Ha Ha Ha....

 

Well now, I didn't exactly get black soap. I got dark gray. 

I was worried all night that I had used too much activated charcoal. 1 tsp per pound of oil is recommended and that's what I used but that batter looked awfully dark. Too much charcoal and your lather will be gray as well as your washcloth or sponge. I'll have to wait until it's cured to see if that happens. 

What I did learn from further research was that I should have gelled the loaf. That means to keep it hot during the saponification (hardening) process. I used to sit it on a heating pad in a cooler but I killed the heating pad last week with my back issues so I just had the cooler for insulation and it wasn't enough. Gelling would have made the loaf darker. You can see by the ring in the center of the first bar that it tried to gell but didn't get too far.  My fault. 

Someone asked me about the fragrance. I went digging through my stash and found some leftover Love Spell which I thought matched the theme I was going for. I only used a tiny bit but I still regretted it. I got carried away and forgot that this soap was just for me and I don't like fragrances in my soap. I only use my unscented bars. I still like to play with fragrances for other people though. The three bottles on the right are the new fragrances that just showed up for my next soap making adventure which will happen once we are through the next two weeks of babysitting. One was open and leaked so all the labels are coming off. What a mess that was. 

What I wanted for this batch was a fragrance that smelled like this. I've looked high and low for herbal fragrance oils that were just that....herbal. I've got several on the way so I'm hopeful.

Soap Tales

 

So what did I do on my big day off after vacuuming, scrubbing all the floors and doing four loads of laundry? I organized my soap shelves. I had a lot of soap left over from the last giveaway. I usually have around 30 people participating and this time I only had 12. My soap shelves were full so I had to get it all down, wrap it and then label it so The Mister can go hand it out in town on his daily meander. 

Then I went down to the soap room and made some more. I've been reading the last of the books in the Practical Magic series and they keep talking about the black soap they make. They talk about this soap in all of the books and I've always meant to make some. Since I now had empty shelves and a lot of leftover ingredients from the last soap making session, I decided to make up my own version. I'll see how it cuts tomorrow but I'll have to wait 4-6 weeks to see if it's actually usable. You never know.

Making soap is an awful lot like making sourdough. The two share a lot of the same equipment so I had to run up and down the stairs all morning to gather what I needed. I guess I need to buy another scale, temperature gauge and bottle of honey. I also had to use my kitchen bottle of olive oil since I had used up the last of the big bottle I keep for soap. I am happy to report that Betty survived another few days in the fridge. I hope to be making bread this weekend so to see her rising and full of bubbles so soon tells me she will be ready when I am. 

FO: Mountains and Fjords

This week's sitting is done and my reward is that The Mister is playing in a golf tournament and won't be back until tomorrow. I've got a day to rest and recuperate from all the baby yoga.....

...city building...

....and book organizing. The little one is fascinated with books. Not reading them. Shelving them. He takes them down, puts them in a basket and then puts them back. Over and over. Librarian in training I think. 

While the little one is napping, Big Grand helps me knit after we do some arts and crafts. He was a big help closing those toes and weaving in the ends of the latest pair off the needles. He also served as my foot model.

In return, he requested a new pair of "snow socks" so I guess sometime this summer I'll be casting on another bitty pair from my ginormous stash. 

 

Wednesday WIPs: Travel Knitting

 

As I mentioned yesterday, we are on babysitting duty again this week but this time we are commuting instead of spending the night. It's an almost 2 hour ride up to Daughter's so I needed to make sure I had plenty of car knitting ready to go. On Sunday, I wound up the Miss Bab's. Look at this photo. I'm winding yarn in front of my quilt with an oven in the background that's baking the week's bread. How Little House on the Prairie of me. 

I prefer to work with two socks on one needle when I'm in the car. Less to lose so I cast them on that way and gave myself a head start.

I finished my first pair of the new Arne and Carlos socks. The other pair are on the toes and they will also be car knitting.

Not much else will be getting worked on this week. I did finish the 4th row of the 1st section on the Hue Shift. When things calm down I'll start the next row and then this section will be done-minus all those ends to weave in.

 

TNT: Deja Vu

 

You may have seen this post before. I tried to blog ahead because we are off babysitting for the next two days and I didn't think I'd have time to post. Of course silly me didn't look at the date and time. Anyway, the Garden got some new doo dads around the trees. It's slow tedious work and I'm not a fan but I will power through.

Patchwork Automne got a branch and an upside down squirrel. I might be putting this away until fall. I'm losing interest. 

I finished that block on the Patchwork quilt. Time to move the hoop when we are done with the kid sitting.

Spiral Chicken doesn't count as a tiny needle project but I did get another corner of her finished this week. I'm pretty close to having all of the inside area done.  I've still got the big outer border to do so it's not time to celebrate just yet. 

Starting Over-Again

 

If you've been wondering what ever happened to that warp I had on the loom, here it is. Yep. I murdered it just like I murdered the one that came before it. 

I've become a serial warp murderer. This time, as before, there were just too many mistakes to overcome. First, the color order of the plaid was off. There's a way to make it symmetrical and I forgot all about that. I could have overcome that problem but up popped another. I had one heddle that was loose. It didn't get threaded on right when I counted them out. I tied it on and it seemed to work. 

I could have gotten over that but the final straw was that I had mis-thread one of them making a very ugly place right in the middle of the towel. In the past, I would have toughed it out by re-doing it thread by thread to fix it but my back wasn't going to let me do all that up and down stuff so I cut it all loose. 

I've got a huge stash of weaving cotton so why fuss about a handful when I can just start over. 

As my penance, I'm going to make the ugliest towel you could ever imagine by just using up my scraps in no particular order. This is a test to see if I can go from start to finish without making any stupid mistakes. I'm betting not.

I've gone from making things like this to not even being able to get a simple twill going. Cognitive decline or just hubris? To be determined. 

Goodies Galore

 

Every week there's been more to buy at the Farmer's Market. I came home with a dinner's worth yesterday.

In the mailbox was a very fragrant order from Penzy's. The spice shelf in the kitchen needed refreshing so I put in a big order. There's a lot more in the box than what you can see here. A lot more.

Also waiting in the mailbox was this box of sock yarn. Knit Picks was having a 30% off sale at the same time Daughter sent me a gift certificate for Mother's Day. One day I'm going to count how many balls/skeins I have of sock yarn and that amount is most likely going to be pretty scary. I have a recurring fantasy of just sitting on the floor surrounded by needles and project bags and casting every single one of them on just for the heck of it. 

Edited to say: I did count my sock yarn when I put these newest additions away and I now have 92(!) balls/skeins. If I knit about 12 pairs a year it would take me around 8 years to knit it all IF (and that's a big IF) I do NOT add to the stash. I'm starting to suspect this can't be done.