I look forward to my weekends. They give me two days in a row to get in touch with my inner kitchen witch, as it were.
As much as I really hate that I broke my ankle last November, it has forced me to slow down and FIND things to do. I get bored really easily, and being winter, I have to fill the shorter, colder days with something.
So far, you’ve seen my crochet projects, the progression of our first batch of homemade wine, and the natural skin care items I whipped up for Christmas.
Only 356 more to go…
On the first of the month I started an afghan project that has me making one granny square per day; the colors are based on my mood that day. I’ve been consistent thus far, though it IS only the 10th of the month. I’ve been trying to do the mental math on how I am going to lay out the 365 squares so that they are not 5 across. (Each square is about 5 inches square, so at 5 across, it’d only be 25″ wide, which is way too narrow for an afghan, in my opinion.) None of the numbers that go into 365 will make for even rows, so I’m figuring I will do some plain white squares to make up the missing squares. I have eleven and a half months to come up with a solution, so I’m not trying to overtax my brain at this point. 😉
Racked and bubbling! 🙂
This morning I racked our mead, taste-tested and added sugar to our second batch of Hell Hath No Fury red, and washed and sanitized all the associated equipment (auto-siphon, tubing, wine thief, buckets, spoons, etc.) I also updated both pages under the “Wine Making” menu.
Oh, yeah! I added two new pages to my menu last week. One is obviously for wine making (it’s a good thing to have a record of the steps one goes through to create a successful batch of wine and to have them all in one place, easily found again), and the other is a place to put crochet patterns and body care recipes for easy reference. This year it’s all about being organized, although you wouldn’t know it if you saw either of my desks. 😉
I still have two little projects on the agenda for this afternoon. One is another batch of body butter for my mother-in-law (I accidentally gave my step-daughter both jars at Christmas), and my friend Kara, who turned me on to my second project of the afternoon; lotion bar sticks. 😀
Have any of you ever tried a lotion bar? Kara sent me one and I tried it and I’m hooked. It comes in a twist up container (think deodorant) and glides on and moisturizes beautifully. I am noodling with a recipe that calls for equal parts of beeswax, coconut oil and shea butter. I picked the recipe up from Wellness Mama and am going to start this as soon as I’m done whipping the body butter.
Lemon body butter in jars.
In fact, I’m typing this while I have my body butter back in the fridge so I can beat it a little more, then add essential oil. I’ll probably post the modified recipe under the “Crochet & Crafts” menu before the day is out…
Fast Forward About 30 Minutes…
Now that the body butter is in the jars, I can start on my lotion bar sticks. I am really excited, because a new project is like a little kitchen adventure. For this batch I am using 2 ounces each of the ingredients and adding lavender essential oil before I put the mix into the deodorant tubes.
Fast Forward Another 30 Minutes…
The lotion sticks came out better than I thought that they would! I used a Corel serving bowl over a pot with 1 inch of water in the bottom as my double boiler. It took almost ten minutes for everything to melt down, and then I stirred in my lavender essential oil into the concoction, let it cool just a bit and used my gravy ladle to spoon it through a funnel into the deodorant containers. The process looks like the following photos:
So there you have it…A cold Saturday in the life of the girl that really can’t sit still and LOVES to make “stuff.”
What do you do when the creative bug bites you? What do you make? Will you share the recipe/pattern?
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Until next time…
Random Musings From a Type-A Workaholic 
Whenever you blog about making wine I always think of the song “White Wine in the Sun.”
Susan, 🙂