Crash!

That most nightmare of technological scenarios befell me on Wednesday night: the hard drive error. I got home from WNK, hit the return key to wake my laptop from its slumbers, and... nothing. In fact, it switched itself off. Strange. Then it repeatedly tried to start up, never quite making it. I knew exactly what had happened, because the drive had thrown up error after error since I bought the thing, but I carried on regardless, and did I back up? Well, sort of, just not as regularly as I should have. So it was soon ascertained that I was the owner of a useless lump of plastic, metal and silicon, and potentially no longer the owner of quite a few photos and knitting patterns. Thankfully my dear knight in shining armour was stubborn enough to spend the next four days fiddling with components from Maplin and software from off the internet, and eventually managed to read off the data, so nothing lost and not too much money spent in saving it. He's a genius. I now have to order a new hard drive to get my laptop up and running again, but at least my stuff is safe.

So two New Year's Resolutions to add to the list:

• Back up, back up, back up, not less than every two weeks.
• Get blogging on the stuff I thought I might have lost, and generally blog faster, so everything I want to keep is uploaded.

The benefit of all of this was that I got some knitting done whilst I was bereft of the distractions of the internet.

Firstly, the stripy "Blood & Bone" socks from my own hand-dyed yarn are finished! I am so pleased with them.

As detailed here, the yarn is Knitpicks Bare for the striping sections, and The Yarn Yard Bonny for the contrast heel/toe/cuff, all dyed with Kool Aid. It's a toe-up stocking stitch sock, 64 stitches on 2.5mm needles for a UK size 6, with my usual toe, Sherman heel and 2x2 twisted rib cuff. I had loads of yarn left over, as they only used 51g (ie half) of the Knitpicks and 19g (less than half) of the Bonny. I could, and probably should, have made long boot socks, but I don't have the patience for the relentless knitting involved or the subtleties of calf shaping. The extra has therefore found a good home to be made into more socks.

I asked the boyfriend to take the photos for me, on a break from IT repairs, as I was fed up with trying to take good photos of my own feet. Once we'd done the above "technical" photos, showing the contrast bits and construction, I thought we should dress them up a bit with my current favourite shiny black shoes, so it was into the garden to take advantage of the weak winter sun.

Thankfully none of our neighbours were around to see this silliness.

Having finished those, I moved onto a deadline job. Tomorrow is my father's 60th birthday and I thought he deserved a luxurious, warm hat for out on the golf course or when he's working on his motorbike. In my stash I had two skeins of bulky cashmere from School Products in New York (the trip on which this was acquired is one of the things I nearly lost the photos of, and must blog soon) and that seemed perfect. It's black, but a fairly washed-out, flecky black. It is very soft and lovely. The hat itself is just a 4x2 rib, 72 stitches on 6mm needles, decreasing for the last few rounds. It took me two evenings, and was finished just in time to make the post down to Bournemouth. Seeing as the finish and immediate wrapping was late at night, I had no photographic help and had to do the traditional Myspace dirty mirror photos.

I sustained a small knitting injury from this as it seems, at that particular gauge, my left index fingernail hits my right first knuckle at every stitch. By two-thirds of the way through the hat, I was bleeding, and had to wear a plaster for the rest. I'm sure I've never had that before but will have to alter my technique if it starts to be a problem.

That done, I can now start the Leyburn socks for the KAL from my last post, so will, in fact, go and do so now.

Remember, back up, people, back up!

In with the New

So it's only taken me until the 6th to do the New Year's Resolutions...

Well, not resolutions exactly, but I do have some plans for the year to come. Shall I split into crafty and non-crafty?

Crafty

Firstly, I have to get my knitting productivity up. I have a stupid amount of yarn. I love it all, and don't intend to destash (or kid myself that I'm not buying any more), but I do need to get on with knitting it. For me, that means making sure I have a mindless project on the needles at all times, such as stocking stitch socks, so that I can knit whilst commuting or in the canteen at work, and if I get to a heel or some other bit that requires concentration, I have to make sure I do it that evening so I can continue. I think I should spend less time on Ravelry to achieve this. I'm just addicted to reading other people's knitting questions and/or drama.

I have to finish a garment that is not socks or another kind of accessory. That KSH jumper would be a good start. I do also have the materials for a couple of other jumpers and it would be nice to do them - although this may be better achieved after the body shape changes that are mentioned below.

I have to knit myself a wedding shawl. I have a pattern, Icarus. I have yarn, undyed alpaca/silk/cashmere from Bluefaced. However, I've just realised that it's cobweb weight so that might be a mistake if I want to finish by September. I'm going to double strand it. To add to the confusion, I also have this gorgeous rust-coloured silk laceweight from Yarn Chef, which would match the wedding colours perfectly. So perhaps I should do the shawl in that instead? I've pretty much decided to go ahead with the white one first, and if the pattern proves as easy and pleasurable as I'm hoping, I'm thinking about making the orange one too and deciding then.

I've also joined an online KAL, on the Ravelry Socks That Rawk group, after having had my attention drawn to it on Turtlegirl's blog. We, over 100 of us, are each taking a different colour of STR for one pattern, Leyburn, and it will be interesting to see how it looks in all the different colours. Mine is Tide Pool in mediumweight and here it is, wound up:

Even the boyfriend remarked that this was "pretty" when he saw me winding it, and he never notices yarn (except in terms of the volume of it entering the house, and he's pretty good-natured about that). I have only about an hour's more work to finish the stripy socks then I'll be casting on for the Leyburns.

But... drumroll please... I have a new toy which could very easily derail all of the above, if I'm not careful. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet my Kromski Sonata:

Isn't it pretty? My dear parents bought it for me for Christmas (at my request, they're lovely but not psychic) and it is going to be a huge time suck. Should I name it, to give Ting's Ewan a sibling? If so, I think it's a girl wheel, and I shall name her Magda because that's the Polish name with which I'm most familiar. Say hello to Magda, everybody. Let's hope she needs less of my time this year than a real baby.

That's not even including any bead bouquet-making, baking, soap or needlefelting. Yikes!

Non-Crafty

Now I know this is an entirely stereotypical response to getting married, but I do really need to lose some weight this year. Not that I think I'm fat, exactly, but I am three stone heavier than when we met (nearly seven years ago) and I'd rather be back to that for the Day of a Thousand Photographs, and ongoing, of course. In the autumn of last year I lost a stone by diligent attendance at the gym coupled with a food diary to make myself more aware of what I was eating - not denying myself anything at all, even chocolate, but pausing to think about whether I really wanted whatever I was about to eat, and if I didn't really want it, I didn't have it, or had less. It worked incredibly well, in a way that nothing really has before because I've never truly tried. Then I hurt my ankle and that was followed by a series of colds, so I was out of action during November and December. I haven't put much back on during the festive season though, and I've been down the gym at least every other day since just after Christmas. Go me!

To kick-start things, during January I am doing the very restrictive detox diet I've done many times before, based on this book. I'm not a huge believer in the "detox" concept actually, but the principles cross over well to having a very healthy and calorie-restricted diet. So until a planned night out on 31 January, I am off alcohol, meat, dairy, wheat, sugar, caffeine... pretty much everything, leaving me to eat fish, rice, potatoes, soy, and all the fruit and vegetables I can stand. As I said, I've done it before and always had great results, just never coupled with an exercise regime to make it stick. I'm remarkably good at hyper-restrictive diets, with rules and a defined end date - I am not so good at trying to follow vague concepts such as "eat fewer Mars Bars". Also, this one still allows me to have my favourite food, sushi, so I cannot be unhappy. Five days in (started on 2 January so the hangover on New Year's Day could be dealt with appropriately with a fry-up) and I am not feeling the pinch yet.

I find it critical to have the correct food available at all times, to avoid unwanted lapses, so we took a bracing walk over the cold hills of north London at the weekend to the farmers' market, and bought fruit with leaves and wormholes, like fruit from the tree should have, and beautiful, sleek, fresh fish from the Dorset coast.

Now doesn't that look better than refined sugar?

Tying in with that, and mainly prompted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's philosophies in this book, and my desire to make my own yummy chutneys from this book (both from my grandma for Christmas), I am seriously considering trying to grow some vegetables in my garden this year. I have no idea if it'll work. There are some borders I can dig out and plant, and I'm just going to try with some courgettes and carrots to start with, but it would make me very pleased indeed.  It's too cold to get started yet though.

Oh, that's far too much bucolic idyll, isn't it? Back to gritty urban life. I leave you with a symbol of London, a graffiti'd Tube train as seen on the way to the New Year's Eve party we attended:

May all your 2009 endeavours be fruitful.

Christmas Crafting

Happy New Year!  Christmas seems to be well and truly over; our tree is down and it's back to work tomorrow after a blissful two weeks off. Now everybody has received their gifts, I can give a run-down of the things I made, as there were a few of these.

Knitting

Since last year's holiday knitting didn't go all that well (with a distinct lack of thanks from the recipients), I'd decided not to bother any more. After all, isn't it better to knit with no stress, no deadlines, for someone who'll appreciate the work that went into it, ie me? But then my aunt came to stay for the night some time in November and gushed so appreciatively over my various WIPs that I deemed her to be knit-worthy and decided to make her some socks. That and the fact that she has really small feet (UK size 2.5) so I was fairly confident of being able to finish socks in the time allowed. Ting is the same size so graciously supplied measurements and acted as in-progress tester.

I chose the Floral Lace Anklet pattern from the Interweave Lace Style book, which is full of pretty patterns. I figured it would be nice to make her something really luxurious, and found some semi-solid pink cashmere/silk Posh Yarn in my stash (Eva 6-ply in Blithe). This is billed as a DK-weight yarn but I'm sure it's far heavier than that - on the 3mm needles I used it made an exceptionally thick and tight fabric. To compensate for the gauge and her little feet, I cut out two of the pattern repeats around, and more than that in terms of length - for example, the leg was meant to be six repeats for an ankle sock versus the five I did for a full-length sock for her, and the foot was meant to be about ten repeats to the toe, versus the five I did here again. This meant that despite these being my first lace socks, and my first top-down socks, they went really quickly. If I hadn't had to take a break for several days because my wrists hurt from wrestling the super-tight lace decreases in the gauge I was at, I'd have had them done in a week I'm sure.

Here are the finished socks:

I actually quite enjoyed the various elements of top-down construction, including the dreaded Kitchener stitch (which went very easily with this video tutorial) but I still think it's all a bit of a faff compared to toe-up. Why do a three-step process of heel flap, turn and gusset, if you can just do a short row or Sherman heel?

I also immensely enjoyed the lace. I haven't done much of it, but every time I learn more about how to read my knitting, and how to fix without frogging. During the course of these, I had to drop down stitches on occasions to add missed increases and decreases, so I feel far more confident about doing bigger shawls now.

Anyway, they were very well-received, and I had the chance to use the "Selfish" gift tags I have from Knit, which make the point by reading "This project took hours of my precious time to make. You may now ooh and ahh and wear it every single day for the rest of your life."

I did also finish off (as in, sewing in the ends) on two WIPs which were otherwise finished a while ago. I managed to get these done on the morning when I was due to head down to Bournemouth for the holidays. May I present garter rib socks for me made from Cherry Tree Hill Supersock DK in the Cherry Blossom colourway:

(Talking of DK weights, the CTH was about half the weight of the PY!)

And the Lucious Llama Lace scarf in Mirasol Miski, which has been very snuggly indeed over the last week or so:

I also used the time off to get on with my stripy socks:

And my Kidsilk Haze jumper:

Just one other knitting-related photo from the holidays:

Sadly, I think they mean fibre optics.

Needle Felting

A new craft for me, this. I'd picked up some felting needles and merino tops from The Handweaver's Studio early last year, and a copy of Fleece Dog some time before that. Then very recently one of my colleagues brought me back another very cute book of needle felted animals from her native Japan. It was time to give it a go, so I decided to see if I could make the lovely Gail small effigies of her own two kitties.

I didn't take any photos during the process, and I was subjected to plenty of "that'll never work" heckling from the boyfriend, but it did work! Here are the girls:

They are based on pipe cleaner skeletons (big green fluffy novelty ones were all I could find locally so they had to do), covered with merino tops. The eyes are small green beads poked into the heads on U-shaped lengths of craft wire, and the whiskers are the more slippery beading wire pushed through the heads and clipped to the right length.

These were great fun to make and I will be doing various other little animals for myself at some point. I think certain members of the mustelid family might be pretty adorable (red panda, sea otter and zorilla in particular).

Beading

It had been ages since I'd picked up a bead in earnest, certainly not since starting this blog, but I used to make quite a bit of jewellery and do have a bead stash. I needed to get back into it as I intend to create my bouquet out of Swarovski crystals. I ended up making this keyring out of green and clear crystals, silver beads and white pearls, for Lotta:

Probably not the most practical keyring, but never mind!

I also made some stuff for myself that evening, including this ring out of blue-green (technically "Indicolite") crystals, large dark grey-burgundy pearls, small white pearls and small silver beads, on one of the ring bases with a loop to attach things, as sold at the Swarovski shop on Great Marlborough Street:

I did really want to have the bunch more solid and able to stand up, but it seemed to be impossible to pack it that tightly whilst still being able to access the loop to attach things, so the stalks flop around and jangle as I move my hand. It's quite fun although distracting to wear whilst typing.

That's it for the presents. My craft (and other) activities for 2009 will be in the next post.

Post-Christmas Greetings

On Boxing Day evening, I hope this finds all of you slowly emerging from your gluttonous turkey-induced slumbers, dragging your way out of piles of wrapping paper, and wondering what the hell to do in this slightly boring bit of the year between Christmas and New Year. It's not quite time to be doing anything useful or indeed anything that would require resolutions, like tidying the house or hitting the gym; those are what January is for. No, what this period seems to be for is watching the telly.

As I don't do the evil television, instead I will make you a present of some knitting-related videos. Can you tell I just worked out how to embed YouTube videos in my post the other day?

Firstly, and this is the one I would really recommend watching, a knitted music video by French-Canadian pop duo Tricot Machine. Yes, the name of their band is "knitting machine" in French. Apart from that, the song, "Les Peaux de Lièvres" is ethereal and lovely. I am a complete sucker for French pop, and piano-driven songs, and this is both, and gorgeous.

Isn't that wonderful? Effectively a knitted flick book. You can see as the camera is zoomed out at the start and end there are numbers on the knitted sheets which are presumably frames, just over 700 of them. Amazing. Their other songs are pretty good and I may be using my Christmas Amazon voucher from the future in-laws for their album.

Much less pretty, but fun nevertheless, another music video made of knitting. "Walkie Talkie Man" by Steriogram. It's probably a good thing that sound recording doesn't really involve that much yarn - the music would be all muffled.

Not music, this one's an art installation. Forget holding yarn double, here Extreme Knitter Rachel John knits a mattress using 1,000 strands held together. The only points to this, presumably, being the ones at the ends of her needles.

More of a point here - hideously annoying background music, but this does use knitting (or rather unknitting) to make illustrate the potential effects of climate change rather well.

You've probably already seen this a million times, but here are the Mason-Dixon Knitters with "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That For You)", which is pretty funny though I wouldn't expect a non-knitter to find that much amusement in it, or at least, not more than once.

To wrap up, news of something I'm very excited about: there's a film coming out in February of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline"! That in itself would be great (but scary), but even better, it's a 3D stop-motion animation (inherently cool) and has plenty of craft content. I mean, buttons for eyes and all... The trailer is here on the film's website and certainly worth a look, but I shall embed here for you a short film about the person who made the incredible minature knitwear for the puppets.

Enjoy!

The Economics of Chutney

Greetings from down south, where I am already whiling away the holidays by spending too much time on the internet and eating too many mince pies.

Whilst at the hairdresser's this afternoon, I happened upon this piece in the Telegraph: apparently our illustrious Mayor of London Boris is giving home-made gifts of chutney this year.

I would very much like to try Mr Johnson's chutney - I expect it is made to very high standards with quality ingredients, him being that sort of chap. It's also, in a small way, nice to know that my elected representative can turn his hand to such things. Perhaps by next year he'll have learned to knit?

Interesting economic analysis and I did love the photo tag-line: "Home-made chutney is not the answer." What was the question?

Hark! The Herald An... Oh, Wait...

I don't believe in them, do I?

For the last few days I have been suffering with yet another cold, like most of London. I have been puffy of eye, impacted of sinus and snotty of nose. My fellow commuters have been staring at me with horror lest I cough over them, almost as bad as if I'd been bleeding from my eyes with the Ebola virus. I am, thankfully, better today, in time for the holidays.

Unlike my nasal congestion, I have been trying not to be too snotty about religion at this most godly (well, for the majority religion of this country) time of year. My own opinions are very strongly atheist, but I do make an effort most of the time not to foist them on people. I honestly don't care what anyone else believes, as long as they don't try to convert me or give me no option but to do things religiously. As an aside, I randomly found out this weekend that it is former Conservative MP and generally orange person Gyles Brandreth I have to thank for pushing forward the law to allow non-religious weddings in this country, during his time in office back in the '90s. Who'd have thought?

I do reserve the right to be highly critical of religion in my own home, and on this blog, which I really see as an extension of my lounge. But I won't enter into a conversation with anyone about it in public, unless they start it. But then, who does, in England? We're all far too polite. I rarely assume anyone has any firm religious feelings anyway, unless they bring it up, and it certainly doesn't affect my opinion of them otherwise.

However from time to time I will indulge myself by hanging out with the militant atheist crowd, which is how I found myself, armed with plenty of tissues, at Eight Lessons and Carols for Godless People on Thursday night at the Bloomsbury Theatre. This was billed as an alternative evening of celebration at this time of year where traditionally one would find oneself in church. Various comedians were billed, alongside the man who would be god if we had one, Professor Richard Dawkins. Aside from that, I had no idea what to expect.

The problem was, I don't think the organisers really knew either. What we ended up with was a three-hour-long variety show. Many, many comedians came on. All except the very famous ones got about a minute on stage. There were a couple of musical numbers, none of which were very good - one problem being that it's hard to sustain a musical comedic number for very long. The unfunny answer is to veer off into a whole other song ("Centerfold" by The J. Geils Band in one notable case) or keep trying to come up with more verses. This is why Mitch Benn does it so well, he keeps them short and knows when to stop.

Of the comedians, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee and Natalie Haynes were all very funny. Tim Minchin was awesome, as he always is. But I must register my strongest possible objection to Ricky Gervais. The Office was great, and I've heard Extras was pretty good, but as a stand-up? Appalling. Seriously offensive. Jokes about raping an old woman with Alzheimer's on the basis that no-one will believe her, and about a father wanking over his young daughter's report of being molested in a park, are unjustifiable and (better or worse depending on your viewpoint) not even funny. Seriously, the man is supposed to be a national treasure, taking British comedy to the world? If so, I hope they don't let him get up on stage, or our international reputation is ruined.

Simon Singh and Richard Dawkins, of course, spoke brilliantly, but then they always do which is why we go to see them speak elsewhere for more than five minutes. The compere, Robin Ince, was very funny, full of the kind of scientific jokes about Richard Feynman that I love, and attacks on evil bitch Ann Coulter (yes, that's Dickipedia, the encyclopaedia of dicks) but it was a bit ruined by hearing him on the radio yesterday using all the same jokes. It always disappoints me when I realise that comedians aren't making it all up on the spur of the moment just for me. I never buy comedy DVDs for that reason. Some of the other acts were OK, others were pretty terrible.

The weird thing was, only a few of them were about Christmas/celebration/religion. Some were just nothing to do with it. There was even a fair bit of shoe-horning in of other "issues" - see the very funny rant on breeders with a sense of entitlement just for having babies, and a wholly unfunny (on purpose) discussion of access to AIDS medication in South Africa. Now, I agree fully with the points made in both of those, but not really what I was expecting.

And there were no songs! It's not a carol service without a bit of a singalong. Looks like I'm going to have to hypocritically go along to midnight mass again this year.

We were all issued with a free copy of New Humanist magazine, which I hadn't heard of before and probably won't be buying again on the basis that it's too dull and worthy for words. On my way home, I happened to sit down on the bus next to an older lady also clutching a copy so we got to talking about the event (her opinion matched mine: too long, too hot in the theatre, about half of it good and half not). She then produced a card and strongly encouraged me to join the National Secular Society. Uh, how is this different from a Jehovah's Witness trying to recruit me? Luckily conversation moved on to the air-time given to religion on Radio 4 (Thought for the Day, I'm talking about you, because I don't want god with my cornflakes and news broadcasting) and then I escaped the bus.

So for all of you celebrating one thing or another over the next few weeks, even if that's only getting some time off work and the opportunity to stuff yourself with Terry's Chocolate Orange, I leave you with my little light-up USB Christmas tree from my cubicle at work:

MERRY WINTERVAL!

(Off to my parents' place now for the festive season, so blogging will be limited.)

Saponify!

That sounds like it should be a spell in Harry Potter, doesn't it? Wouldn't that be a good threat, to turn someone into a giant bar of soap with a wave of your wand? Technically, humans can be turned to soap, but only once dead - it's what happens if you undertake (ha ha) your decomposition in cold, wet ground out of the reach of oxygen. Your fat bits will turn into adipocere aka "grave wax".

That's probably not the best way to start out a post about something that's meant to be nice, pretty, and hygienic, is it? But I couldn't resist, especially since having researched the above I have a new goal in life: to visit the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to see not only The Soap Lady (a saponified corpse) but such other amazing attractions as The Big Colon! The Secret Tumor of Grover Cleveland! And a Freeze-Dried Cat!

Sounds on a par with the fascinating but sadly private Gordon Museum, which I was lucky enough to blag my way into whilst a student at King's College London. All the deformed foetuses in jars you could ever hope to see in one place, plus a great collection of stomachs as damaged by various poisons. I don't recall whether our soap-making friend sodium hydroxide was amongst them but I suspect it would have been.

This is not how I envisaged this blog post going. I should really plan them out in advance. So without further ado, on to the soap...

As you can see from the trays above, I made a whole lot of soap at the end of November, after the initial post. I wanted to have enough for general distribution to the knitting group (because fellow crafters know how to express appreciation for this sort of thing), to give to most of my friends and family in addition to regular Christmas presents (and therefore hopefully reduce actual expenditure on real presents), for swap packages, and, of course, to have enough for myself so that our household doesn't have to buy surfactants for personal use for most of 2009. I wanted to have plenty of variety to match scents to recipients, and, given the initial outlay on new pans, silicone bakeware, blenders and fats, I thought I may as well amortise the cost over as many bars as possible. It's all about the marginal cost, people. You can tell I'm an accountant, can't you?

I therefore made six different kinds in the end, ranging from two loaf tins and then some of the first lavender batch, to only five little round ones of the orange batch at the end. I have a much better idea now of how ingredient volume translates to bars of soap, but I don't have that to an exact science yet. Here are the six:

I shall introduce you to each in turn, in the order in which I made them.

Lavender Soap

You've seen this one, back in November. I used the basic soap recipe from The Soapmaker's Companion, to the letter, being coconut, palm and olive oils, plus lavender essential oil, lavender flowers and alkanet root to colour it. The grooves you can see are from cutting it and sort of forcing some of the flowers down through the soft bar on the edge of the knife. Since doing all these six, I've been advised that I'd get better results by cutting with a fine wire like a guitar string. Wish I'd known that before! There's a soapmaking group on Ravelry which has been brilliant for this sort of thing.

Anyway, the lavender soap lathers beautifully and looks very pretty. Lavender seems to be a very popular scent amongst my friends so it's good that I ended up with so much of it.

Floral Luxe Soap

This was the second batch I made. Exactly the same recipe as above, but with sweet almond oil added to the initial oil blend, and grated shea butter added at trace. Essential oils used were rose geranium, ylang ylang and bergamot - real rose being way too expensive. I added three whole rose buds to the bottom of each cupcake mold before pouring in the soap, and I'd hoped that they'd stay sunk so show on the top once turned out. Unfortunately they floated so they are on the bottom instead, and the above bar doesn't look all that special. They've also turned from pink to a more dried brown during the curing period, but still look OK.

This stuff should be incredibly moisturising, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

Marine Biology Soap

My darling's request - he is a biologist, aquatic in PhD subject, although freshwater rather than marine. This came about when he spotted the jar of chopped up bladderwrack whilst we were shopping for essential oils in Neal's Yard, and he asked if I could incorporate them into a soap. Why not? We then went to Holland & Barrett and bought spirulina, which not only provides more microbial content but is the natural green colourant recommended in the books. He saw bags of sea salt and asked if we could throw them in. Sure. I then thought it smelled just a bit too oceanic to be a totally pleasant washing experience, so I added peppermint essential oil for the refreshing (rather than slightly damp) aspect of the sea. I also added avocado oil to the initial mix, because he loves avocados, and it's very moisturising.

It is a bit of a rough diamond, this one. It looks exactly like he wanted - like something dried up and horrible on a rock on the beach. It drops lumps of salt everywhere because the crust is so thick it isn't all properly sealed by soap. It has weird black lumps of bladderwrack sticking out, and the green colouring is patchy, obviously due to some weird reaction of kelp, spirulina and lye. I can understand not wanting to use this. But having done so, it's brilliant! The lather is white, not green, the salt provides a nice exfoliating element if you use that side of it, and oh wow, it is just amazing on the skin. I was starting to get dry patches from the recent cold weather, and this has cleared them up wonderfully. Clean and soft, totally unlike a dead fish. So far, this is my favourite one to use in the shower. If no-one else wants it, then all the more for me.

By the way, some books extol the virtues of seaweed and spirulina as providing lots of vitamins in the soap.  Other books say all that's tosh as any there would be denatured by the lye.  I don't care, I just like the thought of having a shower with thousands of little creatures (each cell of the bladderwrack and each cell of the spirulina being a separate organism).  There's no privacy with this soap!

Lemon & Ginger Scrub Soap

Two new things tried with this: animal fat and layering. Traditionally soap has been made with mutton or beef tallow (look for "sodium tallowate" in your soap ingredients) or other animal fats, so I thought I should give it a go even if I never did it again. Besides, lard is really cheap compared to all the rest of the stuff I've been using, and is actually in the supermarket rather than having to mail order. So this became the regular coconut, palm and olive oils, with added slightly bacon-smelling lardy goodness (seriously, it no longer smells of bacon, but there was a hint during the initial melting of the fat). I did half the quantity on a Saturday night and added only ginger essential oil to it before pouring into loaf tins. The next morning, I did the rest, adding lemon essential oil, benzoin (a natural resin which helps to "fix" lemon scent into soap, as otherwise it's a bit ephemeral), poppy seeds and yellow iron oxide for colour. This is therefore the only batch I've made which is non-vegetarian and with "artificial" additives in the form of the colour.

The problem with this is that I had enormous trouble cutting it on the Monday. It kept sticking and dragging on the knife, which would have been helped by the guitar wire trick above if I'd known. Unfortunately, the drag meant that for a lot of the bars the layers were pretty much pulled apart. I sort of squished them back together and most are fine although I suspect some will fall apart when used. There'll be two perfectly good bars, one lemon scrub and one ginger, but not quite the layering I had intended. I've been trying to only give out the ones that were best stuck together. Apparently (thanks Rav!) next time I could try only leaving an hour or so between layers (so the bottom one is only just solid enough), raking up the surface of the bottom one with a fork, or spritzing the surface of the bottom one with alcohol. All these should apparently improve adhesion.

Manly Wood Soap

This was the boyfriend's initial request before he went off on the marine tangent, because he liked cedarwood when I was asking him to sniff essential oils. I decided to add sandalwood as well and fought the desire to call it the more smutty "Morning Wood".

New thing: an attempt to make Castile soap, which, like Marseille soap, has a base of pure olive oil. Actually, some sources I've seen has it as just requiring a base of pure vegetable oils, in which case everything made already but the lemon and ginger qualifies, but regardless, I wanted a go at pure olive oil. This requires the addition of melted beeswax into the oil, as otherwise it won't generate a hard bar. Otherwise, nothing else added. It is creamy-coloured, pure and lovely.

Orange Happiness Soap

In fact, stolen from the Manly Wood batch above, to indulge myself. During all the various sessions of essential oil choosing above, I realised what the true scent of happiness is: sweet orange. It just makes me feel better. I had to make a soap out of it, just for me.

Seeing as I had some to hand, I grated in the zest of a couple of oranges, before adding the sweet orange essential oil. It is lovely and will cheer me up when I need it. There's not much of it so I'm afraid I'm guarding this jealously, though I may make more in future.


So having done all of the above, let it cure for the requisite four weeks, and tested it to make sure my skin wouldn't fall off and turn me into an exhibit at the Mütter or Gordon Museums, I needed to distrubute it. That would require wrapping in something at the very least, probably some labelling too. And we all know packaging is important, don't we?

I may have taken this a bit too seriously. I went and bought some little brown luggage tabs and a rubber stamp kit. Observe my soap labels:

Aren't they cool? I did do a batch of just "Lucy's" instead of "Ginger Lucy's" for use with those who don't know about the blog (eg colleagues, parents), but if you're reading this, you'll be seeing the labels above.

I then spent whole nights of my life wrapping each bar in colour-coded handmade paper (no, not by me, from Paperchase), writing the ingredients on the labels, and adding ribbons. One day I'm going to learn not to be such a bloody perfectionist.

Here they are:

So the knitters have them already, and I have a couple of overseas packages to go out although they won't arrive by Christmas. If anyone reading this wants one and isn't already aware they're getting one, do let me know and I'll happily send you a bar.

My house smells like Lush, my friends are dead impressed, and my skin is clean and lovely - win!