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.