Family Haiku:

 Hank, 4/

Wa gug vis ta ga/wuh grain gowps gulks guilps/gorx geeks bups gui bi dip ps

Clyde, 8/

I am the Peewee/I am very cute oh yeah/this is the end done

(His first poem ever!)

Ila, 9/

Flowers are blooming/The river is running clear/It is spring right now

Laura, 38/

I love writing poems /I taught Haiku to my kids/Now they are writing

David, 40/

Under sea city/Cthulhu, an elder god/ lies dreaming of fish

soap on instagram

for those interested in more soap things, I can't say whether I'll post anything more here about what I make. I have a new instagram account @northangersoapworks and I intend to post my projects there.

Henrik Russell + birth story

Born [redacted].

For the 3 people who still read this blog and the 1 person who wants to know, I was induced at 41 weeks exactly (due to concerns regarding gestational diabetes), and had a natural birth without epidural. I did get a little something through my IV 5 minutes before he was born, which had no effect whatesover! So it wasn't 100% unmedicated, but I really only cared about avoiding epidural. I did not need stitches and recovered quickly. I can now independently confirm that pitocin transition labor hurts more than spontaneous transition labor. So. There you are.

Confetti Soap

It's been a year and a half since I made the botched red patchouli soap that bleeds red. I took one of the bars and grated it up with a cheese grater, some big and some small shreds. Once soap is made, it cannot be melted and unmade. So if you mess up you can't melt it down again. Hence comes this confetti soap.

I got the idea from the Soap Queen website, when reading about colorant issues. I have to wait a month for it to cure and test it, but I only grated up one bar of red and put it into a regular white batch with 1500 g oils. I used my basic hand soap recipe where I make the larger bars and cut them in half for our family use. (perfect size for toddler hands). I like to use rendered tallow for it since it comes from the quarter beef we bought last year. It takes a lot more work to render tallow than it does to just open a package of lard, so I suppose that makes me want to save it for our home use. I think also that because tallow has such a high melting point (higher than lard, and MUCH higher than coconut oil) it makes for harder bars which last a very long time. If you ever have an unlabeled jar of lard and another of beef tallow and you aren't sure which is which (as I have on several occasions), lard is soft like butter at room temperature while tallow is still rock hard. Even straight from the fridge, I can scoop lard a little, but tallow is now a cold rock. There is a lot of science behind soapmaking that is pretty interesting. Our library purchased Scientific Soapmaking at my request last year but I have not gotten a chance to read it yet.

I have been thinking of putting eucalyptus scent into soap but was hesitant since it is such a strong smell. Normally I wouldn't put scent into our basic soap but I wanted to experiment with eucalyptus, so I put 4 grams worth into this batch, and you can't smell it at all after saponification. So now I know to use my regular 15g for a 1200 g batch and it will probably be perfect.

I made this soap 10/9/2016, and cut it a day later. I think it turned out very pretty. Here's hoping I don't see any red lather this time around, especially since this is what I'm planning for us to use for the next year (with a scented bar here and there).

Clove and Lavender soaps

2/9/2016

This was supposed to be clove with a hint of orange (I didn't have much orange left), but I made the mistake of putting the oils together in a tiny plastic bathroom cup while I made the soap. It would have been fine for a few minutes, but after 30 minutes the oils burned through the cup and the oil leaked out. I scraped up what I could with a spatula, but I couldn't get every drop. So, it is more just clove soap now since there was hardly any orange to begin with.

7/25/2016

This is the same lavender recipe as before, but this time I put in both blue and purple. Again, I forgot to take a picture the day it was made so this picture is from today.

And that makes 14 batches of soap so far. When the 15th batch is cut I'll post that next.

Basic family soap and two christmas soaps

9/3/2015

This batch I wanted to be the basic bathroom soap to use in our house. It is unscented, with only a streak of purple in it for fun. I used the wider 3.5 inch inserts that came with the soap mold, and cut them in half, thinking it would be just right for small hands (toddlers). And it was perfect. I still have 3 bars of it left, and we've used it all year. I didn't have a picture of it from when it was made, so I took a picture today of what I had left.

10/28/2015 & 11/25/2015

I only have a picture of the first batch of peppermint soap. Both were red, white, and green, and scented with peppermint. The second batch had much finer swirls. I think I forgot the put the scent in until after I put it in the mold, so had to stir it a lot while in the mold. So it made for a a very very swirly soap. The nice thing about these soap pigments is they don't bleed into each other. So even though I basically attempted to blend them all together, it won't blend. If you tried to do it with an immersion blender it probably would blend too much and look bad. I probably won't ever try it though:)
Anyway the first batch looked like this:

And the second batch should have looked similar, except for the stirring I had to do in mold changed the look. Two people wanted to buy a bunch of soap at christmas and I didn't have enough, hence the second batch of peppermint.

Auctioned Soap

I made two batches in a row for a church auction. I only auctioned 4 bars of each though.

8/20/2015

This one was cinnamon again with yellow colorant.

8/21/2015

And this one was orange scent. My favorite scent really, but I have to use 3x the amount I would of other oils (and I used a 5x concentrated orange oil in the first place). So it is more expensive. And it fades quickly, within a few months instead of a year. I used no colorant here, the orange oil turned it yellow/orange. (Not great planning on my part for the auction, two yellow soaps...). Still, everyone loved the orange scent.

Lavender and Vanilla Soaps

3/31/2015

Another lard based soap, lavender scented with blue swirls. I had friends who were having baby boys at the same time, so I made these imagining it would make a nice mother gift at the baby shower. I have to make soap at 4 weeks ahead since it takes that long to cure. Kind of annoying, but that's cold process for you.

5/4/2015

This soap was colored by mixing red and blue pigment. I had the notion it would be purple...but it came out this mauve color. It was supposed to smell like vanilla thanks to benzoin essential oil, but I discovered benzoin to be a strange character (and not at all oil like..its thicker than honey). Too mild, the scent was destroyed in saponification. I still have some of the oil that I keep meaning to use in chapstick or something. But I have yet to make chapstick. So. There it waits.

I posted a picture of this soap on facebook and one person said it looked like headcheese, or brains. Greeaaaat. thanks. best compliment ever.

Cinnamon and Patchouli Soaps

My fourth batch of soap I was finally comfortable enough to do a scented one. This one had cinnamon leaf essential oil. But no colorant. I was not brave enough to do both at once...yet. Also, I had run out of beef tallow and so branched out into the convenience of lard. One pound blocks of it.

12/11/2014

And that's the only photo from that batch. It was uniformly colored so didn't look much different in cross section. Cinnamon scent still remains a favorite of mine. Also you can see the cardboard has been replaced with wood blocks on the ends. Each soap "loaf" makes 14 bars of soap. The end pieces are always a little wrinkly looking, so I always keep those for me. I cut soap with a chefs knife, but grew tired of my imperfect slices so have since bought a cheapo miter box from home depot that helps me have uniformly sized bars. I gave the soap as gifts to people over the course of a year, and then two people have started buying it from me on occasion so I always cut 1 inch bars now. The end pieces are always slightly under 1 inch, but I get 12 1-inch-thick bars that are nice enough to sell or give away out of each batch.

3/15/2015
My next batch was both colored and scented, my first try at that. It was also the only batch of soap that I refused to give away (because it was botched)...or really use much of personally. I made a mistake with the pigment powder which resulted in soap that produced a pink lather. Like bleeding soap. I still have at least half of the batch. I tried using it for a while, but it would stain my tub and shower curtain and I got so tired of having the scum on our ancient tub be so obvious that I felt obligated to clean more often...and so I nearly threw it out. I'm glad I didn't because I have finally found a use for it, which will be in a later post.

The scent is patchouli. It didn't do anything for me and I wouldn't use it again, at least not alone.

That white stuff on top is quite visible on this soap. I didn't understand what it was for the longest time. You can rub it off easily, but it was rather irritating. Finally this year (2016) I read something about it. It is ash precipitate from the lye. I put enough oil in the soap that the lye is fully used up in the chemical reaction, but there is still the precipitate on top. The solution is to spritz with rubbing alcohol after pouring. I don't have the issue anymore, but you'll see it on a few more projects.

Next two soaps

My soap mold arrived, purchased on etsy, so I made another batch with some green oxide pigment I'd purchased with the lye.

Poured on 10/23/2014

Freshly poured, and swirled around for design.

After saponification.

The soap is 3.5 inches wide. That is standard for cold process soap molds, but I think it makes soap bars that are too big and unwieldy. When cut in half, they are quite small, so I wanted something in between. 

post soap making mess

Here is what rendered beef tallow looks like..in mason jars (which was a bad idea in hindsight. I freeze it in blocks now and wrap in plastic.)

And for my next soap 10/24/2014, I rigged up these 2.5 inch wide cardboard inserts to make a narrower bar that is comparable in size to store bought. (the cardboard was inadequate. I had some leak troubles too...and soon went to home depot and had some legit wood blocks cut for me, which I use for almost all later projects.)

These bars are better sized in my opinion. The only difference was adjusting my soap recipes from 1500 grams of oil to 1200 grams. That swirl effect was made with a clothes hangar--one of those pants ones with a waxy paper tube. I wrapped it in plastic to prevent corrosion on the aluminum. It has long since bit the dust, and I haven't got a good replacement yet. 

Soap making + first soap

I'm going to use this blog to post the cold process soap projects I've been doing over the last two years. (It's not like I'm using it for anything else these days.) I make soap and take pictures, but I've never put it all in one place. I just made my 15th batch of soap so I have some catching up to do.

Here is the first batch I ever did, 10/21/2014.  I had no mold yet and I lined an loaf pan with plastic. I didn't insulate it or anything, and the edges showed an incomplete gel phase. No picture of the cut bars for this batch.

I decided to make soap for the first time because I had some beef suet from a quarter of beef I'd gotten from a farmer. I rendered it into tallow, and then made this soap using olive oil, beef tallow, and coconut oil. And lye of course, which I'd ordered online.

I read a couple of books which were mostly unhelpful (Ann Bramson's Soap: Making it, Enjoying it is a classic but the methods are very out of date. Robert McDaniel's Essential Soap was better but didn't talk enough about cold process and all the recipes were vegan.) But I found the basic soap tutorial on humblebee & me very helpful, along with some other reading I did on the internet.

end of year

When I woke up this morning I immediately felt relieved. I can have fruit again. I don't have to eat sugar, but I can if I want to.

Since writing my last post one month ago, I have had to eliminate all dairy from my diet. Anything derived from milk, including butter and cheese, I can't eat anymore. That combined with the gluten free, fruit-free, sweetener-free, dessert-free has been tedious to say the least and quite stressful and overwhelming.

In my last post I said this year has been a failure, and that has not changed with avoiding fruit this past month. I had too many other limits on my diet to be able to appreciate what I was doing, and I have been concerned more for my health this year than any other in my life, even without the sugar. So being worried in general did not help.

I began this year being inspired by my friend Melissa, who dropped refined sugar and then subsequently dropped something like 55 pounds, most of it in the first few months. I did not expect that to happen, and it has not. I did lose 20 pounds,but that was the result of several periods where I counted calories (30 more to go!). Quitting sugar did stop me from gaining weight, however, and it was one less thing to worry about during reduced calorie periods.

Fruit-free has made a little bit of difference in terms of cravings, making them a little less. But going fruit-free after 11 months of sugar free was not the best planning, since I'd already used up most of my enthusiasm. It would have worked much better to do fruit-free/sugar-free/dessert-free from the start, and have it last a much shorter time, like 6-8 weeks. (I like this book, I Quit Sugar, that outlines a program like that).  I will probably do that program in the future, after I have figured out some of my other health issues.

I hoped to be able to say that I didn't care about sugar anymore, but I do still care. I learned that to me, unrefined sugars like honey and maple syrup are just as bad as regular sugar. And I know now I need to limit fruit intake to 2 servings a day, since more has negative effects on me.

Would I do it again? No. Would I recommend it to others? I don't know. I did learn a lot this year. I think going without added sugar for a few months would help any person struggling with their relationship to sugar.

My new mantra going forward is not to avoid any types of sweeteners, but rather to eat treats only after dinner.

the end.

1 month to go

I have about one month left of my sugar free year. So far, the experiment is a failure. I have not lost my cravings for sugar at all, even with avoiding dessert the last 5 months (including over thanksgiving and christmas--which was brutal). Some people do well with honey instead of sugar, but for me it seems to make no difference at all. I always craved sugar, even when I had not had it in months.

And so I will do one last attempt before the year is up. I will continue to cut out all sweet things (which I did for 5 months except for one week in there I had unrefined sweetened treats again), but now will no longer eat fruit. I know I get sugar cravings when I eat more fruit, so I'm interested to see what happens without it. I eat enough vegetables that I am not concerned with any loss of nutrients.

I may extend the year a few weeks so that I give fruit-free a good run.

random stuff

Ila peed in David's shoe a couple weeks back. I know I should be upset or something but it is the best place she could have peed, seriously. Like the proverbial dog:) It was hilarious!

Clyde is 1 now. I sorta skipped posting that. In fact, tomorrow he is 13 months. He has finally started to feed himself a little bit, which is great since it makes things easier for me. He still pick up bites I put on his tray, but if it is something really tempting and I put it into his hand, then he'll eat that. And he can drink from a sippy cup now, and can hold his bottle! He would not have anything to do with either until a couple weeks ago. I finally bought a new sippy for him to try and it helped a lot.

Ila sings or talks all the time. She has long convoluted sentences with multiple clauses and has a large vocabulary. I'm thinking of trying to teach her to read in a home schooling format soon. She already knows all the letters and sounds, so maybe she could do it. David supposedly started reading at age 3, so maybe Ila will too.

6 months later

Today is 6 months exactly since I first started no refined sugar. I have changed the commitment from no refined sugar to be no treats or treatoids.  I haven't lost any weight, but I did discover that I have fructose malabsorption (thus honey is a bad sweetener choice for me) and that I don't think the Costco brand of maple syrup is worth eating (or buying) compared to other brands I've tried. I think my lack of weight loss was because I was just replacing regular treats with honey sweetened ones. Which is really not helpful. So the end of that. I think I will be ok with still eating dark chocolate, so long as it is 85% or more. That stuff is not a big temptation for me. Also, naturally occurring sugars in carob and whole fruit I think are fine. But not fruit juice.

the end.

Things of note

I was running last saturday. Out of nowhere a 60 year old woman comes jogging up to me and starts running with me and talking. "You were my inspiration this morning," she says. She goes on to say how when she saw me running so slowly, she knew she could do that. She gets frustrated with running and getting tired too fast, but at my pace, she could go for a long time.
Well. I am glad to have inspired a 60 year old woman with my slowness. Though I had not thought to inspire anyone by running slower than my husband walks...I am glad I did:)

Clyde is happy again. He was sad for a while. He has 7 teeth now and is 10 months.

My 3rd half marathon is coming up on saturday. This one looks to be the worst time ever, considering I didn't run for 2 months and just started again last week. I don't really care though. I'll just stay ahead of the SAG wagon. (The wagon that picks you up if you are below 16 min/mile pace.) I will try not to SAG. The run last saturday (where I inspired the lady) was only 6 miles. And it is my longest run in 2 years. So we'll just see about 13 miles on saturday.

Also. Four months after moving into our (purchased) house, our rental contract is finally over at our old place. I am SO glad to be done with mean landlords and subletting. Hopefully never again.

There were more things of note but I have forgotten them. Alas.

----
Update: I did finish the race ahead of the SAG wagon. 3h 15m total. Not bad for hardly any training and walking half the race! Also. Clyde is 11 months now and has 8 teeth:)

relentless

After a recent discussion with friends, I decided to give up something for lent this year. I'm scrapping added sweeteners, refined or not, from my diet. I'm shooting for 10 grams or less each day of added sugars. (This includes fruit juice. Whole fruit is ok.) After lent I'll allow unrefined natural sweeteners to some degree, but I am going to continue to avoid refined sugar for a year, staying below the 5 or 10 gram/day mark. (I'm still working out what is feasible without making everything from scratch.) I'm hoping that during that time I will totally lose my desire to eat it so that when the year is done, I won't suddenly rush out and buy a bunch of treats, and will instead want to continue avoiding it.

I know this is sort of drastic, but smaller measures don't seem to work on me and I'm tired of the ill effects on my health and well being. It's all or nothing, and I choose nothing.

For the record, lent began on 3/5/2014. Wish me luck.

Birth

I will amaze you all and make a post.

Here it is.

My baby is nearly 5 months old now. Life is busy now with two kids. (Biggest understatement I have ever made, possibly.)

Here is the story of the birth. The day Clyde was born, I did many things. I can't even remember them all. Here is a list of what I do remember:

• shopped at Trader Joes. The cashier asked when I was due. "Monday," I said. Two days away.
• went to the library.
• made three loaves of meatloaf. One of these loaves was dinner for David and Ila that night. They were supposed to go in the freezer that night (for post-baby meals), but stayed in the fridge for 2 more days.
• Emailed a friend. "Baby has not come."
• emailed j the square. "mailed the choker yesterday." For her wedding. 
• went to a church dinner before Relief Society general conference. I ate tomato basil soup but could not eat the bread because it had wheat. Then I had ice cream. I thought my chair was very uncomfortable.
• sat and started watching conference. thought I had gas pain from the ice cream. Pulled out my phone to measure intervals just the same. 
• water broke one hour in. luckily, did not get onto church pew. dash to the ladies room. I guess it was not gas after all. 

After that, two friends got me home. One drove my car, another followed in hers. I was in serious pain when I got back. We called the neighbor to come over, called the doctor, wasted 30 minutes packing stuff. My contractions were around 5 or 6 minutes apart (before water broke). I was expecting a long slow labor. 7 minute drive to the hospital. Lots of screaming in the car, and 2 minutes apart by the time we arrived. Next, the wheelchair in the parking lot of the hospital. We should have gone to emergency, but we did not know valet would not be there on a saturday night. The security guard pushed me into the hospital, passing me off to another guard.

4th floor entry: Can you please spell your name? What is your date of birth? I thought, let me through before I am killed.

More screaming. The nurses can hear me down the hall and prep the room for me. The nurse tells me to breathe.

5 minutes later: baby comes out. His head was perfectly round. No time to be squished. Thank you Kate the doctor. It was 9:08 pm. My "gas" pain had started at 7 pm, and water broke at 8 pm.
Afterward, I was officially admitted to the hospital. 

I was wearing a yellow shirt (this one) and grey skirt during the birth. I wore that same skirt home 2 days later. Still mostly clean, amazingly enough.

Clyde James

9.28.2013

7 lbs 12 oz & 20 inches

Dress for Ila

David told me that Ila's sunday dress was getting too tight, so I decided in my last week of having a sewing machine (before being packed) that instead of making a dress for myself I would make one for Ila. I used some of the pattern pieces from the junebug dress pattern (size 2T)--specifically the sleeves and the back pieces. I used the back pieces for both the front and back of the bodice, but I added an extra 1.5 inches and cut through the fold for the back part so I could add buttons. It was my first time trying to do buttonholes, and let me tell you it was horrifying. The fabric was too thick to work with regular settings. It looks totally awful up close..but nobody is looking except me hopefully:)

I used some knit fabric I already had. You may recognize the skirt fabric from here.  The buttons I found in my grandmothers button collection. They are bright orange with little mushrooms, and so cute! I used my new shirring knowledge to do the puffed sleeve. I zigzagged the edge of the sleeve and then did one line of shirring near the edge. Then I sewed the sleeve ends together, added a gather on the top, and attached it to the bodice. I also had some lace lying around from an etsy purchase awhile back I wanted to add, so sewed that on last using a straight machine stitch (and going very slow, using the hand wheel for a lot of it).

Anyway. The sewing machine is now packed so no more projects for a while. I'm not sure if the sewing fever will last, but it has been fun while I had it.

 This picture of Ila in it is before I added the lace.

Trying to show the cute buttons, but the lighting is terrible. Alas.

The end.