Emerald
Month: October 2016
An oath
There’s a whole lot wrong with my first attempts at soapmaking, as I’ve since learned on the interwebs: a partial gel phase and a lot of soda ash on the outside of the loaves.
But I’ve decided to be okay with that. I’m determined to curb my perfectionism here. I mean… they smell good, they produce suds, they look like bars of soap, they seem to actually clean. So that should be enough. Right?
I won’t get all crazed now. I won’t be disappointed if my soap looks less than perfect.
I won’t get too gung-ho about making soap à la medieval. I won’t decide that the only true way to soapmaking is to make the lye myself by filtering rainwater through a barrel of hardwood ash. I won’t start rendering my own beef tallow. No.
Not yet, at least.
Mint coffee soap (first picture)
- Olive oil – 18 ounces
- Coconut oil – 16 ounces
- Palm oil – 14 ounces
- Lye – 7.10 ounces (5% superfat)
- Prepared liquid coffee – 17.5 ounces
- Peppermint essential oil – 6 teaspoons
- Cinnamon – 2 teaspoons
- Coffee grounds – 2 tablespoons
Olive oil soap (second picture)
- Olive oil – 48 ounces
- Lye – 6.17 ounces (5% superfat)
- Water – 17.5 ounces
Supplies from Coco & Calendula
September, belatedly.
Three ginormous and terribly ugly spiders have usurped the garden. They’ve built webs over the tomato plants and sneer at me when I approach. The last time I attempted a harvest, one managed to crawl onto my sleeve: I squealed like a piglet, dropped my colander of tomatoes and ran for cover. I immediately decided that gardening season was over.
Instead, I spent September tending to a solitary milkweed plant and a small family of monarch caterpillars. They came to me by way of Monarque sans frontière, an organization dedicated to saving the monarch butterfly. The school I work for kindly bought a monarch raising kit for anyone interested.
My kit came with five smallish caterpillars and one chrysalis. (Butterflies form chrysales, moths form cocoons. Who knew? The life cycle of the monarch is amazing. Read about it and sign up for your own kit next year.)
Over several days, my beautiful jade chrysalis turned pale green, then black. And then, this happened. It was amazing. I called everyone into my office to proclaim that I’d just given birth.
I tagged my monarch and released him with great fanfare in the garden the next morning.
Under the gaze of a group of wholly disinterested students.
“Look! This one’s male. See the two dots on the lower wings? Those are scent glands. That’s how you know.”
“Yeah, whatever lady, can we go now?”
Baby boy was strong and happy and took off right away. Godspeed butterfly WAC010! Or should I say, ¡vaya con dios! (He did, initially, fly north. Hope he’s figured out that Mexico’s the other way.)
Trigger warning: things don’t turn out well for the caterpillars. If you are sensitive to caterpillar death (like I am!), don’t read on.
My other babies did good for a while: munching away, molting like champions. But then their activity slowed. They seemed sluggish and disinterested.
I tried to encourage them with gentle, loving pokes. I would softly blow air on their curious little faces and they would arch their backs up at me as if to say: “yes! don’t give up on us! we loooove you!”.
But one by one, I found them overturned and deflated on the ground of their cage.
Ophryocystis elektroscirrha is to blame. A protozoan parasite. It devastated most of our caterpillar population this year.
Here’s hoping WAC010 and his peers make it to Mexico safe and sound.
Get down to that romance business soon, butterflies. The future depends on you.
UPDATE: The Montreal insectarium has decided to end their monarch raising program. They have determined that the risk of disease/pest is too high.
Brome fair socks
Every labour day weekend of my life I have spent at the Big Brome Fair, ensconced in the smallest booth on the fairgrounds, selling fudge and barley candy with my family. It’s tradition.
And every year is exactly like the last. The midway sounds the same. The cow barns smell the same. The corn on the cob tastes just as good. My toes get just as dusty/muddy as ever. Hardworking people are hawking the same old gimmicks to the same old marks. I love it all.
The fair exists in this weird atemporal place. We set up on Friday morning and disassemble on Monday evening. But in that in-between time, as I’m sitting in the booth, knitting on a sock and listening to the new magician on the small stage, I feel like I’ve never left.
(Brome photos from 2012)
- Pattern: 68 stitch CO improvisation
- Yarn: Self-striping Schachenmayr Regia Pairfect. Colour: 07111 Lot: 5990
- Needles: Smallest I have. Size 0?
- Notes: Pretty sure the instructions on the ball band are wrong? I knit these cuff down, as they said, but only got to the coloured stripes on the foot, not the leg (as pictured on the band). Oh well. I also had to end the toe a little prematurely: another colour was approaching and it would have looked really awkward to have only two or three rows of light brown on the toe.