The call of the Muse - It's not a destination

It took me a while as a young student of art and design to realize that the purpose of my school projects wasn't always to produce something incredibly beautiful for my teachers to admire.  Sometimes the whole purpose was to go through a process.  A process that tested my technical capabilities, challenged my mind and stretched the physical qualities of my medium.  Thus I gradually learned to expand my self imposed limits of creativity.  The outcome or final product was part of the process and interesting as such, but it wasn't the beginning or end of all.  This is not to say that everything I did as a student was very ugly.  Some was, but some was quite good (if I say so myself, I even won a few awards in student shows - sorry, I just had to brag a bit).

The freedom that one gets from adopting this mindset when creating is wonderful and it makes life so much fun.  I love to do.  I love to do things.  In the sense of doing something to make something.  Some thing.  The whole process is joyous.  I feel good while I do it and I love every step of the way.  The beginning of an idea.  It can be like a tiny sprouting seed that takes days to emerge, a little bit at a time.  Almost shy to expose itself.  Or sometimes it gushes forth like a waterfall, screaming for immediate execution.  I respond to the call of the muse when I can, but some ideas have been germinating for years and decades and are still abiding their time.  I tend to be a bit spontaneous, but even so there is always a preparation stage, during which the idea will mature, change, evolve.  And then there is the execution.  That is bliss.  It's the culmination. It's full of excitement and unexpected happenings, some happy and some disastrous.  But almost without fail there is the birth of the next idea.  Oh, what fun!  And then it's all over and I'm left with something.  Some physical thing that somehow became the product of the process.  But it is not the whole point.

Don't get me wrong.  I enjoy it if people genuinely like something I did for it's face value.  But they will never be able to experience it the way I have.  And I don't particularly have a need to explain.  Which is why I tended to be reluctant to put a title to my work in the old days.  I'm not a practicing artist so this isn't a big issue anymore.  These days I make whatever strikes my fancy.  Soap, mostly.  Creams, lotions, herbal remedies, bread and yoghurt.  I'll grow plants and knit, crochet, sew and maybe dye fabric and even bind a book one day soon.  And I do it for me.  Precisely to experience the joy of the process.  Except it is sometimes an issue.  It annoys me tremendously when people foster on me their preconceived notion that everything is supposed to be pretty or good or nice.  And then proceed to tell me so, when it obviously isn't.  Or the opposite.  Sometimes that just isn't the point.

If I ask you to taste something I made.  Share with me the laughter, when it tastes revolting.  Make that memory with me.  When I make something that would be considered hideous in any culture on this planet, don't insult my intelligence by admiring it.  Maybe that experiment wasn't about beauty.  Ask me what I learned.  And please don't tell me that my work in progress is ugly.  How do you know?  Why would you want me to know that?  What if I care?  And what if I don't care?  What if I'm having fun?  I'm playing. I am learning.  And I am living.  May I suggest you do that too.
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Happy Easter

"Sweet is a small gift" was on the little slip of paper that was inside my Easter egg.  I like that a lot better than the slightly insulting admonitions of my youth like: "Money turns many into apes".  But I think they have started to make up new ones rather than use the fairly well known traditional sayings and adages.  My egg is the dark one in the middle, I don't like milk chocolate.  The others are for my daughters.

The small gifts that I had made for The first Day of Summer were appreciated.  I gave the lip balms, some face cream, a few soaps, some beautiful blue yarn that I picked up at a thrift shop and a book.  My mom also brought gifts.  She had picked up some old books, an old (1950's or 60's) German Encyclopedia about crochet and knitting and another on games and card playing which found appreciative new owners.  We really like to go treasure hunting in thrift shops.  There are so many interesting things to find and I also really like old books.  They are often much more current than one would think.  And if they are not, they can be really funny.

My mom gave me "Hlín, the yearbook of Icelandic women", 40 years worth, unbound.  So I guess she approves of my plans to start to dabble in bookbinding.  They date from 1917 to 1957 which was the last year it was published.  It fascinating to read.  I've found 2 soap recipes and quite a few tidbits about dyeing with plants.  Not to mention a few recipes for traditional food.  I have been taking a peep at them, but need to cut up the pages of some of them to get a decent look.  The paper is pretty yellow and I should probably photocopy the oldest onto acid free paper before it crumbles to dust.  I look forward to attempting to bind them.  I think they deserve some nice girly book cloth.  I may have to make my own.  But I can do that :)

But I forget, the point of this post was to say: Happy Easter.  Eat lots of chocolate!

The First Day of Summer

Well, the good new is that summer and winter froze together last night.  That signals a very good summer, which is comforting since the weather gods are throwing a spectacle of every variety they can think of at the moment:  Sleet, rain, wind and short (very short) sunny spells. The First Day of Summer is the first day of the year, according to the old Icelandic calendar and the beginning of the month of Harpa.  The Old calendar had two seasons, summer and winter, and people would count their age in winters.  We have been giving gifts on this day for five centuries, which is a lot longer than the tradition of Christmas gifts.  This day was also a special day for courting and romance.

I am having the closest family over for dinner and I made more lip balms.  I realized that the choice of a pink with peppermint or an orange with a flowery scent wasn't really for the boys, so I made a third lipbalm with Annatto oil to give a yellow colour and used Sweet orange oil.  I also have a few junk shop finds for presents (only for those who like that kind of thing) and I made some face cream which I put into new containers which I like very much, airless pumps.  So there will be a few gifts, but nothing expensive.  

Today is also the start of Easter, so this year it gets a bit jumbled with Easter decorations.  Of course they are all about spring and summer so that's fine.  And I am most definitely putting on some white clothes and a bright lipstick to greet summer and the new month of Harpa with a smile on my face. 

Lip balm - a perfect Summergift

I have been planning to start to celebrate the First day of summer in a more formal way than before.  It is the oldest holiday in Iceland and unique to this country, I think.  It's funny how I have gotten more interested in old people and traditions as I grow older.  It just seems that older people can teach me something about the world they knew.  With younger people, it's more like: Jep! Been there!  Done that!  Oh yeah!  That too!  No surprises there, really, so it's all a bit repetitious and slightly boring.  But older people are very interesting, they know stuff I never knew, lived in a time that's long gone and they aren't hanging around that much longer either.

I'm still a bit frustrated that missed some good opportunities to question my great aunt, Anna.  I just didn't appreciate soon enough how much she had lived through and how much I would learn if only I had figured out what to ask.  She always had an open house on the First day of Summer.  She didn't really invite anyone, we were just supposed to know and show up.  And we did.  It was an old fashioned coffee and cakes gathering of the most boring relatives.  But my father made sure we showed up.  I have been thinking that I should revive this tradition, except to do it with my closest family and do dinner.  I also want to give everyone a small present, like is customary to do on that day.  I'm not thinking of another mammon-fest, but just an occasion where I, as the matriarch (my mom is there, obviously, but she doesn't do family meals.  It's just not on her radar), give small summer presents.  And I thought of lip balm.  I have given people lip balm before and they like it very much.  I do too.  I think home made is the best and it literally takes minutes to do.

I have been looking for these sliding tins for some time in Europe and I found them at a British web page: Of a Simple Nature.  I bought a few (too few) and went ahead the other day.  I made two recipes, one pink and one orange.  I think they look so cute.  The red one has Peppermint essential oil, wonderfully fresh and traditional.  The orange was a first for me.  I mixed Alkanet and Annatto seed oils to get the colour.  It's very pretty, although it doesn't really show on the lips that much.  The scent for the orange lip balm was a combination of Vanilla and Rose.  It smells wonderful.  I figured I should do something sophisticated for those who are not fans of peppermint.

I have never written down my lib balm recipes, but this time I did.  So here it is.  It is a very small recipe, I did one for each colour and filled 6 tins each.  It's pretty standard, no glycerin or honey, but it is a consistency that I like.  I can be made softer by adding more oil.  Anyone can do it and I don't really know why everybody doesn't.

Just melt together in a waterbath or use the microwave (just use short bursts so it doesn't burn):

10 g / 0.35 oz.  Beeswax
10 g / 0.35 oz.  Coconut oil
17 g / 0.6  oz.  Castor oil

Pour into small jars or lip balm tubes.

For a pink colour: add some Alkanet infused oil and Peppermint essential oil
For an orange colour: Add Annatto infused oil and Alkanet infused oil about half and half or adjust to get the orange shade you like.  Add Vanilla and Rose essential oil.

Another colour might be yellow, with just Annatto infused oil.  That would probably make a very pretty lipbalm.  It is tempting to use the citrus oils for yellow and orange colours.  Some of them are photo toxic, but not all.  For example, Sweet Orange is not considered photo toxic, but Bitter Orange is.

From what I can gather the following citrus based oils would be safe to use in lip balm and creams and lotions:

Essential oils of:
Mandarin (Citrus reticulata)
Sweet Orange (Citrus sinensis)
Tangelo (Citrus x hybrida)
Tangerine (Citrus nobilis)
Neroli oil (Citrus aurantium)

Also the DISTLLED essential oils (NOT expressed essential oils) of:
Lemon (Citrus limon)
Lime (Citrus aurantifolia)
Grapefruit (Citrus paradisi)
It may be better to shy away from those if the method of production is unknown.

So maybe I'll add a yellow lip balm with Orange scent and that will be a perfect summer gift.

Colour... please

After the miserable months of January, February and March it really is time for some colour.  While winter has some lovely moments, the absence of colour is what makes it so difficult.  Absoluely everything turns gray and brown.  Spring brings back colour and makes the heart sing with happiness.  Just seeing colours can make one happy and I had to smile when I saw these multicoloured plastic eggs in the Good S some time ago.  I actually thought that someone with a terrible taste had dreamed these up as Easter decoration, but my husband said they are for Easter egg hunts.  Silly me.  But I bought them anyway, thinking that they might be used as molds for bathbombs or soaps or something.

I have been feeling a bit under the weather for the last couple of weeks.  I had a minor surgery and haven't been able to go to the gym.  As a result I have spent two weeks with the remote control firmly clutched in one hand while munching sweets with the other and generally experiencing the weariness that accompanies the end of winter.  I had lots of things that I wanted to do, but just couldn't bring myself to actually do any of them (except make fresh yoghurt, I did do that).  But then one evening I just got my butt off the sofa, got out my Grumpy, fed him and put him on his shelf, I made lip balm in two colours and flavors/scents and I used those funny little plastic eggs as molds for soaps.  So three projects in one evening.  Boy, did that feel good.

I just realized that easter isn't far off and now I need to start to prepare for that.  My mom used to decorate for Easter almost as much as she did for Christmas.  She embroidered little tablecloths, pillow cases and runners and we always collected the little chicks that decorate the chocolate Easter eggs that are customary here.  When my sister and I got up on Easter Sunday we would go to the living room where my mom had put our almost identical eggs on this runner that was embroidered with yellow chicks, easter lilies, tulips and eggs.  And there would be the chicks of Easters past and yellow candles.  We would rip the cellophane off the eggs, see whose egg was the prettiest and then start to breake it up to get at the sweets it contained as well as the most important: The saying.  There was always an old saying or adage inside.   And back then it could be anything.  I sometimes got the most horrid sounding things ("The stupid usually have a large head" springs to mind (it really sounds more poetic in Icelandic) and felt miserable, especially if the chick on my sisters egg had a prettier face than mine.  Nowadays they only put the nicest sayings in the eggs.

The egg soaps were a fun little project that I still haven't completed.  Getting the soap out has been interesting, to say the least.  So I will have to see if I can make them presentable or if they are heading for the rebatch bin.  This is all a bit fiddly and perhaps a little frou-frou, but they could be fun.  The colours did turn out differently than I had anticipated.  That means I learned something new.  Which is great.  I'll share the new knowledge in another post.

But I realized that I needed some retail therapy when I  saw photo's of Lilacs on a blog and it almost brought tears to my eyes.  Lilacs bloom in the middle of June in my world!  So I went out and got this big garish pink Hydrangea to brighten up my life. Just to tide me over until nature starts it's annual show.

I finally won!

The-ugliest-soap-anyone-ever-made-reward has got to be mine.  I made this soap sometime before Christmas and I had high hopes for it.  I thought it would be perfect as a gift to old people as a soap for a foot bath.  I had just gotten some Ginger essential oil and wanted to try it.  I had read that it's warming so I had this brilliant idea to combine it with the eggshells that I so ardently collected during the big bake fest.

When I used finely crushed eggshells in my Alkanet and lavender soap I liked it, but I like very scratchy.  I did however suggested that normal people could use it on their feet.  So I thought it a brilliant idea to do a special foot soap?  That time I had thought that the eggshells would sink to the bottom and form a layer at the bottom with a pumice kind of surface.  But they were pretty suspended throughout the body of the soap.  This time I sprinkled a layer on the bottom, thinking that the soap would soak in and automatically embed the eggshell in the bottom layer.  Well that didn't really work.  The result was a completely dry layer of eggshells that just sat on the bottom of my mold when I lifted the soap up.  What little managed to stick to the bottom of the soap was uneven and not pretty at all.  Fortunately, I had also put some eggshells in the main soap, so it wasn't a total disaster.  I still had a ton of exfoliating power in that soap.

I thought carefully about this recipe, but I can't find the recipe file.  But I wrote down the ingredients so I know it contains: Olive oil, Coconut oil, Soybean oil, Cocoa butter, Honey, Ginger EO and Peppermint EO and then the eggshells.  I think it might be 30% of the first three oils and then 10% Cocoa butter.  I used honey for it's lovely humectant qualities and it also gives a nice lather.  The eggshells need to be very finely crushed, or one can use poppy seeds.

I thought that since the colour was a sort of beige from the honey, it would look good with brown accents so I used cocoa powder for a line and sprinkled a bit of it on top with some brown sugar.
It looked fine in the mold.  But when I took it out to cut it it was horrendously ugly.  Not only was the bottom uneven and ugly, but the line looked dirty and the sugar on top just plain uninteresting.  I quickly shoved it out of the way so that no one would see it and puke.  And promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, I had cold feet, literally, so I went and found it and used it as foot soap.  I guess appearances aren't everything, because it works fine.  For feet.  Not for the body.  I tried it.  The eggshells are just a bit coarser than when I used them before (pounding them with a pestle in a mortar is a lot of work) and they did scratch my legs quite severely.   But that is very good for hard skin on the feet.  The scent of ginger with the peppermint is very nice, not too strong and maybe I should have used more.  Although I can't say that the soap alone made my feet feel warm, I'm sure it helped.  So all in all , not a bad soap.  But boy is it ugly.
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