Happy holidays

Snow.
And lots of it.
Candle light.
Big dinners.
Long dresses.
Cookies and candy.
Friends and family.
Presents.
Sleeping late.
Laughing out loud.
Feeding the birds.
Long walks.
Great movies.
Lots of books.
Festive spirits.
Getting the car stuck in snow.
Stranger towing it out.

Isn't Christmas lovely?

The Queen of Hungary's water

I found a lot of recipes for the Queen of Hungary's water.  The recipes are all pretty different and after reading about it trying to find the correct recipe I discovered that originally it was probably a distillation of Rosemary in Brandy and that it dates from the late 14th century.  It has since been added to and modified to include various herbs such as sage, mint, rose, chamomile, lemon balm, calendula and lemon peel.  The Hungary water is both a cosmetic and a herbal remedy, reputedly curing all sorts of ailments.  My interest is to use it as a toner.  I love to use toner on my skin, even if I read somewhere that they are useless.  I don't care.  So I thought I'd make my own Hungary water.

One common recipe for Hungary water is widely attributed to Rosemary Gladstar on the internet.  She has been called the godmother of American Herbalism and she has written many books.  This is her recipe for the Queen of Hungary's water and I used that as a base for mine.  She uses vinegar instead of alcohol and I think that suits me well.  I've been interested in using vinegar based toner for a while, but haven't done anything about it.  Although, of course, it is the easiest thing to do.

6 parts lemon balm
4 parts chamomile
4 parts roses
3 parts calendula
3 parts comfrey leaf
1 part lemon peel
1 part rosemary
1 part sage
Vinegar to cover (apple cider or wine vinegar)
Rose water or witch hazel extract
Essential oil of lavender or rose (optional)

Place the herbs in a widemouthed jar. Fill the jar with enough vinegar so that it rises an inch or two above the herb mixture. Cover tightly and let it sit in a warm spot for 2 to 3 weeks. Strain out the herbs. To each cup of herbal vinegar, add 2/3 to 1 cup of rose water or witch hazel. Add a drop or two of essential oil, if desired. Rebottle. This product does not need to be refrigerated and will keep indefinitely.

My own version of this depended on my ability to find the ingredients fresh and free.  I wanted to use only plants that I either grew myself or picked from nature myself.

So my version is here:  I put in the fresh herbs in this order.  I did cheat a bit and used dried lavender from the store since I had just killed my plant (with kindness, you understand).  I didn't measure the amounts, but I guess there was more roses and calendula than the others.

Roses
Calendula
Comfrey
Yarrow
May Seaweed (our local Chamomile)
Sage
Lavender
Mint
Calendula
Roses

These were stuffed into a large jar (it looked really pretty) and I poured 300 ml. of white vine vinegar and 300 ml. apple vinegars.  This sat in a jar for quite a few weeks until I strained it.  I then diluted it, like instructed, with Witch hazel and Rosewater.

The resulting toner smells of vinegar and herbs.  I don't mind the smell at all.  I've gotten very used to the smell of vinegar, since I use it a lot in cleaning.  The toner really works well for me.  I use it to wipe away my makeup and it does a great job of it.  I then use some infused oil, I love the green Achillea millefolium oil and also the Rose oil that I infused this summer.  It makes for a rather shiny face at night, but also very soft skin.  I also use the oils under my makeup in the mornings.

I had planned elaborate Christmas presents for the women of the family with this toner and face oil (in a serum type bottle), some face cream maybe and a lovely soap, sugar scrub, bath bomb and body bar - all in delicious scent blends, but you know how it is.  Maybe next year I'll start early enough.

Happy mistakes

One of the Christmas soaps this year had a different look, quite by mistake.  Vanilla for scent and charcoal for the colour, just like the black special blend, but this one has no frou frou look about it.

For some reason the soap didn't mix all that well.  I didn't notice that anything was different until a few days after I cut it and the colour started to develop.  The look was just like Granite rock.  So that was the name it got.

The scent is only vanilla and it smells sweet and innocent, although it looks rather wicked.  I made another batch, to try and duplicate it, but that ended up in a very badly lined soap form so I couldn't get it out.  It was just stuck in there and I had to spoon it out.  It was still quite soft so I thought I'd make small balls out of it to use as decoration or something.  The balls didn't want to form nicely so I ended up with really uneven looking balls.  The next day when I took a second look I realized that they looked just like pebbles on a beach (yes, the beaches here are black, sand and rocks.  White beaches are just an exotic foreign thing to me).

But this mistake again turned out great, because I've had two people enthuse about my pebbles already.  Funnily enough, both have a hard time saying nice things about my flower decorated soaps.  It's funny how tastes are different, but I can quite see the appeal of the rock look.  So I'm going to polish them a bit once they are properly hard and put a few into a bag or on a dish and present them to their admirers for Christmas.

This recipe is a very basic one.

Olive oil      40%   - 280g / 10oz
Coconut oil     35%  - 245g / 8.6oz
Rapeseed oil     15%  - 105g / 3.7oz
Soybean oil     10%  - 70g / 2.5oz

Medical charcoal for colour, vanilla for scent and sugar crystals for a touch of glamour.  I love it when something that seems to be a failure turns out to be something that I would never have thought of doing myself.

Im memoriam

Five years ago, today, my father died.  He, like all fathers, was the most handsome man who ever walked this earth.  I worshipped him when I was a little girl.  I woke up with him very early in the mornings and ate porridge with blood sausage and sipped cod fish oil from the bottle.  I was going to marry him when my mother died because I knew that he would need a wife to take care of him.  I collected plants and he taught me how to dry them and label them correctly.  He also taught me to play chess and appreciate both classical music and Faroe Islands folk songs although the latter was more of a: If you can't beat them, join them.

He loved to watch Opera and sports on TV.  He would watch the Olympics and World Cup soccer and practically every major sports event that was shown on TV.  And he was serious about it.  He would take vacation time and wake up in the middle of the night to watch if he had to.  He was also very interested in politics and loved a hearty debate.  And he had a great sense of humour.  He bought us Donald Duck magazines (in Danish back in those days) and always read them himself first.  He'd come home with some candy and tell us that it was from our dentist.  I believed that for years and thought we had the nicest dentist.

It is always amazing to me how much more difficult it is to loose a parent than I ever thought it would be.  I thought that old people (because I am now an old woman by my own definition as it was some years ago) didn't feel the loss of parents that much.  I mean, everyone is old, the parent and the child and old people die.  Everyone knows that. So it shouldn't come as a surprise and it shouldn't hurt.  But it did.

Tomorrow is his birthday.  He would have turned 78, an age that was once ancient to me, but is now not that old.  I will spend the day with my mother.  I always buy her flowers on this day and I probably will also do that tomorrow.  But even nicer, we will go for a coffee in Keflavik, a small fishing village since we are driving my 83 year young aunt to the airport which is right there.

I am very fortunate in that I like my mother very much.  She has been my best friend for many, many years.  She isn't perfect.  She is a lousy housewife and a horrible cook, but she is very intelligent and very funny.  And she is the best grandmother anyone could ever wish for.  Probably because she was a very good mother.  I look forward to tomorrow even if it will be tinged with sorrow and hope that we will have many, many more days together because I can't even begin to think what I'd do without her.

My special blend - The Black

Black is the opposite of white, so the next soap was obvious.  I love everything vanilla and especially vanilla scented perfume, but perhaps not an undiluted sweet and sickly scent. I prefer a bit more sophisticated blends that have some of the warmth and sweetness of the vanilla but also some element of freshness.

I wanted to try to make a vanilla blend but I didn't want the soap to be brown.  I do remember the 70's when everything brown, orange and avocado was the height of fashion but brown isn't exactly romantic.  So I wanted to disguise the brown.  Don't get me wrong, I love brown soaps and the rustic look of unbleached linnen and stuff, but for this purpose I didn't want the brown of the vanilla to show.  I used medical charcoal to colour the soap black and the first idea was to decorate it exclusively with white flowers.  I thought that would be a really serene and cool look.  But then, when I was rummaging through my stash of dried herbs, I came across the red clover and it was this pretty purple.  So I decided to use that for decoration and consequently this soap is a bit wilder than originally planned.

The scent is a blend of Vanilla, Sweet Orange, Palmarosa, Bensoin and a bit of Ylang Ylang.  The scent is very nice.  Quite unusual, but my younger daughter likes it the best of my blends so far.  And she has very good taste.

To decorate I used dried flowers of Red Clover, Rose, Alchillea, Calluna and dried leaves of Rubus.  The dried flowers are holding up well so far and I'm optimistic that they'll look nice at Christmas too.

The recipe for this soap is a little bit different.  This time I had neither lard, not did I want to sacrifice any more duck fat, so I used castor oil instead.  I wanted something to make it conditioning and it can be used for the hair.  And I didn't have anything else.  This soap also got a bit of sugar and silk like the other ones.  I can't wait to test them.  They should be very nice.

Olive Oil   45%      225g / 8oz
Coconut Oil   30%      150g / 5.3oz
Cocoa Butter   10%     50g / 1.8oz
Rice Bran Oil 10%     50g / 1.8oz
Castor Oil   5%     25g / 0.9oz

The soap turned out to be quite black and sultry looking with the dark red flowers.  For some reason it got me thinking about my German grandmother and that spun some thoughts about the other soaps and who they would fit of the elderly ladies in my life.  But that might be another post.

The market went quite well, we couldn't have stayed another day.  The table looked rather bare at the end as we almost sold out.  Thankfully we didn't since we had promised a few soaps to someone and those were some of the ones that were left.  But all in all a really nice experience.  I love talking about soap.  I could go on forever, and almost did.  Someone asked if we were thinking of teaching how to make soap and I think that might be something to consider.  But not till after Christmas.  I still haven't done the Advent wreath, but everything is sitting here ready and staring at me.  I'd better get going.

My Special Blend - The White One

Inspired by my yellow soap I made a white one.  I used the most delicious enssential oils and although I intended to use the same recipe as for the white one, I didn't have any lard left so I had to make up a new one.  I wanted something similar to the lard, so I reached into the fridge and pulled out duck fat.  I love it for roasting potatoes, but I've never used it in soap but since the profile for it's properties on SoapCalc looked good I gave it a go.

So here it is, my lovely white one with some wildflowers.  I used the rose buds again and then I found some viola flowers that I had dried.  They are really tiny and don't have much of a shape, but they are a vivid blue that almost stands out in the medley of different colours on top of the soap.  I used pretty much everything that I could get my hand on: Lavender, Calendula, Chamomile and Raspberry leaves.  Now I only have to hope that the flower petals last for a bit and don't all turn brown before Christmas.

The recipe is similar to the yellow one:

40% - 200g / 7 oz. Olive oil
30% - 150g / 5.3 oz. Coconut oil
16% - 80g / 2.8 oz. Duck fat
8% - 40g / 1.4 oz. Rice bran oil
6% - 30g / 1 oz. Cocoa butter

I used both sugar and silk in this soap as well and titanium dioxide to make it whiter.  The scent was a blend of my favorite: Neroli with Sandalwood and Bensoin, Bergamot and Palmarosa.  This would be an outrageously expensive soap if I had to price it.  I used half of my tiny bottle of Sandalwood on this recipe, the rest is in the yellow soap.  Sandalwood is a really, really nice scent.  But so terribly expensive.  I would also have loved to use rose in this, but I understand that it is more expensive than gold.  Or maybe that was yesterday, those gold prices are still going up I believe.  But anyway, I really love the scent.  It is a true blend, with the scents merging into a whole different entity where it is hard to recognize the component eo's.

I don't know which one I like best, the white or the yellow.  And then there is the black, which is pretty cool as well.  There is a glimpse of it in the banner photo.  That one is for the next post, but first I need to get the market done.

Cut!

The yellow soap turned out a very dark yellow and to be truthful I like yellow when it's mellow.  But I still like this one very much.  The smell is heavenly and although I tend to think that soaps look their best just poured into the mold and freshly decorated, I still love the way it looks.  A bit frou frou and old lady.  It is going to look absolutely horrible once it gets wet, but who cares?  It'll look very good as a gift and then it'll still smell really nice.

I have been on a roll, making more of these, but in different colours with different fragrance blends and I plant to make a few more.  I've already done one white and one black and I want to do one blue and another pink.  I'm just waiting for a fresh shipment of oils so that I can mix the fragrances that I've imagined for those.

I've also lost it!  I'm going to be in a Christmas market next weekend with my soaps and some jewelry that my sister-in-law makes.  The market idea just happened and I have no idea how it's going to go.  I won't be selling the special blend soaps, but I've made some lavender and lemongrass ones with flower decorations.  We have been selling soaps to friends and last week one friend took some samples with her to work and we got an order for about 25 soaps.  That is a lot for us and we were thrilled.  I guess it went to our heads and therefore the market seemed like a good idea.

I went today to scout out the territory.  It's quite cute actually and since we've just had the first snow it looked really nice.  It's this place where people can cut their own Christmas trees and then buy some coffe and waffles with cream and jam and also some crafts.  Everything that is sold in this market has to be made or designed by Icelanders, so we fit right in.

I've been so busy printing labels and getting myself organized for the market that I didn't have time to do the Advent wreath today.  Oh, well I'll get in done tomorrow, or the next day.  There's plenty of time...  isn't there?

I really like this one

I made this soap and I intended it to be just like one that I made last year.  I really liked that soap.  I loved the colour and the scent, and I especially liked they way it felt.  It was the first silk soap that I made.  So I thought I would replicate it.  But I didn't.  In part because I didn't have the exact ingredients and in part because my brain gets ideas most of the time and tends to want to do different things all the time.  And I let it.  Because that way, life is fun and not boring.

So I did this soap, mostly like I did last time, except I couldn't decide if I should use Annatto seeds and make it a soft yellow or use the fresh Rumex oil that I had just started and make it pink.  So I used both.  I thought: Maybe I'll get a pretty orange or coral colour.  But I didn't and it's a rather dark yellow, but that's fine because the really nice thing is that I did a fragrance blend that I really, really liked and the decoration reflected that and I think it just so cute.

The recipe that this one turned out to be is:

38%  - 200g / 7 oz.   Olive oil
28%  - 150g / 5.3 oz.   Coconut oil
19%  - 100g / 3.5 oz.   Lard
6%   -   30g / 1 oz.   Cocoa butter
6%   -   30g / 1 oz.   Sunflower oil (half infused with Annatto seeds and half with Rumex root)
4%   -   20g / 0.7 oz.  Rice bran oil

I used an infusion of Baldursbra/Mayweed as the water.  It gives a lovely yellow colour and also smells really nice.  It's a local herb (almost weed) that is sometimes used the same way as Chamomile.  I also added about a teaspoon of sugar too the tea before dissolving the lye.  Then I added quite a bit of silk threads (still using the bridal silk) and let them dissolve in the lye.

For the scent I used some Sandalwood (the real expensive stuff), Bergamot, Bensoin, Palmarosa and Ylang Ylang.  And as the crowning glory I threw on a few dried flowers: Some tiny rosebuds, some Chamomile and lavender and a few herb leaves that I had hanging somewhere.  I put this in my boudoir    (it's the previous girls room that I now filled with my thrifty treasures) because it smells so nice that I wanted that scent to infuse my special place.

I had this idea a while back that I would like to experiment more with fragrance blends but somehow I haven't really gotten into it that much.  I guess there have been other things to occupy my mind.  But now I feel that I want to make a few experiments.  I've decided to make a few more soaps like this one, but with different fragrance combinations.  I think one very white, but a rosy scent and perhaps one blue (if I can bear to sacrifice my indigo) with a greener sort of scent and then I should do a pink one with either Rumex or Rhubarb oil and something lovely smelling.  Oh, I'm really quite excited about these.  Maybe they look a bit "old lady", but I'm turning into one anyway.  They will be my special blend soaps and I make them in my small 500g mold.  And then I thought I could do a matching fragrance blend for some sugar scrub cubes.  Or dollops, I think dollops look more old fashioned and lady like.  And I would love to do both a bath bomb and lotion bar.  That would make a wonderful Christmas present.

I'm really getting into the Christmas spirit now, in spite of unseasonably warm weather (it's been raining non stop for weeks).  I even baked my first batch of Christmas cookies the other night.  I've never been this early.  Ever.  This is going to be a lovely holiday season.  I can just feel it.  No.  Actually.  I know it.  Because I decided it's going to be just that.  A lovely holiday season.

Soap!

I've been making soaps again.  The Christmas soaps are pretty late this year, but I've been busy with many other things and so has my cousin.  Of course, I have made quite a few soaps this summer and autumn, but perhaps not as many as last year.  There are so many things that compete for my time.  There is gardening, visiting thrift shops, herbal stuff to make and of course the dying and then I have a few projects at home for some DIY.  But most time consuming has been Pinterest (www.pinterest.com).  It's completely addictive.  I even saw something that I almost pinned.  It was one of those clever sayings and it compared Pinterest to Crack.  Not that I would know for sure, but I can well believe it.

I just spent an hour and a half to add a Pinterest button to my blog.  I had to try it.  It looks slightly too big, but I've given up tweeking the size for now.  But I love Pinterest and wouldn't want to be without it now.  Just a great place to store interesting bookmarks and webpages. This is my Pinterest .  I've also started to use Evernote and an organizer/notes thing as well as something called Myfitnespal in an effort to get rid of those eternal extra 5 (or is it 10) pounds (and that's probably kilo's).  But at least I'm getting very, very organized.  And I have to mention that I finally cleared the clutter in the kitchen today.  It almost looks empty now with all that counter space.

But back to soaps.  I have been making soaps for Christmas lately.  Lavender was a given since my daughter needs it to give to the grandmothers.  They just adore Lavender.  So we (my cousin and I) made two soaps with Lavender EO and experimented with the colours a bit.  One of the soaps was Alkanet infused oil with a bit of Rhubarb oil and the other one was also Alkanet oil, but with more Rhubarb soap.  This was to make the purple look a bit more red, to celebrate Christmas.  My cousin suggested that and I love to do things a bit differently every time, so I was game.  The colours are really nice.  I'm not sure which one I like, especially since they change a bit with time as the soap cures, so I'll reserve my judgement for now.  The recipe was from last Christmas which I posted before, so I won't repeat it.  For decoration we used Sugar crystals to decorate the soaps and that looks pretty good.  I think it looks like jewels, but my sister asked if we were using broken glass!

We also did some little soaps to decorate other soaps.  We did pink hearts, using the Rhubarb oil from this summer.  It only takes a little I find.  I used IKEA ice cube molds for those.  And then we also did stars.  Those were just natural colourless soap that I poured into a tray and I used a cookie cutter to make.  Maybe they should have been yellow?  But I think I just may spend some of my precious Indigo to make blue soap with a star.  That would be really Christmas-y.

Lichen: Obsession no... Oh! What was it again?

Or:  The importance of being rigorous about writing things down

I had this uneasy feeling that something wasn't quite right, but since I couldn't find the piece of paper I had written my notes down on, I brushed it aside.  But I was right.  Something was wrong.  I got my Lichen soaps mixed up.  I'm not used to making many batches at the same time.  I usually make just one batch, sometimes two and I have done three at a time, but then my cousin was with me.  So this marathon soaping session was quite unusual for me.  Afterwards I was sure I had written down what lichen decoction went with what scent and what I put on top of them, but I couldn't find it.  So I tried to do it from memory and, boy does that not work!

When I started making soaps I wrote down the recipes in a notebook and then input them into Soapcalc and saved them as pdf files.  So I'm pretty organized.  But since I was using the same one for them all I just saved the first recipe and wrote the name of the lichen and the scent and what I put on top on a slip of paper that I found in a hurry.  Then I misplaced it.  

I finally found the piece of paper, so I could correct my mistake.  But the results were so surprising that it was really counterintuitive.  The Lichen that coloured the most is the one that give the least colour to yarn.  The first one I wrote about, Peltigera canina.  But parts of that post are wrong, I had the wrong soap mached up with the Lichen.  I simply coudn't believe that there was this pretty Peach from so little colour.  Admittedly, I used Lemongras EO which is yellow in colour, but that was only about 10 g and then 10 g of Peppermint EO which doesn't have any colour at all.  So it must be the Lichen.

I thought I would get a better feeling for the Lichen's potential to colour stuff by doing these experiments, but I have to say: I still haven't quite figured it out.  Lichen is still a mystery too me and still just as fascinating.  I will continue to read about them and try them out, both as ingredients in soap and as dyes.  Even as medicinal plants, because many of them are used as such.  Just totally fascinating organisms.

Don't ask how I like the soaps.  I haven't tried them yet, they are still curing.  I have been using the face cream that I made with lichen decoction.  And I like that.  Pretty sure that the lichen decoction does something good.  I really need to try more soaps, I have a few that I haven't tried yet, the Seaweed soap among them.  I've finally exhausted the subject of Lichen soaps although I am still dying yarn with new lichen varieties that I have found.  But, not a day too soon, I have also started to make soaps for Christmas.  I can't wait for Christmas.  I love that time of year.

Lichen: Parmelia saxatilis - Obsession nr. 4

Parmelia is the lichen that has most commonly been used here in Iceland to dye.  It gives rather nice yellows and browns and even over to reddish browns.  And it leaves it's wonderful scent in the wool.  As with other lichen, heat will make the colours more brown so dying cold is actually quite smart.  There are three varieties of Parmelia that grow here and all are used to dye wool.  They all look very similiar, but P. omphalodes is slightly more brown in colour than the others. P. sulcata has a wrinkly kind of surface.  I think the one that I collected is P. saxatilis which is known as Shield lichen or Crottle in English.  Crottle was also commonly used in Scotland to dye wool.

I came across this lichen by accident.  Even if it is quite common here, I hadn't quite figured out where to go to look for it.  But my husband and I were taking my mother in law for a drive to see a place where we sometimes take the dogs for a walk.  It's a lovely place, only minutes from the city and there is this river and a few small summer cottages and there is also some lava rock that is covered in moss and also Parmelia saxatilis.  I sat on the rocks and as I touched the rock to steady myself I felt that it wasn't actually a rock, but a lichen.  It looks just like rock.  That is so cool!  I am always so grateful for these little gifts from nature and in that spirit of gratefulness I gathered a little bit.  Just enough to cover my palm really.  Because there wasn't that much of it in that place.  I'm not dyeing large quantities, only about 20-25 grams of wool at a time (there are about 30 g to an oz).  I'm just curious about what colours I can get and I want to document that.

There isn't that much written about lichen dyeing compared to dying with plants, but what there is in Icelandic is about Parmelia.  There isn't usually any difference made between the different Parmelias in dyeing literature, but I'm interested in the subtle differences.  But the problem lies in identifying them correctly.  I may have to look to one of my father collegues for help one day because I just may be wrong about the particular variety.

I did the same with this lichen as I do with all the others.  I first simmer it in water and coloured some wool.  That gave me a mustard kind of yellow.  It's very nice even if I'm not a fan of the curry yellows.  There just simply doesn't seem to be a lichen colour that I don't like.

Then I tried to steep it in ammonia, but that didn't really do anything special.  At least not yet.  It's still sitting there and I'm still shaking it.  This can go on for weeks.  Up to 16 weeks I've read, so patience is needed.  But, I'm not expecting purple from this one.  It would be more of a maroon, or in the best case a burgundy colour.  But we'll just have to wait and see.

I had rather high hopes for this in a soap.  It somehow seems logical that a light yellow liquid will give much less colour than an orange one will.  But...  You'll have to wait for the next post.  There was a bit of a mix up and I couldn't find my notes, so this soap you may have seen before in my Peltigera post.   That was wrong.  This soap, the one that I decorated with Gallium verum, is made with Parmelia water, not Peltigera as I thought.  And it only produced a slight blush of a colour.  And no mustard tone to the soap.  It really amazes me how unrelated the yarn and soap colours are.  I would have thought that there would be more of a correlation between the two.  Because even if I have been using the exhaust baths to colour the soaps, there has been quite a bit of colour left in the water.  But I'm sure I'll have to try the lichen decoctions fresh in soaps one of these days.  For now this is just experimentation for fun.  And I have a lot of soaps that smell of Vetiver and something.  Oh, yes this one does have Orange Essential oil and Vetiver.  At least I got that right.

Going back

I've sometimes wondered is it is possible to go back.  You know, to visit the past.  I think I read somewhere that you can never go back.  It's never going to be the same and it's bound to disappoint.  And I have tended to agree with this viewpoint most of the time.  I know that when I've gone back to visit places where I've worked it's always been kind of awkward.  Even if I was there on genuine business and not just to visit old work mates.  But then again, I recently met an old friend that I hadn't seen in ages and it felt like we spoke just yesterday.  So I don't know.

Nostalgia is a positive thing in my mind, although I've never really looked the word up in a dictionary until now.  I just did and I guess my husbands view of it's meaning is more correct than mine.  Wikipedia says it's a: Yearning for the past, often idealized.  Hmm.  I don't feel that way about the past.  To me it's more of a celebration.  A happy feeling.  Memories of an adventurous life, strange places and foreign people. A realization that I was very young once, not that I knew it at the time, and probably made some mistakes.  But that's all right.  That's life.  "Je ne regrette rien" and I certainly don't long for the past to come back.  As much as I love to look through my albums at my old photos (and it always brings a smile to my face) I do not want to relive it.  It was happy, but not all the time.  Any given stretch of time is bound to have it's ups and downs, it's life.  That's the way it is.  Messy, but wonderful on the whole.

So anyway.  I got to go back.  To this place that I first saw 31 years ago:  Colorado.  Wonderful, wonderful place where I spent five years of my life.  And it celebrated my return with the most glorious blue sky, bright sunshine and wonderful autumn colours on the trees and a lovely unexpected 80 degrees.  I even got parking spots downtown without problems!  So, yes.  It is possible to go back.  It's not the same as it was, but I didn't expect that.  I didn't even want that.  Part of the fun of going back is to see what has changed.  The roads are wider and there are houses everywhere, where there were none before.  And new shopping malls.  But the Pearl Street Mall is there and the Hill, and The Harvest House and Boulder Canyon hasn't moved an inch.  My apartment building is still there and the Denny's is still on the corner.  The Dairy Queen has moved from the shed into a better building and now there is a Starbucks close by, and Whole Foods.  And a Goodwill store.  Perfect!  I could move right back.

But, no.  I'm back for real now.  To my life, the one I live today.  I already coloured some more wool and I have planned a soap session with my cousin tomorrow.  It doesn't matter how much fun it is to travel, either in time or space, it's always best to come home.

Lichen: Ochrolechia or Pertusaria - Obsession nr. 3

The lichens that I have already posted about, have been foliose, but now it's time for a crustose lichen.  Those are the ones that are like stains on rocks.  This type is quite abundant on rocks in the wood where I walk the dogs.

I am not sure if it's an Ochrolechia or a Pertusaria.  It is probably either lactea or corallina.  The former is a creamy or gray colour and has a pimply surface and can grow to about 15 cm, the latter is very white and without the bumps and gets even bigger, to 20 cm.  I'm not the only one who is confused, P. lactea is sometimes also called Ochrolechia lactea, so if biologists are confused...

But anyway I'm pretty sure that both O. (or P.) lactea and O. (or P.) corallina both grow on the rocks because there definitely are lichens that are more white and others that are more gray or cream.  I collected tiny amounts of the cream or gray ones and still have the white ones to explore.  Oh, there is so much to do and so little time!  But, on the bright side, I have something to look forward to.

It is pretty amazing that a colourless body of a crusty something can produce colour, but it can.  This lichen gave me the most beautiful sunny yellow on wool when simmered.  I first dyed a small amount of Icelandic wool and as it is very white I got this beautiful yellow.  The Alpaca wool that I'm using for the lichen dyes now are much darker in colour, so that the colours are more muted.

After I had used the lichen to dye in water I put the same lichen into an ammonia solution and it turned a kind of red colour with a hint of brown to it.  I shook the jar every day faithfully for over 3 months, sometimes thinking it was on the verge of turning purple, but I gave up in the end and dyed with it.

It is a lovely earthy pink.  I also dyed another skein in the exhaust bath, which gave a lighter shade.  I was very happy with that and expected great things from it in a soap.  But of course you never get what you expect in this natural colour business.

In preparation for the glorious pink I expected I scented the soap with Geranium as well as the Vetiver and put some hibiscus on top.  But the colour never showed up.  Just a slight blush of a tint in spite of the strongly coloured water.

It is so amazing to me that it is possible to get two such different colours from the same material.  How can one not be fascinated by these unpredictable things?

Lichen: Melanelia exasperata - Obsession nr. 2

I noticed that there was a lichen growing on one of the birch trees in my garden.  It wasn't pretty or anything, I actually thought it was slightly revolting.  But it was a lichen and there was plenty of it. And it was on my tree.  So I took some.  It had a green colour that was quite tempting.

I first boiled it in water to see what colour that gave to Icelandic wool.  It produced an off white colour.  Not the most exciting, but quite useful in many colour combinations.  I gave it to my daughter for a blanket that she is crocheting.

Next I put the Melanelia in Ammonia solution and I let it sit for a few weeks.  This is quite common to do with lichens because some of them will produce remarkable colours if they are steeped in this stinking solution for a few weeks.   And shaken every day.  In the olden days they used stale urine, most often from cows.  I have it on good authority from an Icelandic dyer that running after cows with a bucket to collect urine is a rather uncertain endeavour.  And as much as I love the methods of old, I decided to skip this one.  And peeing on it myself just seemed too self sufficient, somehow.

Anyway the ammonia solution is generally 1/3 ammonia, 2/3 water and it's better to have a good lid on this.  The smell is horrid.  I really knew that it wouldn't produce any exciting results because I have basically read which lichens are the primary dye lichens and Melanelia hasn't been mentioned.  But the thing is, there are a few thousand of these lichens and not all of them grow everywhere and maybe no one tried this with Melanelia.  So I had to try it for myself.

When it was apparent that nothing exciting (that means reds, pinks or purples in my mind) would come from the Melanelia I used it to dye a small skein of Alpaca wool.  The colour was slightly olive green.  Not as green as I expected because the water from it was a fairly distinct  green in a muddy brownish sort of way.  But I read somewhere that the colour of the dye water is not a good indication of the colour that a lichen produces.  These guys are just full of surprises.  But this is the greenest colour that I have had from lichen.

The Melanelia soap I did was exactly the same recipe as the other lichen soaps.  I only varied the water and the scent.  For this soap, which I hoped would be some sexy green colour I chose Ylang Ylang with the Vetiver.  I didn't get a sexy green, nor the rather muddy sort of greenish brown that I more realistically expected.  In fact the soap hardly took any colour at all.

I put some Birchbark with Melanelia on top to make it a bit more interesting, but maybe it's just a bit creapy.  But the scent is lovely, earthy and seductive.  I might use that again.

But the conclusion is that Melanelia exasperata (I'm pretty sure it is exasperata, but I willing to be corrected if a lichen expert should see this) is worthless as a colouring agent in soap.  It will produce an olive tint to wool in roughly equal quantity of lichen to wool.  The exhaust bath will be a light beige.  No reds or purples lurking in this lichen and it doesn't give much scent to the yarn, although the decoction smells nicely of lichen.  But it was a nice experiment and now I can leave it alone on my tree.

My neck of the woods

I went for a drive on Friday. There is this place only about half an hour from the city called Hvalfjördur (Whalefjord).  It's a long fjord that used to be the major road to the north, but has now been replaced by an undersea tunnel.  It's a very deep fjord and I remember how tiring it was to drive it on the way home, first all the way into the fjord and then all the way out again.  But it is a really nice place to go to, especially now that there is hardly any traffic there.

I had the idea to just wander about and look at the plants and see what I would find.  This is of course a slightly crazy time to go to the countryside, the plants are dying and all the leaves are turning yellow.  And red.  Glorious reds and oranges and it's just all very pretty.  I'm not much of an autumn person.  It's my least favorite time of year.  But this autumn has been quite nice and we haven't yet has a powerful low pressure system blow away all the leaves.  But it's getting a bit cold and as everyone knows it's always really windy out in the country.  So I dressed in my trusted ski overalls (bright red and easy to find should I get lost and have to be rescued).  I also made myself some sandwiches and took some cookies and something to drink and drove off.

I hadn't planned to pick any berries.  In fact I hadn't even thought about berries at all, and even if I had, I would have been sure that they were all gone.  But I saw so many fat and juicy berries that I had to pick them.  They were Empetrum hermaphroditum, which I understand are called crowberries in English. We call the plants krækiberjalyng and they are the most common berry that grows here. I will make saft from them.  Saft is just the juice with a bit of sugar to sweeten, but I thought using honey would be nice. It will be very healthy with all the antioxidants of the berries and the the antiseptic properties of honey. I like to have berrysaft to take in the morning, one tablespoon a day, with the fish oil.

I also found some lichens. Actually I found a lot of lichens and I collected some. I'm not quite sure what type they are, but suspect one of them is a Parmelia. I need some more lichen dyed wool for my someting-soft-and-warm-around-the-neck-this-winter-project. My mother also gave me an Umbilicaria lichen that she collected for me.  My mom wrote her BS thesis about moss and lichen that grow on the graveyard wall that is a stones throw from where we lived . I'm very excited to try to dye from that. It could give me that elusive purple.

And I wasn't alone in the fjord.  I had the company of the local sheep that still haven't been rounded up for winter.  I love the way they look, so haughty and arrogant.  Like they own the place.  And of course they do. I was just the visitor.  This is where they live all summer long.  I thought it would be nice to post a picture of them in their natural habitat.  So if you see Icelandic lamb in Whole foods, you can be sure that you are buying mountain lamb.  They are almost like goats they climb so high.

When I came home I went to the store and bought some fresh lamb's liver for dinner.  I used to get inards, like liver, hearts and kidneys for dinner very frequently as well as whalemeat and seabirds.  But so many people have stopped eating that although I don't know why.  My husband wasn't used to this type of food, but I've gotten him to like both liver and whalemeat, but he won't eat the kidneys and hearts, but the dogs love those.

Liver is really delicious and very easy to make.  We use lambs liver almost exclusively here, but calf liver is very popular in Italy and I think some nations eat liver from grown cattle.

But I think that if you can make a delicious meal with just salt and pepper as the only seasoning, then that food is the best.  So here is my liver recipe:

Slice one onion and brown it on a pan until it is soft in half olive oil and half butter.
Cut the liver into fairly thin slices and brown them on both side in the pan.
Pour some water over the whole thing and let it simmer for about 10 minutes or until the liver is no longer pink.  But don't cook it longer than that, check it by cutting into the slices.  Liver gets very tough and unappetizing if over cooked.
Thicken the liquid to a sauce by your preferred method, I use a maizena thingy from the store.  I also add a bit of cream to the sauce if I have some.
Season with salt and pepper.
Serve with boiled new potatoes, fresh salad greens and red currant jelly.

So now I just have to make the saft, make some Rhubarb syrup from the last of the Rhubarb stalks this year and then make fruit rolls from the left over mash.  I'm also wondering if I could make fruit rolls from the left over mash of berries.  And I'm all out of yoghurt and the sourdough bread is almost gone.  I bought a lot of broccoli at the store since they had them on offer and I've started to eat this delicious Broccoli soup for lunch.  So I'm making a lot of soup and freezing it.  And then there is all the timber that I got for free and plan to use to make raised beds for the allotment garden.  And I'm crocheting that warm thing and also a jacket type ting from the sweater that I unraveled last week.  I really wish I had another weekend coming.

Peltigera soap

I had to use the lichen infusions in soaps.  That's just obvious.  If one can get colour from something one has to try it in soap.  I was very curious to see what I would get from the lichens in terms of colour.  So I made a few soap with the different lichen decoctions that I had.

After some thought, I decided that they would all share the fragrance of Vetiver, but I would add other essential oils that I felt would match the colour or character of the specific lichen I was using.  Vetiver is a masculine kind of scent, rather dry and I thought it was a great base scent.  I knew that there was no hope of the lichen scent to come through the soaping process on it's own.

One lichen, Evernia prunastri (Oak moss) is extensively used in the perfume industry as a fixative and base scent.  The method of extraction is a trade secret and anyway, I couldn't get hold of that, it doesn't grow here, so Vetiver had to suffice.  But other lichens also have this very distinct and generally pleasant smell and one of the benefits of using lichen as a dye is that the wonderful scent stays with the yarn or cloth through it's lifetime and every time the garment is washed the scent is very noticeable.

I started with Peltigera canina and used a recipe for the soap that I think is going to be a good one.  It contains lard which I find gives a lovely hardness to soaps in the absence of palm oil, which I have a hard time getting without even getting into the ethical issues.  I didn't expect any colour from the Peltigera and I didn't really get any.  I'm pretty sure that whatever slight colour there is, is as much a function of the essential oils as the lichen itself.  So why bother?  Well, besides satisfying my own curiosity, I thought they might be cool to try out.  The Cetraria islandica soap that we made some time ago turned out to be very popular.  And lichens have many unique components and they are still being researched for all sorts of medicinal uses.  Many have anti bacterial, anti viral and anti fungal properties.  Peltigera canina has been used as a liver tonic and cough medicine, as well as to treat urinary disorders, thrush, tuberculosis, and rabies. I wouldn't count on it as a rabies cure, though!
The recipe for the lichen soap was:

30% Olive oil
25% Lard
25% Coconut oil
15% Soybean oil
5% Cocoa butter

The water phase was Peltigera canina decoction and I scented with Vetiver, Orange and Cubea litsea.  I put some dried plant material on top of it just to make it a little bit interesting.  I didn't have the dried lichen so I used Gallium verum, Ladys bedstraw, which I had handy.  Peppermint and Lemongras. (I made a mistake, the soap in the picture is indeed scented with Vetiver, Orange and Cubea litsea, but the water phase isn't Peltigera canina.  I got my soaps a little bit mixed up, sorry about that.  The right picture of this soap is in a post dated Nov. 7 2011.)

I made four soaps with the different lichen decoctions that I had and I had a blast.  They didn't give any spectacular colours, but there was one surprise.  But I like the Vetiver scent with the variations and I think these soaps just might be the coolest gift to the biologists in the family.

Will the lichen do anything for the skin?  I don't know, but I decided to use some of the decoction in a face cream.  It's quite nice and since I have been reading some magazines with cosmetics ads I'm pretending it's one of those 100$ miracle night creams that will make me beautiful overnight.  And guess what!  It seems to work.  Overnight!  I just love the placebo effect.

Lichen: Peltigera canina - Obsession nr. 1

Lichens have totally taken over my life for the moment.  They are so weird and different that it's hard not to be fascinated by them.  There isn't that much information around about lichen dyes and what little there is is often without latin names and that makes everything difficult.  I use latin names a lot although I realize that some people think that is very snobbish.  It isn't.  It's the only way to talk about specific plants without causing confusion.  I read about plants and dyeing in many languages and common names are very different from country to country and they tend to be quite arbitrary so that translating them is no help at all.

Lichens are totally different from other organisms and not much is understood about how they work. They may look like they are a single organism, but in fact they are two or more partners that form a symbiotic relationship. One of the partners is a fungus (mycobiont, for those who are interested) which makes the vegetative body of the lichen which houses the other partner, the photosynthetic (photobiont) one. The photosynthetic partner (there can be more than one) is usually green algae or cyanobacteria (cyano is from the greek kyanos=bluegreen) and it's funtion is to produce energy for itself and the fungal partner.  Cyanobacteria is quite well known to most soapers: Arthrospira platensis and A. maxima are the latin names of Spirulina which can be used to make green soaps.

There are about 13,500 species of lichen on the planet, but only 750 are found in Iceland.  Lichens are basically of 3 types:

1. Foliose - which means that they are leaf like in their structure.
2. Crustose - those are like a crust stuck to a surface and are usually very thin and tightly attached. These are about 75% of all lichens.
3. Fruticose - these are branched structures.

One of the problems with lichens is that they can be very hard to identify, but at least it's fairly easy to classify them by the above and work from there.

Since lichens grow very, very slowly I am careful to harvest only common lichen that I find growing abundantly.  I have a rule of never taking more than 1% of any plant material that I collect and therefore I have no fear of collecting too aggressively.

I have known about lichens forever, as my parents taught us well and especially about the more unusual plants like lichen and moss, my fathers specialty.  But I wasn't all that interested in them although I remember noticing how many different species of moss and lichen can grow on one tree trunk in one of the last trips I took with my parents about a year before my father died.  He pointed it out to me and showed me how different things grew on different sides of the tree trunks as well as at different heights and on different tree species.

Peltigera canina isn't a particularly good dye plant.  So why did I write a post about it?  Well, about a year ago when I noticed this lichen growing on a rock in the woods on my evening walk with the dogs.  Something about it fascinated me, and I was hooked from then on.  I collected a little piece and took it home.  I was quick to identify it as the very common Peltigera canina.  It has been used as a medicinal plant to treat treat wounds, urinary disorders, thrush, tuberculosis, and rabies. I later found it growing simply everywhere in the woods and in many other places.  It is amazing how a whole new world opens up when we discover something new.  And what a wonderful world it is.

It will give a light yellow colour to wool and silk.  There are lichen that will give reds and purples, so yellow isn't all that special, but I love it anyway.  It's soft and natural and it goes well with many other colours.

I have been using Icelandic wool (Lopi) to dye, but for the lichens I decided to use alpaca wool.  It's so wonderfully soft that it's obscene.  I need something soft and warm for this winter.

Seaweed salt soap - and my icy cold hands

I went to pick seaweed with my cousin and mother the other day.  We timed it carefully since we wanted to pick a particular kind of seaweed, Pamaria palmata.  Dulce is the common name in English, but we call it Söl in Icelandic.  Dulce has been used for ages here as food.  They are very nutritious and are sold as snacks and some people used them in green drinks.  This is why we were going to collect some, because my cousin uses them in her nutritious morning drink and it is rather expensive at the shops.  Self sufficiency appeals to me, even if I don't really eat that much of the stuff.

Dulce grows at the very lowest point of the beach where there is movement of the sea most of the time and in order to pick it we had to wait for the lowest tide of the month and we were fortunate that this month it happened to be a Sunday.

We only had to drive about an hour from the city to find a nice place to collect seaweed.  There are these two really cute tiny villages with tongue twisting names (Stokkseyri and Eyrarbakki) and old houses made of timber, clad in corrugated iron and painted in vivid colours with white windows.  I really love those old houses, no matter how impractical they are in the modern world with their low ceilings and tiny rooms.  They have some really nice restaurants in those villages, but we didn't stop this time.

We had to walk pretty far out on the beach to find Söl, the species we were chiefly interested in.  We could hardly sea land by the time we found some and had almost given up and turned back.  It was really hard to walk on those round seaweed covered boulders and we had had to leave my mother behind pretty early on.  I left her, bless her heart, sitting on a rock, hoping she would make it back on land without braking any bones.  I had made sure to take some refreshments with us but unfortunately I had the car keys in my pocket, so she was left stranded alone on the beach with nothing to eat and no phone (that was is the car with the food).  She wasn't upset at all, but started to collect plants to show us when we returned.  Still teaching me about plants, like she did when I was little.  So I learned all about the few plants that grow by the sea.

Even if the sun was shining it was pretty windy and cold and we could hardly see land anymore.  But all that was forgotten when we started seeing the Söl.  We managed to collected three bucketfuls before we started to work our way back to safety, with the tide rising steadily.  I was beginning to get a bit worried that we would need to be rescued, but we made it back safely, if a bit tired and cold (did I already say that?).

We didn't just collect dulce. We also saw these really pretty green seaweeds that I now know are Ulva lactuca, or Laver.  I collected some because I wanted to use them in soap to see if I could get the lovely green colour.

That soap just had to be salt soap, I mean how could it not be.  Sea. Salt.  No brainer!  It did turn out green and a nice green at that.  The photo doesn't do it justice.  It will probably not last too long, but I'm enjoying it all the same.

I had decided to make about 2/3's of it non-salt and have the rest a salt soap.  So I poured quite a lot of soap into the mold and them dumped some salt into the soap batter I had left.  It turned out to be the exact opposite.  More salt soap than not.  I should have tried to get some fancy blending of the two.  But I thought it was going to be a straight line.  Oh well!


I used a lot of coconut oil to see if it lathers.  So the recipe is quite simple:

Cocoanut oil      50%     250g / 8.8oz
Olive oil            40%     200g /  7.0oz
Cocoa butter     10%       50g /  1.8oz

Seaweed blended with 200g / 7.0oz of water.

I scented it with a blend of Peppermint and a hint of Vetiver.  It's quite nice and appropriate for this sea inspired soap.  I used fine sea salt.  I like that a lot better than coarse salt.  It makes a smooth rock hard surface that doesn't scratch.   I look forward to trying it.  I kind of like salt soaps.  They are so different and this one is very authentic with real-live-seaweed that I picked myself from the sea with my icy cold hands.  Did I already say it was cold?

Fairy candy - Strawberries

Strawberries are Fairy candy.  Or they could be Goddess fruit.  Definitely they are otherworldly good when you grow them yourself.  Much sweeter and juicier than store bought no matter if they are imported or grown locally.  I think it's because they are picked just a little too soon so they don't get damaged in transport.

This summer I got a bowlful of my own homegrown strawberries for the first time.  A whole bowlful!  I've had a crop of strawberries before, but it's always been one or two at a time, but not a full bowl of fully ripe strawberries, deliciously red and sweet and juicy.

I have two varieties of strawberries.  Some nameless one I bought in a garden center (they never seem to care about named varieties here) and a named variety that I grew from seed so the name was on the packet, but I have since forgotten it (but I think I have the empty packet somewhere).  The seeds came from Denmark and the flowers are pink and the fruit is large and dark and juicy.  This variety flowers well and doesn't try to send out runners like the other one does.  That is a good thing since that means it will concentrate on flowering and producing lots of fruit.  But I lost most of the plants last winter so I want to propagate the plant that I still have.  So I saved a few seeds to sow and am hoping to raise a few more plants.

Strawberry seeds need to get a period of cold in order to germinate, so I put them into the freezer after cleaning them well.  I only have 11 seeds, but I find that it never pays for me to sow too many seeds at a time.  It only results in way too many seedlings and consequently neglect and death.  I prefer to sow a few seeds and take very good care of them all.  Putting the seeds in the freezer somehow doesn't feel very kind, but if that's what they want...

I grow them in a long and narrow box that I built and hung up on a sheltered wall in the garden.  I used some left over timber that I had, screwed the whole thing together and hung it up with some chains.  I take the box down in autumn and keep it close to the house, right under the balcony so it doesn't get soaking wet in winter.  That way most of the plants survive until next spring.  I gave them very good soil this spring and added lots of well rotted horse manure as well as some water retaining gel.  I also mulched with the manure and I have fed them with comfrey fertilizer to boost flowering.  I seems to have paid off.

The nameless variety sends out a lot of runners and this is not good for fruit production but I can easily get lots more plants.  I almost can't keep up with sticking them in pots.  I'm growing them to give to my younger daughter (her apartment has a garden) so that she too can harvest her own next summer.  Her husband doesn't really like strawberries.  Why is it that it's just girls that like strawberries?  Most guys seem to be able to take them or leave them.  My husband doesn't really eat them.  I'm not complaining, I would be devastated if I had to share my berries.  There really aren't that many of them.  And after all they are Goddess fruit, so really not for men, are they?

Gift from the gods, brought by the butler

Filipendula ulmaria - Meadowsweet is a lovely medicinal plant.  It is well known as a natural painkiller as it contains salicylic acid, the ingredient in aspirin.  The plant is however, unlike aspirin, quite gentle for the stomach and is used to treat heartburn since it neutralizes stomach acids and it is used for peptic ulcers.  It is anti inflammatory and as such it works well for rheumatic pain.  It is also astringent and a urinary antiseptic.  It is even gentle enough to treat diarrhea in children.

It's name in Icelandic is Mjaðurt, which means Meadplant.  Mead is a drink that the vikings drank way back when they were delusional enough to think Iceland was inhabitable.  There are no surviving recipes for mead, but it was probably alcoholic and some think it was made with honey, but it is fairly obvious that Filipendula ulmaria was used in it.

I got the idea to make a drink from Meadowsweet when I had finished the Rhubarb "champagne".  I was sure that it would make a lovely drink that would be even more like Champagne than Rhubarb.  The scent of Meadowsweet flowers is sweet and warm, almost vanilla like, but still very distinct.  The leaves have a slight almond like smell that is again a bit different.  I made a potful to try it out.  And Oh!  Jumm!  I really like it.  This is no drink for viking brutes.  They can drink robust Rhubarb drinks.  This one is a drink for the girls, wearing white lace, sitting in the garden in the sunshine with the butler reverently serving this delicate tasting and lovely natural champagne, like it's a gift from the gods.

The recipe is simple.

Take about 10 - 15 flower heads of Meadowsweet and put in a pot with cold water, about 4 liters/quarts.

Add:
A sliced lemon
500g. /1 pound sugar
1 desert spoon of apple vinegar.

Let this sit for 24 hours
Sieve this and pour the clean liquid into 2 liter plastic bottles, close them and let sit for a couple of days.

When the plastic bottles are quite hard, you put them in the fridge to stop the fermentation.

When you open the cold bottle, the drink will have a gentle carbonation and taste divine.
This drink is lovely and refreshing and would go well with Macarons.  You know!  Those French lovely cookies that I'm always planning to make.  That'll be another post one of these days.

I am making another batch of it these days to give to the vegetable club of the Garden society who are coming to visit the allotment (and I offered to be their host).  I did give some to my husband, poor thing, he went into the hospital three times last month and finally got out last week (and no I never did smack him on the head with the bat :) and he's getting all better, finally.  Although that could be a result of receiving correct medical treatment rather than drinking this lovely drink.  But you never know, do you?
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My favorite books about soapmaking

I buy books.  A lot of books about all sorts of things.  If I get interested in something, the first thing I do is to buy a book about it.  Or even better, two books... or more.  So I have a few books about soap making.  I love all my books and I am always so grateful to the authors that they took the time and made the effort to write a book to share their knowledge with me and many others.  I would like to share a few of my favorite titles and books about soapmaking are first in line.  I have to say beforehand that I do not know any of the authors.  I have only bought their books and read them.  I haven't read every book there is about the subject, but if I see a book about making soaps, I look it over thoroughly and buy it if it interests me.  What are your favorite books?  I might be missing a few!

I think my absolute favorite book about making soap must be Anne Watson's simple little book with the big title: "Smart Soapmaking: The simple guide to Making Traditional Handmade Soap Quickly, Safely, and Reliably, or How to Make Luxurious Handcrafted Soaps for Family, Friends, and Yourself".

It was my first book on  making soap and I did read an awful lot of reviews about a lot of soapmaking books before I chose that.  I wasn't disappointed.

The book doesn't have glossy photo's, just very nice black and white line drawings.  It isn't big and it isn't expensive.  What the book has is very clear instructions on how to make soap.  It talks about the dangers of lye (so much so that when I made my first soap I looked like I was ready to go to the moon), equipment and ingredients.  And it lays out in very clear steps how to go about making soaps.  Anne gives quite a few recipes and I would think that anyone, anywhere would be able to find ingredients for at least a few of them.

The best part of this book is that Anne doesn't try to make the process complicated.  She simplifies things quite a lot.  Especially that "trace" thing that had me scared that I wouldn't know when it happened and then everything would be ruined.  Or that the soap would seize and then everything would be ruined,  Or that I wouldn't be able to get it out of the mold or that I wouldn't be able to cut it.

This is a book that I would recommend to any beginner interested in starting to make soaps.  It is by far the best in my humble opinion.

Another life saver that I want to mention is Soapcalc.  I use it every time I make soap (I tend to make a new recipe each time, that's crazy but that's the way I am.  I'm sure I'll come up with THE one perfect recipe one of these days).  But Soapcalc is absolutely invaluable.  I know there are other soap calculators out there and I'm sure they are just as good, but this is the one I started to use and have gotten so used to.  Soapcalc lets me choose grams or pounds or percentages and change between them in the middle.  I love that.  It doesn't look particularly good, but it is functional.  The only thing that is that I would say is:  Don't use the default 38% water.  It makes for a very wet soap.  Change it to 30% or even less.

Anne has also written another book with and equally interesting title:  "Milk Soapmaking: The Smart and Simple Guide to Making Lovely Milk Soap From Cow Milk, Goat Milk, Buttermilk, Cream, Coconut Milk, or Any Other Animal or Plant Milk".  That is excellent for those who are interested in making milk soaps.  Milk is a bit difficult to work with and here I learned that the best milk soap makers can make very white soaps using milks of all sorts.

I also discovered in that book that there are plant milks and that in soapmeking the same rules apply to those as to traditional milk.  I come from cow country and it was almost news to me that sheep and goats produce milk, but coconut milk! Almond milk!  That's not milk to me, but apparently when it comes to soapmaking, it is.  Oh well!  You live and learn :)



Another book which I found very helpful was Susan Miller Cavitch's "The Soapmaker's Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques & Know-How (Natural Body Series - The Natural Way to Enhance Your Life)".  What is it with these long titles on books about making soap?

What I liked about that book was the complete opposite of what I liked about Anne Watson's book.  This book had loads of information about all the different additives that is possible to use in soapmeking.  Variations like colors and scents and shaving soaps and exfoliating soaps and ... the list is endless.  And that is terribly interesting when one is starting out and is just very thirsty for more ideas to work on.  So that is one great book to have on the bookshelf.   Again, there are no large glossy photo's in this one, but nice line drawings and plenty of inspiration.


Finally, I have to mention a special favorite of mine.  This is a series of books about absolutely everything.  Well, everything that is remotely related to the country:  Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins.

I just love them.  They have bulletins about raising chickens, natural remedies, growing the best blueberries and building a root cellar to name but a few.  And they're only around $4 each.  They are all written by different people and they say they have more than 200 different titles, some of them very interesting.  "Axes and Chainsaws".  How cool is that!

I have a few.  No!  I didn't get the one about axes and chainsaws, but I did get the ones about natural remedies, hand creams and cheese and soap.  I think I also ordered the one about beekeeping, optimistically hoping my husband would suddenly change his mind about that.  Or maybe I just dreamed that.  I can't seem to find it now, but I did find a lot of titles that I would like:  "Great Rhubarb Recipes"!  I need that one :)  And "Making Grapevine Wreaths" (although I think my grapevine is about to give up on life), "Planning & Planting a Moon Garden" might be the answer to that or maybe I should just get "Sleep and Relaxation: A Natural and Herbal Approach". That actually sounds really good.  I should just do that.
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