Encapsulate your own...

Here's the thing...if you're on any sort of budget (and who isn't these days) and take supplements, whether they be herbal, vitamin, or otherwise, you may be able to save yourself a bunch of money by purchasing your capsules and innards in bulk and just doing it yourself with the help of a capsule filling machine...which can be got fairly cheaply (generally between $10-$15).  We do this with powdered Vitamin C (which you'll see in the pictures that follow) and also with powdered herbs.

Because you KNOW I love showing you the minutia of my daily life, I've included the following series of photos (with some commentary) detailing the general process.

Here's a pic of everything I used, capsules, machine, empty vitamin bottle being recycled to hold the newly encapsulated capsules, powdered Vit. C, two small bowls to hold the capsules once we pulled them apart into bottoms and caps, and a bowl.

Close up of machine, with example of an empty capsule, pulled apart into it's bottom and cap.  The larger bottoms go into the machine part on the left, the smaller caps into the part on the right.

Once the bottom portion is full of bottoms...place into bowl (to catch spills) and pour powdered vitamins over the holes to fill them.

Use the handy, dandy scraper included with your capsule machine to spread the powder evenly over the bottoms.

Once they're full, use the included tamper to tamp down the powder, scrape again, tamp again, scrape again, and tamp a third time.  It is altogether possible that I'm a bit OCD about this step so feel free to tamp and scrape as many times as you deem necessary...

Scrape excess powder back into powdered vitamin container (there is a handy notch in the lower right hand corner of the machine that allows you to do this very cleanly...love that), and then place top of machine (filled with the caps) on top of the bottom part.

The next step I couldn't really take a picture of since it took both hands to do but basically you press down the top part till the machine is flush with the table top and that secures the caps onto the bottoms and when you lift the top off you get these perfect, filled capsules! 

You then push on the top of the top half again and eject the capsules into your bowl, which you can then dump into your vitamin bottle/container of choice.

And voila!  Your very own encapsulated supplements...at a fraction of the cost of buying them this way. Seriously...do your research and you'll see what I mean.

TIP:  Do this with a friend or willing child...it'll go WAY faster that way.  My almost 5 year old helped me the WHOLE TIME (which kind of surprised me but hey...I went with it) and was invaluable at helping me pull the capsules apart initially, and also filling the bottom portion of the machine.

Happy Encapsulating!!!!!