Diane's Blog

This is a lavender/lemon/bay soap, all essential oil scents. I will call it Sunset by the Bay. It smells very unusual….the combo of scents lends a mysterious note of spearmint, even though there is no spearmint added. Lovely! Doesn’t it look slightly Van Gogh?

Our first trip walking on our frozen pond this winter: Behind our house you can see some open water at pond’s edge.

Let’s go down and take a closer look. The deer seem to be keeping it open for drinking.

Now let’s see how difficult it is to walk in this depth of snow wearing just boots. Looks to be about 6 inches deep.

It is tiring if I go too far. Poor deer, they go even deeper with their pointy hooves.

Wearing snowshoes, it’s a bit easier.

Let’s go uphill to get a good view. It is a bit steep for snowshoes.

Darn, I’m up, and hubby has the camera, down below. He took this pic of deer tracks and said: all roads lead to the house of feed:

Final picture today: Di walks back to house, while Crawford takes a wide-angle shot. The ice should be good and hard now, after 2 weeks of below zero weather. Hope so anyway. It’s fun to walk on frozen water.

I keep getting requests for Herbal scrub, so made this one, with 13 different scents in it, mostly lemony, along with ground oats, coffee grounds and pumice. Smells lovely and should help get all that wintery dry skin smoothed down.

This log will make 30 bars.

Cut, they look like this: (don’t mind the partial gel in center…the room was very cold overnight).

and I made one small soap muffin to try out this silicone baking mold. Cute?

They might have a conversation like this:

I just today learned how to put balloon captions into photos. It took an hour and a half to do these six. Hope I get faster at it.

Literally.

Deer visit the bird feeders every winter. Occasionally, a buck arrives.

This is our first sighting  this winter. He’s a tad shy.

This next pic will be our Christmas card photo for 2009

but two days later, this very morning,  this on the front lawn:

I had sent out a silent request to him the day before, to please leave an antler here, nearby.

So I went searching. Hubby took this next pic of me stomping through the back forest, following tracks.

There are many broken tree branches. But Di the deer-whisperer, feels it is nearby. Hubby searches with me, but after 45 minutes, returns home. Diane really intuits that it is here somewhere, so just a few more minutes search…..15 minutes go by, and just as she’s about to give up….

She sees it! Can you?

for those of you who need a closer shot, here’s a zoom-in:

I run back to the house to ask hubby to come with the camera. He runs out without his coat, and takes this pic.

They don’t call me “four eyes” for nothin!

Here it is, snowy, near a cup, to give you an idea of size.

and on a diningroom chair. The cats are totally spooked by it. It’s a five-pointer.

Riverguild store in town just phoned, wanting 48 more bars. Xmas shoppers are requesting soap. So I tucked some beauties into their travel case.

but before we head out, we may need to clear some snow!

Three deer are looking mighty interested in the birdseed. And the car is getting whiter by the minute.

Wish us luck as we head out….Tally Ho!

So I am using some cocoa butter which looks rather unrefined, has lots of hard brown bits in it – but smells wonderfully chocolatey! and I think that the chocolate scent of it adds to its ability to hold whatever other scents I may add…like a good base ground of scent.

But it leaves flecks in the finished bars, which to me just adds to its natural-lookingness, so I rather do like the look of it. In the bars pictured below, I added some pink clay, and swirled it in, but you can see the white and brownish flecks of the cocoa butter (not the main ingredient).

It smells lovely!

Here is what the unrefined cocoa butter bits look like after I grated it, and before I melted it into the other oils:

This is the view from our front door, early morning. You can barely see the pond for mist. Most leaves are now on the ground, awaiting raking. It usually takes many weeks to pick them all up and tote them to the back woods.

and here is the front driveway at sunrise, not yet 6AM so it’s pretty dark on the ground.

and later, you can see the many poplar leaves that can be raked up and added to the compost piles. Poplar makes good compost, as it rots quickly, and is not as acid as some trees, such as oak. I don’t add the oak leaves to the compost.

I won’t have much time for soapmaking until this is done!

Been out of touch with blogging for a week of nursing both of us through a short flu bug. So glad to be alive and well again!

so….I’ve been knitting this colorful scarf. it’s about halfway done. A simple but challenging enough pattern with garter stitch stripes  interspersed with alternating bands of solid -color stockinette, and all in a parallelogram shape.

Then this morning, I went outside and noticed the colours outdoors!

and the leaves beneath my feet. (confession: I did arrange them a bit)

Don’t you just adore Autumn?

A new friend who is staying at the nearby nun’s Hermitage offered to come help me make soap this week. We made 2 batches of 15 bars each: First, peru balsam

Next, unscented oatmeal, which my eczema-suffering customers buy frequently, need to keep this in stock at all times.

and last week I made a lavender/ylang swirled with purple oxide, also a regular best-seller. I never know how the blobs of color are going to spread out. Always interesting to cut these bars!