Crafty Girl

I’ve got three kinds of soap here, but only two batches. For the first batch I made two “logs” scented with lavender but added oatmeal to the second mold. I made this one about 2 weeks ago.

And then Sunday (same weekend I finished the Bulky Cardi and Bill was out of town) at 6 AM (I’m a very early riser, usually around 4:30 AM) after surfing the net for an hour or so I got the bug again. It’s scented with Sandalwood and Jasmin and has lots of “special oils”

So the I generally use a blend of coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil, castor oil and then usually something special like shea butter or whatnot. Well, I have craploads of special fancy oils and I never use them. That is going to change. I really need to use this stuff up! So I found a recipe that was similar to my standard but had cocoa butter, avocado oil & apricot kernel oil. I have all of those!

I dragged everything up from the basement only to find I was out of my pre-melted palm oil. You see, palm oil is solid at room temp and separats into layers. In order for your soap to turn out correctly it needs to be melted and mixed thoroughly before using. I think they sell some stabilized version now, but when I buy I buy big (grin) and I’m not yet out of the 6 gallon bucket I bought about 2 years ago (second one though, so I do use lots of my main oils).

I went outside and started hooking up the turkey cooker and a big pot of water to give the oil a hot water bath to melt it. I unhook the propane from the grill (no tools necessary) and hook it to the cooker (crescent wrench necessary). Bill normally deals with the propane and propane excessories. I just make stuff. I pried off the lid of the bucket and discovered this is a completely brand new untouched bucket of oil. I get oil all over me hoisting the bucket into the water (there’s a clue here). Then I realized that I used to always put some kind of rack in the bottom so the water can circulate around and the plastic isn’t in direct contact with the hot metal bottom. Damn! Then I realized that it’s been so damn hot in the garage where I store said bucket that the oil is mostly melted even though it’s only 60ish degrees out that morning (hence the getting it all over myself). I got a long spoon and stirred it up and had no need to melt it. So I wasted about 1/2 hour and made a big mess doing all of that.

In the end I measured out oils for the soap I made that day and an entire other batch for next Sunday. The next one will use Emu oil, Almond oil and some other “special stuff”. I like to measure out more than one batch at a time cause there’s the same amount of mess to clean up if you are measuring 1 or 5 batches.

Oh! Good thing I was reading about the properties of different oils to refresh myself. This batch was really high in cocoa butter and can make a VERY hard bar so it’s something you want to slice as soon as it’s cool. I’ll post the recipe for this when I get home. I sent it to myself but then I deleted it. Silly me.

Edited to add the recipes…

All this sweater needs is a zipper and this baby is done. It took longer than I expected (besides the fact that I started it over a year ago) when picked up my knitting again this summer. Partly because of many 90 degree days and partly because I reknit each sleeve several times, either to fix mistakes or to stop the decreases sooner.

When I finished it I picked up the ribbi cardi and wow did those size 7 needles feel like toothpicks.

I thought I had already posted this, but I guess it got lost.

Here’s Bill’s sweater with reworked sleeves. I think I could have totally remade it, but for Christ’s sake! It took like two years just to finish it. Lemme look that up…

Looks like I started in the January 2003 and finished the first version in August 2004. The thing was enormous, so I remade the sleeves to a size small (the sweater is an XL). The thing that pisses me off though, is that I carefully made it to gauge and chose a size based on the measurements of another sweater he liked.

Anyway, the saga is complete and Bill has his first hand-knit sweater.