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.