Saturday morning I was up at 6:00 am and on a mission.  I was determined to find a recipe for the perfect soap. I was planning to make the soap as a gift for someone special.

I decided to take a few days off from training and running this weekend.  I will get serious next week (I promise :p). So, I joined a studio this week, which offers yoga classes, Pilates, boot camps and more.   Next week, I am going to take a few classes and increase my mileage.  Hopefully, I can get myself ready for a half marathon in November.

But Saturday was a day for creativity.  I began by catching up on some writing projects.  I spent a few minutes on Pinterest and found some perfect recipes.  One for the soap and also one for some lotion I thought might be fun to try. I checked the ingredients and found I needed rosemary essential oil.

No problem.  There is a small rosemary plant out in my garden.  I love my little garden…… and it is little.  I have two tomato plants and a couple of pepper plants along with my herbs.  I clipped some fresh rosemary from my garden to blend my essential oil.

I researched and found two different methods for infusing essential oil.  One method required drying the rosemary for a few days, dropping it into a bottle and covering with oil to infuse over time.  The second method called for warming fresh rosemary and oil in a crock pot for about 6 hours to infuse.  I chose the latter for several reasons.  The main reason?   I wanted to enjoy the aroma of the oil while it infused.

Mixing the oils together for the lotion was relatively easy, but I was disappointed in the consistency of the lotion.  Nonetheless, I now have a lovely jar of rosemary essential oil in my cabinet.  It has already been used to sauté a handful of mushrooms which were tossed into a skillet of quinoa for a delicious meal.

But now it is dinner time, and I think I will go out and pick some fresh tomatoes for my salad.