Been MIA for a Bit

I know I have not posted for a long stretch now. I got caught up in a very cool Herbalism class for a month there. (More about that in a future post! I’m working on it now.)

But also, my repetitive strain injury has flared up really badly, so I have not been making any soap, and typing is not terribly easy right now either. : (

So I will be back soon.

A Super Swirly Tutorial!

Previously on A Handcrafted Life: I was swooning over bars of super swirled soap. Since then, I have located a tutorial from GrumpyGirl herself!  Here it is!

The photos and instructions are very clear. I can’t thank GrumpyGirl enough for sharing this with everyone.

The Dancing Liquid is Freaky!

This video give me the willies! It kind of creeps me out, but I cannot stop watching it:

My Love of Castile Soap and the Law!

My obsession with 100% olive oil soap lead me to this: Edict of Colbert

It’s pretty clear I’ve violated alot of the Articles of the edict. On the upside, I’ve only made the soap twice. On the other hand, if I make it two more times, I guess I’ll be banished from the realm.

Swirly Swirled Soap!

Terrifyingly fantastic soap swirls is all I can say:

I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around how GrumpyGirl got all those colors and all those swirls in to one bar of soap. The number of colors in this bar is just FABULOUS. Not only that, it goes through the entire bar! WOW!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And if that was not amazing enough, get a load of the soaps at Alkali:

Oh yeah, she’s got some amazing marbling techniques. Very beautiful soap.

I’ll have to give swirling a try.

Soap Making Frenzy Follow-Up: Part II

ZOWIE, where has the month of June gone?

I am trying to keep up with June soaping only to turn around and discover that July has overtaken me. I got so swept up in doing research for new recipes, I have been lax in writing about what’s on the curing rack. So now, on to more soap:

Here is a bar scented with Cedarwood & Sage EO blend. We added Cinnabar colorant and Poppy Seeds. We’ve been absolutely loving all the EO blends we’ve gotten from Wholesale Supplies Plus and the colorants from TKB Trading.

The scent blends are just delightful and have been working very well in cold process soap. We got the colorants that are suspended in glycerin and it’s been pretty easy to use and blend in to our batches.

 

This bar looks kind of funky because the ground loofa was not very easy to cut, at least not with the crinkle cutter. So there are drag marks and little chunk that came off when the crinkle cutter hit the loofa. We tried a 50/50 palm and rice bran recipe for this batch. We scented it with lemon EO & ylang-ylang and added yellow colorant and poppy seeds along with ground loofa.

I’ve been using a lot of rice bran oil in my soaps. I have also used this oil in lotions. I find it absorbs really easily in to the skin and is not greasy at all. Rice bran really not terribly expensive so i’ve been using it in place of olive oil overall. (Until I made the fatal error of trying a test batch of Castile.) 

It’s happened, I’ve become a Castile soap junkie. I don’t know how, I did not think it was possible. I’d read so much about how it could take the greater portion of my life to get it to trace. How I’d have to wait eons for it to harden and cure. I thought I had gotten away scot free from the allure of olive oil in my soap recipes but alas, I guess all that saved olive oil will find it’s way in to 100% OO soap.

The soap still has pretty small lather, but it’s very emollient and the Sensuality type blend from Wholesale Supplies Plus is wonderful. Even though the bar hardened up right away from doing the water discount, I will still have to wait a while for this bar to cure.

This 4th of July weekend I tried my  hand at rebatching with goat milk. I’ll take some pics and post more about the rebatch in an upcoming post.

Happy 4th of July!

Wishing you all a happy and safe 4th of July.

The Most Amazing Bento You Will Ever See!

I have always enjoyed getting bento in Japantown from any one of the local grocery stores. I’ve made Japanese food at home, mostly simple  things I learned to make from my mom like riceballs or miso soup. 

Making lunch for my husband and I, every day can be kind of blah at times. We get trapped in the sandwich and a bag of chips or indifferent leftovers languishing in a battered plastic container rut far too often. On occasion, my husband would pack a can of Saba and rice with some tsukemono, but I was thinking we could expand our horizons. I finally decided to looking in to making bento.

I came across this website whilst looking for information on bento. (I hesistated when showing my husband this website. I didn’t want his raise his expectations as far as his bento was concerned.)

It was just a run of the mill sandwich and Hawaiian Punch in my lunch bag when I was a kid. But this lady has done things with food I could never have imagined.

Mari Miyazawa  is famous in Japan for making these elaborate bento for her child. She’s written several cookbooks and posts her magnificent creations at this website which is in Japanese: e-bento. When you see what can be done with rice, hotdogs and nori, lunch time will never be the same again.

As dazzled as I am by Ms. Miyazawa’s bento, I continued my search for every day lunch making ideas.

Lunch in a Box is a wonderful site for tips and inspiration when packing lunch for yourself and your family. Biggie’s directions and photos are very clear and easy to follow. For people with young children, she gives many tips on packing food with young kids in mind. I enjoy how she often shows the adult sized & kids sized versions of each lunch she makes. Another great feature of Biggie’s posts is timeframes. She lets you know how much time it took to make the meal so you can plan your schedule.

And if you really get in to the bento life, you can proudly display your culinary masterpieces here: Bento Lunches a LiveJournal community, filled with people who share what they’ve made for lunch every day.

A Nice Feature of Wikipedia

Picture of the day:

Soap Making Frenzy Follow-Up!

Previously on A Handcrafted Life: I was in the midst of making a whole lotta soap. I tried a bunch of different oils and some new techniques I recently learned at a fantastic workshop with Alicia Grosso.

The soap is out of the molds and on the drying racks. We had to unmold and cut them all up within about 24 hours after making the soap. All the soap was really very firm with the water discount. The hubby and I made seven batches of  soap this past Saturday and Sunday (June 14 & 15).

My husband took them all out of the drawers, peeled off the freezer paper and cut them in to individual bars. We have them on trays and drying racks and we’re still trying to figure out where to put all this curing soap.

 

I had read that using 100% coconut oil was very drying to the skin, unless you used a very high superfatting percentage. This is my 100% Coconut Oil soap. I made a 2 lb test batch. It was superfatted at 20%, scented with 40/42 Lavender and colored with Ultramarine Violet. It lathers like CRAZY.

It’s only been curing one week and my hands are not dried out at all from testing the soap, it’s amazing! But I will still let this and all my other batches cure for at least another 3-4 weeks before using them in the shower.

 

This is one bar from a 4 lb batch scented with a essential oil blend called Honey Almond. I added exhausted vanilla bean seeds (this what is left after the vanilla extract has been made) and oat flour. The vanilla bean seeds at some visual interest and along with the oat flour, some very gentle exfoliating properties. It’s got tons of lather and the vanilla bean seeds feel really cool in the bar.

I’ll give another update on the other soaps we made in another post this week!