Celebrate Galentine’s Day with At-Home Spa Treatments

galentines

Although Galentine’s Day is not yet a national holiday – despite a hilarious effort by the TV show Parks and Recreation – that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate Feb. 13 with your favorite girlfriends. On the day before romantic couples celebrate Valentine’s Day, Galentine’s Day is a great excuse to get your best girlfriends together for an amazing day of friendship and female empowerment.

While Leslie Knope prefers to brunch, why not host a DIY spa and movie night? You can easily create exfoliating treatments, facials, bath crystals, and even a pedicure foot scrub with the inexpensive, all-natural, drugstore wonder product: Epsom Salt.

Some ideas:

Glowing skin exfoliating treatment: Mix 2 cups of Epsom Salt with 1/4 cup of petroleum jelly and a few drops of lavender essential oil. Use the mixture to gently scrub away dry skin patches.
Microdermabrasion Facial: Mix 1/2 TSP of Epsom Salt into cleansing cream for a deep-pore cleansing. Massage on skin. Rinse with cool water. Pat dry.
Bathtime Bliss: Add two cups of Epsom Salt to the water in a standard-sized bathtub; soak for at least 12 minutes, three times weekly. For an extra treat, add a few drops of eucalyptus oil for a refreshing scent.
Pedicure Perfection: Dissolve a half cup of Epsom Salt into two quarts of warm water. Pour the water into a container and soak your bare feet for fifteen to twenty minutes. For an extra treat, add a few drops of eucalyptus oil for a refreshing scent. Massage the entire foot with Epsom Salt concentrating on the heels and ankles to remove any dry, rough spots. Then, rinse your feet off with clean tap water and dry them thoroughly.
Homemade bath crystals: Mix two cups of Epsom Salt with a few drops of fragrance to create a custom bath crystal. Add a few drops of food coloring or 1/2 TSP of glycerin if you like. Store in an air-tight container.

Julep.com also has some Galentine’s Day party planning tips you might enjoy.

Over the years I have shared a lot of pumpkin knitting patterns, and I’ve knit and crocheted a lot of pumpkins myself. But it feels like there are always more fun things to try with knit pumpkins, so this year I wanted to look a little more beyond basic stockinette or ribbed pumpkins and share some pumpkin patterns with cables, bobbles and colorwork.

In the cable collection we’ve got these cute little basic cable and ribbed pumpkins from Elly Bear Knits. There are two sizes that make a wide, flat pumpkin and a taller round pumpkin. Both are worked in the round as a tube that’s cinched top and bottom when you’re done, and they use bulky weight yarn.

Another cute cable pumpkin knitting pattern comes from Gray Bear Akswokrat. This one is knit flat and it looks like a chunky yarn but you could use other weights to make pumpkins of different sizes. This one also has an I-cord stem and uses yarn to cinch up the sections of the pumpkin, giving it a more natural look.

Add some bobbles to your pumpkins with this design from Autumn Shelter Makes. Also worked in the round in a tube, it features a repeating pattern of bobbles and uses yarn wrapped around the outside to make segments. This one looks like worsted weight yarn to me.

Of course there’s nothing that says your pumpkin has to be a single color, so let’s throw in some colorwork. I love the look of the Cozy Fall Pumpkin knitting pattern from South Stitch Girls. The little leather loop adds a rustic touch but you could also just add a stick. These pumpkins have five colorwork options and are worked in worsted weight yarn in the round.

There’s also the Autumn Fair Isle Trio pumpkins pattern from Equestriann Style, which has three different sizes of pumpkins with four colorwork designs. They are worked in super bulky yarn in the round and look good with high contrast or more muted color combinations.

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