The last of the Special Blends

I can't believe that I forgot this one.  The last of my Special Blend soaps that I made for Christmas.  I never got round to doing the blue.  I had intended that for my mom, with some sort of a fresh blend of oils (I'm sure I wrote that down somewhere) and Shea butter.

But back to this one.  I had to do a pink soap for Christmas and used... Yes Rumex oil.  I do love the stuff.  But as all my Special Blends, this one had to have that one different ingredient and I found Lanolin.  Lanolin is wonderful stuff.  It is the oil that is on sheep's wool, so it couldn't be more local.  We have more sheep than people here and I love them.

I know that some people are allergic to Lanolin, but for the rest of us, it's a wonderful moisturizer.  So I used a bit in this soap.  I haven't tried it.  I can't believe that I admit that, but I have so many soaps to try.  I was thinking that I should start to pick out my all time favorite soaps.  I still remember the ones I particularly like and it would undoubtedly be interesting to see if there is a common denominator.  I have a feeling about he recipes that I live, but I use so many different one that I should do this in a more scientific way.  But back to the Rosewood Special Blend.  Because it had to be rose something and I can't use pure rose oil, it's just too expensive so I thought Rosewood would be nice.  The recipe was:

Olive oil  40% - 200g / 7 oz.
Coconut oil 30% - 150g / 5.3 oz.
Cocoa butter 15% - 75g / 2.6 oz.
Rapeseed oil 10% - 50g / 1.8 oz.
Lanolin 5% - 25g / 0.9 oz.

I used about 25 g. of Rumex oil.  Part of that was deducted from the Olive oil, but 5 g. were extra.  I guess I thought is wouldn't be dark enough, so the recipe really should be for 5 g. more of Olive oil.  But anyway, I also used both silk and sugar in the water.  

As the picture shows, the soap seized on me and the soap has that characteristic look of being pushed and shoved into the mold.  The scent was a nice blend of Rosewood, Sandalwood Amirys, Bensoin, Ylang Ylang.  It's quite nice, not oppressive at all but rather mild and feminine.  I actually am glad that I haven't tried it yet.  I have something to look forward to this spring.  I can't wait for spring.  This winter has been dark and oppressive and I want more light.  It's getting better.  I can always tell by my Ficus benjamin a who always has a tantrum at this time of the year, just before it starts to get light again, it's leaves turn yellow and trow themselves on the floor.  I feel the same, but I know from years of experience that just as the two of us are about to give up, the sun reappears and spring will be here eventually.

Soaps for grannies

The first soap that I sold at the Christmas market was to a woman slightly older than I, who was buying the soap for herself.  It was Lavender soap.  There is something special about Lavender soap.  It's the soap that the grandmothers in my family get for Christmas.  Since I sold all the Lavender soaps that I had at the market, I needed to make a new batch especially for the grannies.  And since there wasn't enough time to cure before Christmas, the soap were packed with a slip of paper that explained about curing soap and that the soap would have to be used for purely decorative purposes for about 10 more days.  Ready to be used in the new year.

I made this especially with the older women in mind.  I had just bought some Shea butter and wanted to try that in soap.  One of the grannies is a fan of Shea butter, so I thought I would make her happy.  Needless to say I used Alkanet infused oil to get the purple color, but I have to admit that I completely love the pretty blue that it turns at first and I would really like to get that color permanently.  I think I have to sacrifice some of my precious indigo soon to make some blue soap.  Blue soap with Shea butter would be just perfect.

But back to the Granny soap.  I made a small batch and tweaked the recipe a bit so the percentages are a bit strange.

Olive oil 50% - 270g / 9.5oz
Coconut oil 28% - 150g / 5.3oz
Shea butter 9% - 50g / 1.8oz
Cocoa butter 9% - 50 /1.8oz
Rice bran oil 4% - 20g / .7oz

I used sugar in the water and about 80g of the Olive oil was Alkanet infused.  Scent was pure Lavender, no mix this time and I sprinkled a few flowers on top.  Sea Mayweed, Achillea, Lavender and Calluna, the Sea Mayweed flowers turned a pretty lime green when the soap dried and I liked the effect.  There are alway surprises when working with natural materials and I do appreciate that.  I may use those flowers again and maybe arrange them a bit more carefully.  Tweezers work well for this fiddly work.

Speaking about fiddly work.  The eiderdown cleaning progresses at a snails pace.  I now have 114 grams cleaned, but I am going to make a harp (a tree frame with strings) to help with the cleaning.  Norwegians use this and I'm going to try to see if I can make one and clean faster that way.  I'm really excited about my eiderdown and I can't wait to get the cover.  It's being made in Germany right now and I think it will be fabulous.

Pink at last - Using fresh Rumex oil

Since I really wanted some pink soap, I kept making soap but this time I used the new Rumex oil.  Only 3 weeks of infusion.  I wasn't at all sure that it would produce any color at all since the oil had only taken on a little color.  With this light yellow oil I was excited to see what would happen.  I made this soap with the usual amount of Rumex oil, about 3% (20 g. to 700 g.)

It turned this lovely light pink.  There is alway a bit of yellow in it where it gells, but the color tends to veer towards pink as it gets exposed to air.  It is pretty amazing to me that the small brown balls and the soap and pink hearts are made with the same material, rumex oil, but just different batches.

I think the conclusion has to be that fresh oil will produce pink, but as it gets older the color will get darker and eventually turn brown.  It doesn't take a lot of oil to color the soap.  I've usually used 15-20 grams in one recipe of 500-700 grams, which is less than 5% of the Rumex oil to the amount of other oils used.  That is very different from the amount of oil that I use when I've used Alkanet oil.  But I really need to try to make soap using less of that.  Could be the next project.  There is always demand for Lavender soap.

For decoration, I used Heather (Calluna) and Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) on top.  Those two are actually very well suited as a decoration on top of soaps because they keep their color well and don't turn brown easily since they sit on top of the soap and don't really get wet.  It actually turned into a very pretty and girly soap.

Now I need to make yet another one, using this very Rumex oil, except it has now been infusing for something like 8-10 weeks.  In fact I just poured it into a jar to discard the Rumex root.  The oil is a lovely, lovely bright golden yellow and it smells lovely.  I have been using it on my face at night and I swear that it does make my skin feel and look better.  Of course my face looks a bit yellow.  The oil must be chock full of antioxidants.  But since my darling husband hasn't even commented yet (other than to tell me I'm beautiful) I'll keep using it.  And btw I'm almost up to 100 grams of cleaned Eiderdown.  Only 900 to go.

The mysterious affair of the brown Rumex soap...

Puzzled by my brown soap, I thought that maybe I hadn't used enough Rumex oil.  I generally use about 15-20 grams (0.5 -0.7 oz) of the infused oil in one recipe.  My recipes are small, either 500g or more usually 700 g (about 25 oz.)  The obvious solution was to use more oil, maybe double it, and see if that would change the color to pink.

So I did.  But it didn't.  Still stuck in the thinking that yellow and pink somehow go together I threw on some dried calendula and calluna, with a bit of yarrow.  It probably looks better on the brown background than it would on the intended pink,  but I will not be repeating that combination any time soon.  I scented it with Bensoin, Sweet Orange and Geranium.  Tha was a nice combination, which I might repeat.  The Soap was Olive oil, Coconut oil, Soy bean oil and Cocoa Butter.

I love the brown color though.  It's just really nice.  I sometimes forget how nice brown can be, I tend to think of it as a dull color, but it is so useful.  And lots of things that I like are brown.  Linnen is mostly brown.  Most of the eyeshadows that I can use without looking ridiculous are brown and eiderdown id brown.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  I saw somewhere that the way to recognize Eiderdown is that it is always white.  That is nonsense.  The female Eiderducks are brown and therefore the down can only be brown.

I've been cleaning the Eiderdown myself.  I found out that if I have it cleaned by machine I will only get about 20% out of it.  That is an average number and it could be more or it could be less.  But I think that the process the down goes through in the machines is bound to waste some down.  It basically means that my 3 kilos would only yield 600 grams, and that isn't enough for a duvet for me.  I was hoping to get 40% by hand cleaning, but I think that is a bit optimistic.  I have now cleaned just over 70 grams.  So 7% of the duvet done.  Oh, well.  Some things are worth waiting for.

The Surprises of Nature

December was cold.  We got a lot of snow for Christmas, which was incredibly nice, but now it just feels like it has been snowing forever.  In this weather I just want to snuggle up in bed, preferably under an eiderdown.  It is amazing to me to think that in late November I was out on the allotment, building raised beds and digging manure and seaweed into the soil.  There was quite a lot of weeds that I had to get out before I dug in all the goodness, so I was actually weeding.  At the end of November!  That's a new one to me.

Fortunately Dock is a very common weed in the allotment ground, to the dismay of many people, and my delight.  I dug up quite a few fat and beautiful yellow roots.  This is the most perfect time to dig up roots, when all top growth has died down and all the goodness of the plant is stored in the roots.  Next best thing is this spring, just before the plant starts to put on new growth.  This, by the way, applies (very logically) to all roots.

I still had a little bit left of the dock oil (my dock is Rumex longifolius, but most species of dock have the same properties) that I first infused.  It's colour, dark and glorious, had always produced pretty pinks in soap.  So I was eager to chop up some more roots and infuse more oil.  The oil is reputed to have many benefits for the skin, but I would use it even just for the colour only.  But it takes a while, about 6 weeks, for the oil to acquire the goodness of the root.  It's lovely to watch the gradual change in colour, from the light colour of oil to the dark yellow, with a strange tinge of green that almost reminds me of the play of colours in an oil slick.  Since I wanted some oil for my Christmas soaps I used what was left of my old oil.  It was quite good still, no sign of rancidity, but I had kept some root in it for a lot longer than the 6 weeks and it was very dark and had the characteristic smell of dock root.

Well, surprise, surprise.  I didn't get pink.  I have read that some people only get a brown colour from dock and that has puzzled me.  Mine just turns a light beige when I add the oil and stays that way for a few hours and then, just like magic. it turns pink.  Except this time it didn't.  It was a nice grayish earthy brown.

Fortunately I had decorated it with yellow rose petals (I know - yellow and pink? What was I thinking) so it actually looked really nice.  This recipe was pretty standard, 40% Olive oil, 30% Coconut and 10% Cocoa butter and I forget what else.  I haven't done my January organizing yet, I just barely managed to take down the Christmas decorations.  Come to think of it, I think I never do any January organizing, but it sounds like a good idea.  But I remember that I scented with Lemongrass.  I thought it looked good with the yellow rose petals.  And why I thought this would look good as a pink soap.  Hmm, I'll never know.

Eiderdown

I am the happy owner of 3 kilos of uncleaned eiderdown.  I originally bought a small bag, perhaps 600 grams, of Eiderdown at the Good Shepherd, a local thrift store.  Even if I knew that, cleaned, it would yield only 300 (10,5 oz) grams and a duvet for a full grown person requires 1000 grams (or 1 kilo/35 os/2.2 pounds) I thought it was worth it.  I had to pay a bit of money for it, probably about 60$, but Eiderdown is incomparable when it comes to duvets.  Mine is old and getting to be rather thin.  So I had the idea that I would start to collect eiderdown for the duvet that I would have for the rest of my life.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to find some more Eiderdown at the Good Shepherd.   This time it was 2,5 kilos of uncleaned down so I knew that I had all the down I needed for my new duvet even if more than half is straw, seaweed and feathers.  I couldn't believe my luck.  And this time I only had to pay around 40$, making the total outlay for the down about 100$.  Eiderdown is truly a remarkable material.  Somewhere I saw it described as the Fabergé egg of comforters.

Eiderdown is gathered from the nests of Eider ducks, Somateria mollissima.  The female ducks pluck their breast in order for their warm body to get in better contact with the eggs and then arrange the down in the nest itself to insulate the eggs from the cold Icelandic summer.  Farmers watch over the nests, protect the ducks from birds of pray, fox and mink and in return carefully remove a small amount of down, replacing it with straw which keeps the nests dry.  It is generally a happy arrangement for all.  The 4-5 ducklings go to the sea with their parents when they are old enough and the parents return each year to the same nest.  The eiderdown is left for the farmer to pick before it is blown to sea.  Each nest provides less than 20 grams of down.  So it takes down from more than 50 nests to make one single duvet.

I started to clean the eiderdown just after the New Year and soon realized that it would take me absolutely ages.  One needs to go over the down very carefully to extricate the delicate strands of fluffy down threads from straw, moss and a few feathers.  After spending every evening for a week, I weighed the results of my hard labour and lo and behold, I had almost 20 grams cleaned.  That is 2% of the weight I need for the whole duvet.  At the same speed it would take me a year to fully clean all the down.  I now understand why an eiderdown duvet costs thousands of dollars.

I have found someone who will clean the down for me in a machine.  It doesn't cost very much, but picking the feathers has to be done by hand and I have to do that myself.  It takes a skilled worker almost one day, so it'll probably take me a week.  But I'm actually quite excited.  I would prefer to clean all the down myself, but it takes too long.

I am now in the process of trying to find down proof silk to sew the cover.  If I'm to have this perfect, most light and fluffy material I need it have have the most glorious fabric cover.  I read somewhere that silk has the same thermal qualities as the eiderdown.  I have been admiring some photos on the internet that I have have found of vintage duvets.  They have the prettiest flowery material and I have to admit that I would love to find something like that in 300+ count silk.  The traditional color for duvets here in Iceland is a mid blue cotton.  It's nice enough, but I think I have to find silk for this one even if it won't be flowery.  I can't wait to get my new duvet.  I'll probably never get out of bed.

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.