Projects

I've been having a very productive week. Besides giving the whole house a good vacuum after finally buying a proper vacuum last week ($10 at Goodwill, spending time cleaning is bad enough don't also want to spend too much money) and restocking us with granola and zucchini bread, I got to work on these projects.

Tomatoes picked and mint dried (for tea)












Tomatoes drying












Cider to be made into hard cider, is currently bubbling away in the basement











Sauerkraut getting more sour












Soap hardening












And Henry has been very happy to sit and play on the kitchen floor. He is especially happy with his new toy the coathanger.

Christmas Presents I made

Now I can put up pictures of the Christmas presents I made that I'm quite proud of. I made a rice filled heating bag for my Mum complete with removable cover.

The final product, our soap that we gave to various people. We ended up with 3 kinds: lavender and marigold, orange, and mint.
Homemade limoncello for Kevin's Dad. We used the instructions found here:
http://patty.vox.com/library/post/homemade-limoncello-when-life-gives-you-lemons.html
And for Kevin I made a dinosaur pillow and coaster for his office.

Christmas Soap Making

Kevin has been helping me make some soaps for Christmas gifts. First we made some peppermint soap. We used peppermint oil to give it a strong peppermint smell and I opened up a mint medley tea bag to give it some specs of dried mint leaves too which I think look really cool especially since they came out kind of different colours after the soap making.


I also wanted to use the dried marigold flowers that I had saved from our garden this summer. I matched it with some lavender essential oil. Marigold and calendula I think are the only two flower petals that don't turn black in the soapmaking process so it was nice we happened to have loads of marigolds.


I hung them up in the study closet to dry months ago. Then we pulled out all the dry petals (along with the seeds).


And I think the soap turned out really nicely. I already bought some nice ribbon from the thrift store to tie it up with.

Soap Batches 2 & 3

Eliza and I have been doing some more soap making. We're using a recipe that only uses Crisco as the oil so it's cheaper to make than the other recipe that used olive and soy oil. We will see what difference it makes when we finally get to use the finished products.

The first one we did we boiled some ginger in the water and then added loads of cinnamon. That's why it turned out so dark. We are so excited it actually smells like cinnamon. We just hope it doesn't turn your hands black.


For this one we used some essential oil. We chose orange essential oil and added paprika to give it the orange colour. We used a pringles container and a crisco container to get the round shapes.

First Adventure in Soap Making

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Eliza and I made some soap! We went to a soap making workshop last weekend and then we were ready to try it ourselves. We used a recipe that used olive and soybean oil. The lily of the valley infused oil definitely did not work and smelled like rotten flowers. We didn't want to spend money on essential oils while we are still learning so we thought we'd try to get a little scent out of adding lime zest. I don't think I can smell any lime zest but it added an interesting texture/look (except in the places where there's clumps of it in which case it looks pretty gross). And we added turmeric to give it a bit of a peachy colour.

It was pretty fun to make. It was really nice having 2 people especially when trying to get the oil and the lye mixture the same temperature.

The soap seems to have turned out alright. It is crumbly and I looked up that that indicates probably too little water. And it may result in a harsh soap. We can't actually use the soap for 4 weeks so we will see if it is too harsh then. If it is we can leave it longer or rebatch it. We are already planning what to try for our next batch of soap.