Thriftism

Months ago I began knitting a towel, but I lost focus about halfway through. In fact I knitted a pair of mittens for a friend's newborn, made soap, and basically forgot about this project. Good news is that I found it again and finally finished it. I missed Valentine's Day, but it will be ready to go for next year.  This was a trying project for me as I made up the pattern as I went and I hadn't ever done that before. Turns out not to be as hard as I expected, but one tip I figured out- don't watch tv or talk on the phone while you're doing the first couple rows of a pattern you created. J I ended up pulling out several rows and reknitting and after all the trouble, I got a towel covered in hearts.  It's actually very easy once I got going and paid a little attention to stitch counts and stopped dropping stiches. I used size 7 needles ( gauge doesn't really matter, make it whatever size and however tight/loose you want) and Rose Pink Sugar and Cre...

Part 2 - The Process In this post we will detail our approach to the soap crafting process. The recipe we used is simple and easy to follow, listed below in no particular order are the ingredients. 2 oz - Lye 16 oz - Olive Oil 6 oz - Water Begin by gathering some necessary tools, you will need; Scale - Preferably accurate to the 0.01 oz but we made do with a shipping scale only accurate to 0.1 oz Thermometer - Working range of 100F to 150F, 2 thermometers are ideal  Bowl - Used to mix the lye/water solution, be careful as the lye can etch glass products PPE - Personal Protective Equipment, lye is caustic and can cause skin irritation and blindness if contacted on your eyes, rubber gloves and safety goggles people Kettle/Pot - Used to heat the olive oil and mixing vessel Wand Blender - Used to accelerate the saponification process by emulsifying the oil, lye, and water Soap Mold - We used a silicon 2 oz bar mold, if usin...

Our First Experiment with Homemade Soap Part 1 In the constant battle of budgeting, one is always looking for places to save money as well as potentially turn that savings into an income stream. We have selected the lowly household item, soap, as our next area to improve on. This was done for a number reasons; Soap is simple and used everyday. People have been making it for thousands of years, most recipes go like this - Lipids (Fat or Oil), Hydroxide Salts (Lye, Sodium Hydroxide, is most commonly used for its availability), Water, Extras (Anything else you want to add, fragrance, color, abrasives) Store markups on soap products are quite high when compared to the value of materials used to make it. A lucrative market currently exists on sites like Ebay and Etsy for speciality homemade soaps. Homemade soap is better for your skin. We selected a basic soap recipe for our first batch as a sample trial before getting too creative. This recipe includes; extra virgin olive oil, lye...