting I know this happens in most of my videos every time I talk our bird at least she just talks back so when I'm talking she'll exactly keep talking over the top of me so you may hear a lot of tweeting in the studio I apologize so what you're going to do is fill a glass jar two-thirds of the way with those dried calendula leaves then you're going to pour in the olive oil until it covers about one inch above the calendula leaves because you want to leave space for the flowers to expand then you're just going to stir the mixture together well and then cap it tightly so it's airtight then you're just going to place the jar on a warm sunny windowsill where lots of light can get to it and keep it warm and you're just going to shake it at least once daily or more then after four to six weeks you're just going to strain out the herbs using a cheesecloth so you'll get the oils at the bottom and you'll keep the flowers at the top collected in that cheesecloth and then you can pour the infused oil into some glass jars and keep in a cool dry place and you're ready to go so you can keep those oils for separate uses and then you can use whatever you need for the cream now they say it is preferred to infuse the oils using the solar sun method rather than doing it in the crop pot however if you do need it quickly this also works well by just adding a little heat to it so I'm going to quickly show you the oil infused calendula oil I've just decided to use a smaller jar just so I can save some of the flowers to use for the slow cooker version but if you guys aren't doing both you can just use a bigger glass jar to pour the flowers in or you can use a small one as well and just save the flowers for a later date just making a bit of a mess like it's a must when cooking so these are what they look like the actual calendula leaves when they're dried and they smell absolutely amazing now to add in the oil okay so it's the next day so my mom's finished using the crock pot in the kitchen and my herbs are going very nicely behind the wetsuit just down here they're sitting well so they'll be going for another four to six weeks so they're not going to be ready for a while so we'll just leave those there so I'll show you what I'm going to do with the crock pot today so this is the second method of how to make this calendula oil it's probably a faster way but they do recommend doing the slow version of the four to six weeks one I think it yields just a better oil but you can do it this way as well so let's get to it so I've got my crock pot ready to go and my other herbs and I've got two bottles of olive oil because this one's almost run out so this one's very similar to the other one you're just going to fill the crock pot with how much of the herbs that you want and then you just need to pour olive oil or another carrier oil that you're using so it could be coconut oil or there's another way you can do it where you do both coconut and olive oil so you're going to put the herbs at the bottom then you're going to fill the oil just one to two inches above the herbs then you want to gently heat the herbs over very low heat so around 38 degrees Celsius to 60 degrees Celsius or for people who use Fahrenheit 100 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit for about one to five hours or until the oil starts to take on the color of the herb which is calendula so be a bit of a yellow color other people do recommend doing a different way where you just keep the temperature at a controlled level of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit or with 38 degrees Celsius and you just keep it on that controlled temperature for 48 to 72 hours so you can do either option and see which one works best for you then you just want to turn the heat off and allow the mixture to cool then strain the herbs out of it using a cheesecloth and you can pour the oil that's left and remaining at the bottom into some sterilized dry glass jars or glass bottles and you can just use how much you need for the cream later on and then store the rest for later use for other things now it's important to note that you store the calendula oil in a dry cool dark place and it only lasts for up to six months so it's recommended not to keep it past then so I hope you got all that but if you didn't I'm gonna go through it now anyway again in live format might just spread it out a little bit so that it's not a huge clump in the middle now add the oil come to find me so in the meantime while I'm waiting for the herb oil to finish I'm sorting out and posting some of the flotation devices so like floaties and things that I found at work so these are just old floaties that would've been thrown into the bin so I'm going to pop them into those old boxes that I got from packages and things that I bought or got given I'm going to pack them in there and send them to New Zealand and ship them to this New Zealand company where they actually turn these flotations and inflatable flotations these inflatables into awesome bags so this is the company here I absolutely love them so they take inflatables that no one's going to use anymore so either they've been broken or we'll just throw them out and you can actually send them to her and she'll make them into these awesome cute little bags and things so definitely recommend checking her out she's from New Zealand and honestly it's such a great idea to reuse these old inflatables that would otherwise be thrown to landfill and because they're plastic will take forever to break down so yeah that's what I'm doing today so I'm sorting out that into that to then post to New Zealand where to begin as you can see that's need to be pushed in a little bit but otherwise they fit really well and I just had just enough boxes to fit everything in yeah let me know in the comments below if you guys want me to do a montage of me doing things like this in the future when I repack or send off different parcels or when I'm doing a montage of cleaning or anything let me know if you want me to do montages like that in the future rather than just cut to the end result otherwise yeah I'll see you guys in another 24 hours or 48 or 72 it's been 48 hours later so I kept it at the same 38 degrees Celsius temperature the whole time for that 48 hours I didn't do the 38 degrees to 60 degrees Celsius one for this one I just kept it at 38 and just did the slow heat over the 48 hours and it's finished as you can see it's all ready to go there's that nice yellow color from the flowers now just sterilized a glass jar to put the oil in our options you can use are just smaller different individual glass jars that you've sterilized that can also be that dark color on the outside to prevent light getting into it which may be a better option but I didn't have any of those with me today so I'm just going to use this glass jar that I've already sterilized with hot water just make sure that you'd let this cool once you've turned the heat off oh and I also forgot to mention you need a strainer to strain out the flowers as well as you're pouring into your glass jar so I've just got the remnants of the flowers from the oil now I'm just popping them into my compost outside so instead of throwing them in the bin you can choose to pop them in your compost instead or throw them or sprinkle them rather than throw onto your garden where they'll give a lot of nutrients to the soil so just another alternative rather than just throwing them out and wasting them in a sense so there's my compost just there I'm gonna pop them into that yum so now it's all ready to go for calendula cream but I've got to wait for the beeswax pellets to arrive because I've ordered them from Miami stores online so that will be a few days so until then I'm going to store it in a nice cool dry dark place just in here so we're back it's been a couple days later and I've finally have my beeswax it's arrived so I got two because they only came in this size unfortunately because you need about one ounce of beeswax and that's about four tablespoons worth so I guesstimated that this would be enough then you're gonna need some essential oils of your choice now I'm going to use some it's gonna see which one this was great fruit and lavender essential oils today they're just my choice of preference today but you can use whatever you like really you're also going to need one cup of tepid water which just basically means lukewarm water and then finally you're just going to need about a few jars worth maybe also sterilize them before you use them just to make sure that the cream doesn't go off any earlier than it needs to and then you're good to go so let's get started in making the cream part of this recipe the part we're all waiting for I'm so excited to show you guys so to begin with we're going to need about several cups worth of water and we need to bring it to a boil in a saucepan and then once you've boiled it you're going to then turn it down to a simmer so the water is just simmering in the pan and then you're going to make a double boiler out of it so you can either put a heat-proof bowl on top and put the beeswax and the oil in there or you can get a glass jar and just put that into the simmering water make sure it's staying above the level that you don't want the water entering into the glass jar I am going to put a bowl on top just I find that easier for me so let's start by doing that so I've just finished boiling the water as you can see just down there so I'm going to now turn it down to a simmer so now I'm going to pop my bowl onto it so that's ready to go now I'm going to pop in the four tablespoons or one ounce of beeswax in the one cup of calendula oil and then I'm going to let that sit on the stove until the beeswax has melted and then you're going to pour it into a blender just here I have to put two cups of boiling water into this just to sort of preheat it so when I put the oil and beeswax mixture into here it won't start to harden because it's cold so this will keep this warm and then you can put the lid on and then we'll just go from there so now because it's just plastic I didn't want to put the hot water into early in case it like melts it or deteriorates in any way so now I'm going to put the two cups of hot water into the blender just to preheat it so when we put the calendula cream in it doesn't start to harden it's gonna let that sit there for a little bit just to heat it up a bit and then I'm going to tip it out and then put the beeswax oil mix in there okay so that's just been a like a minute or two so I'm just going to tip that out and then fill it with the beeswax oil mix so now you're going to add in your essential oils I'm just going to add in about five drops of grapefruit and about seven drops of lavender now essential oils are quite strong so you only need a little bit and you can adjust the quantities to how much of each that you want it's going to stir that through really quick so now when you put the lid on you want to actually leave the pouring hole open because you're going to add in the tepid water which is just that lukewarm water in through there slowly now ours actually has it at the top so I'm just going to take this off and put it through that way so with the drizzling of the tepid water just do it slowly you may need to scrape scrape scrape down the sides of the blender every so often because it may stick to the sides so they are the cream side to go I've just stopped it because I need to mix it through a little bit because it's stuck so I'm just gonna mix that through and then pour the last little bit of remaining water in blend that up and then we're ready to pop it into our sterilized jars so to sterilize them I basically just set them in hot boiling hot water now I'm letting them dry out if you don't want any water at the bottom because it can cause the cream to separate and go rancid that's so good look at that perfect I'll mix it through a bit more because as you can see the sides a little bit not quite mixed through so I'm gonna fix finishing mixing that in and then we're going to pop it into our jars it's a little bit runnier but as the beeswax starts to harden it will go a bit more more cream like so they are finished now they're all good to go you just need to let them set for several hours until they become that cream calendula like consistency so you just let them set out in room temperature so you just rub it in like that like so and you have your healing cream today's come one of the day goes to Kate Bobbo said thank you for leaving such a beautiful comment on my video for the Queensland vlog my first week there you guys are so beautiful to watch and comment on my vlogs I'm so so grateful I'm so glad you enjoyed it I hope to see you in future videos in mine just keep in mind when you're doing this recipe that there's a lot of cleaning up afterwards I just soak half my pants in hot water just to get the beeswax off everything and the oil but totally worth it for this beautiful baby already yes I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you don't see more videos like this feel free to check out my playlist right next to me on one of these sides and you guys can see my videos like this one in the future always I hope to see you in my future videos bye