Making Salve

(Jeeze! My camera broke, so I have no pictures to offer, but I'll make this as detailed as possible, okay?)

1. Decide what kind of salve you want and what you want to go into it.

I generally make a dry-skin salve to get me through the winter, or an antifungal soothing salve to get me through the dampness of summer. Since it's getting into the colder months, we'll go with the winter salve.

Salves are just oils thickened up with some beeswax. An absolute basic salve would be just that-- olive oil and a handful of beeswax. This one will be a little more ambitious, because basic is boring.

2. Gather your spplies

For the winter salve, you'll need a good thick oil like olive-oil (a cheap one is fine unless you have a really great one you can spare a few ounces of-- flavor doesn't matter in salve, and all olive-oils are pretty much the same consistency).

You'll need beeswax, which I get online at Stony Mountain Herbs -- http://www.wildroots.com/ -- in granular form, which is easier to use.

And then you'll need your additives: herbs, vitamin E, scent or essential oils. Callendula, chamomile and comfrey make good soothing herbs. Buy them in bulk and keep them around for winter; sealed up in jars, they'll last ages. Vitamin E is cheaper in capsule form, and both conditions skin and helps preserve the salve; you'll need a few capsules, I usually use three to five. You can also add something rich like shea butter or coconut oil at this stage, just minus the amount of the olive oil a little. The scent oils are mostly just for decoration, and if you have really cracked and sensitive skin, I'd recommend using all natural essential oils instead, and chose ones that would help: lavendar, mint, comfrey, sweet orange, any of the ones listed on the back of, like, Burts Bees or something similar. They keep down fungus and bacteria, so you won't get infections when your skin gets really bad, and they help sooth it into health.

You'll also need a wide-mouth container or bowl to store it in, a wide-mouth jar to cook it in, a small sauce pot or hot pot to make a double-boiler with, an old chopstick for stirring, and something to strain the herbs out with.

3. Start cooking

Put your main oil in the jar and place it in a cold pan with an inch or two of water around it. You want it to be about equal to the oil's level or a little under, so don't overfill the jar-- a few ounces will be enough salve for weeks. Add a few pinches of your herbs. (If you're using a solid oil like shea butter, add it here, so it has time to melt)

Keep the pan on low. You want it to heat up gradually, but never to boil. Boiling water will make boiling oil, and then you'll just fry your herbs, not infuse them. Bring it up to a nice simmer, and let the herbs soak in the oil for 15 or 20 minutes, or until it looks like all the color has left the herbs and gone into the oil. Strain out the herbs carefully, and put the oil back in the jar.

(Alternately, you could make an infused oil the slow way by adding oil and herbs to a jar and leaving them in a cabinet for a few months, then skip this step because you've already got the infusion, heat it up and go right to the wax).

4. Add the wax

Start adding the wax granules. If you have a big block of beeswax, get a veggie peeler and make little slivers, or a pick and make little chunks. Add it a pinch or two at a time, and stir it until it's completely melted before you add more. You'll need a quarter to a third as much as the volume of the oil.You can test the set the way you test jam-- drop a little on a plate or the stovetop and let it sit a second, then run the chopstick or your fingernail (be careful! it can burn!) through it to see if it's gelled.

This part is kind of the trial and error part-- too much wax will make the salve too hard, but that's fixable by melting it back down and adding a little more oil. Too little will make it really soft, but if you have skin that will need a good soaking, soft is maybe easier to handle. You can harden it up by melting it down and adding more wax. The reheating will probably burn off the scent and vitamin oils, but you can just add more when you're re-working it.

5. Add the additives

Once it looks kind of thicker and opaque-ish, remove it from the heat and add the vitamin E and scent oils, and any additional oils like the coconut oil. If you want to add solids, this is the time, but make sure you only add a little, it's a very fine powder or a small herb-size, and you stir really really well. I've added sandalwood and cedar powder, rosepetal dust, lavendar dust, milk and honey powder, amber powder, things like that, and they really add color and a mellow scent that's pretty nice-- just make sure they coordinate with the other scents you're adding. And they're pretty.

6. Jar it up

Working sort of fast, but really carefully, pour the hot mix into a wide-mouth shallow jar or canister (old compacts work well, if they're sort of deep, and japanese sauce bowls work very well if you're going to use it every day before it can dry out). If you're feeling fancy, you can fill old clean gluestick or lipstick containers, old and cleaned deoderant push-ups, things like that. I usually make more than I'm intending, so I keep a few choices around and fill them all up.

Keep the container(s) on a level, solid surface and leave them alone while they cool off so they cool evenly. In a half hour to an hour, they should be pretty set up, and a day later, they'll be as hard as they're going to get. If it comes out as stiff as you want, it's done and you can throw it in your purse and go! If it's too thick or too soft, you can fix it as discussed above.

7. Options

If you're vegan and you don't want to use beeswax, there are vegetable waxes you can get that should work the same way, but I've never used them so I can't tell you much more than that.

To make this a summer salve, add teatree oil, mint, and citrinella to make it antifungal and help keep bugs away, and aim for a harder set so it can stay solid as it heats up in your purse or bag.

Rosemary smells good, but in salves it kind of makes you smell like thanksgiving dinner. Same with sage.

Saffron or safflower will add a nice yellow-gold to red tinge, and safflower is good for soothing. Too much might stain things the salve comes in contact with.