GBBO Spa Set - Macaron Soaps & Vanilla Sugar Scrub

I have a problem.  Whenever I watch the Great British Bake Off, I want baked goods.  During cake week I want cake.  During biscuit week I check the pantry in case cookie faeries came while I was out and left me something delicious.  During bread week I resort to making cinnamon toast while watching the show.  So when I joined the Great British Bake Off Swap, I just assumed I'd be sending my partner some sort of tasty treat, either homemade or a purchased extra.  Then I got partnered with the amazing PerfectlyBohemian, who is on a keto diet right now.  So I decided to try to make her all those carb-filled baked goods, in other ways...

The result was a set of spa goodies.  French Macaron Soaps were the first decision.  I purchased a silicone mold from Amazon.  It makes 6 soaps per batch.  (If I was going to do more of them, I'd consider getting a second mold to do more at a time.) I picked up some melt & pour goat's milk soap from Joann's.  Most of the scents were in my stash already.   

I ended up making 4 different scents, Lychee Red Tea (pink), Lemon Chiffon (yellow), Butter Mint (green), and Vanilla Latte (tan w/brown flecks).  I tinted the pink, yellow and green with soap colorant, and the tan was achieved by adding a bit of cocoa powder.  The flecks are coffee grounds, which not only resemble vanilla bean flecks, but also work as an exfoliant.  :)

Out of a 2lb block of soap I think I got about 39 macarons, and one larger lump of leftover soap that had been already tinted and scented.  (I forgot to put aside 1/4 for 'filling', and had too much 'cookie'.  :D)  I packed them up in little treat boxes, with mini-cupcake papers, both also found at Joann's, and tied the boxes with baker's twine.

I decided to make a vanilla sugar scrub to go with them, because I ran into the cutest little jar that says 'home made'.  It was too cute not to buy.  Since my partner listed loving the scent and flavor of vanilla, I used my homemade vanilla extract as the scent, and voila.  Vanilla Sugar Scrub!

Union Jack Paper Bunting

As soon as I signed up for the Great British Bake Off Swap, I knew that I wanted to make a bunting.  But instead of fabric, I decided to use some sweet blue & pink floral papers I won from an Alpha Stamps giveaway a few years ago.  (Sorry, can't remember the name of the line.)  I used those pieces as the base, and found a few more bits in my stash, and bought a few more sheets of cream, pink, and turquoise, to round out the project.  I was especially happy to find cream-on-cream and pink-on-pink gingham! 

I cut the project on my Silhouette Cameo, starting with the bases, from a file available in their online store.  Only problem: I zoned out when cutting, and didn't pay close enough attention.  I assumed that the larger of the crosses should be cut from white, since white runs around the outside of all the red on the flag of Great Britain.  So I cut them all, then glued them down while what I thought should be pink was being cut. 

Nope!  Turns out the cut file was strange, and wanted there to be a giant red cross, with thin fiddly little bits of white cut out and placed over the red.  They were a pain in the bum to cut, and did NOT want to come off the mat cleanly.  I destroyed 2 or 3 sheets of paper, as they tore to shreds when I tried to take them off.  Only to realize an hour later, that they would have been the wrong color in the wrong place anyways! 

Finally I decided to just change the cut file itself! I used the line tool and the eraser tool, to create a new center 'red' piece, which could be glued over my already-glued-down white bits, thereby saving the pretty background papers.  All in all, after mucking things up a few time, I managed 17 pennants, out of the 21 bases I had cut.  17 seems like plenty anyways, right?  ;)

When I went to string them, I couldn't find any ribbon in my stash that I felt matched well enough, so I grabbed 3 colors of embroidery floss, and made a GIANT braid to string them onto.  I think it was somewhere over 4 yards?  That way if the entire piece was too big to display anywhere, PerfectlyBohemian could cut it in half, and then have two pieces of bunting, with plenty of string for each end. 

And here it is strung across PB's plant stand: