Natural Goats Milk Soap, made on the farm.

Here is my latest effort at making soap. I've got a small show coming up with a group of artisans and I'm trying to make as much soap as I can. Since the show is only a week away I decided to try my hand at HP or hot processed soap. I searched the Internet and found the oven method on Diane's Naturally http://www.dianesnaturally.com.au/. For those who don't know CP or cold processed soap takes 4 to 6 weeks to 'cure', while HP takes 24 hours to set up and cure. It's a lot easier to do CP but it's quicker to do HP.

As you can see from the photos below I've got what I think is a temperature problem, but I'm no expert and will ask others what this two tone soap means and if I should turn it into laundry soap (grate it all up into powder). The second photo shows the smaller molds turned out nicely, but the large block mold is discolored.

Wedding Shawl, machine knit tuck lace

My oldest daughter is getting married so I thought I'd make her a nice shawl, you cant really see it in the pictures but there is a silver thread running with the white thread. I used an old baby blanket pattern developed back before ribbers and patterning cams I'm sure as there was a lot of hand manipulation to pull three strands through three strands all the way up for six columns of sts.


You can see I deliberately killed the yarn so it would drape and for picos on he edges, I hope she likes it.

The pattern is formed by leaving several sts out of work across 100 needles on the bulky machine, knit plain for 170r and then latch up the six columns, then knit another 170r and do the same. I crochet cast off so I could have a nice edge to hang fringe, but I like the pico ends so much I decided it doesn't need anymore finishing.







I will take photos at the wedding and post them, hopefully it will show up better than it does on my bed spread.

Baby Shower & Knit Baby Blanket

Today was fun! I went to the baby shower of my DH's youngest brother and his wife. We played baby bingo, and had delicious sandwiches and soup and just visited with family and had a nice time. It helped that it was a lovely day in Washington, nice and warm with lots of sunshine.


















My baby blanket was a hit, the little ball player even looks a little like my BIL!! I knit that last night on my E6000 using T186, it turned out large enough to cover the three of them when they take those naps with the new baby in a few weeks!

Tomato & Pumpkin Fall Harvest - not exactly stellar!

Well, so much for growing tomatos this year!!
I only got one or two red ones out of the bunch,
I will say that the bushes were really healthy and there was no rust or other diseases on the plants for the first year in a long time.

Here is the largest pumpkin I've ever grown!!
It's yellow still, but it's a beaut!

This one has a lot more growing to do, don't know if it will make it as it's the middle of October already.

This one looks more like a striped watermellon, but it's a pumpkin.

Making & Canning Jam

Making Jam!!!

DH & I decided we better start taking care of all the fruit we have around here before the fruit flies learn of our collection and destroy it all! We pitted some beautiful blue plums and filled a one gallon zip lock bag, and then I got the jars boiling to sterilize them while DH pulverized them in the blender skins and all. Then we boiled the mixture with pectin and sugar and voila! We got eight 12oz jars of plumb jam. Then we started in on 4lbs of apples and stirred in cloves, cinnamon, and allspice and boiled it all down to make apple butter and after boiling the five half-pint jars and then filling them with apple butter we processed in boiling water for another 7 minutes.

So we got a total of 13 jars of canned fruit for this winter!! Yeah!! We still have two boxes of apples to go through adn about 15lbs of pears to ripen and can as well. This is fun!! I used to help my SIL many years ago but never did this myself, so I'm really quite proud of us!!