Soapy day

Well I had my soap making day and it was successful. I think it was anyway. The soap looks fine but has to cure for 4-6 weeks so I won't be able to use it for a while yet.

It was exciting as I have thought about making soap for years but have always put it off and been a bit worried about using caustic soda as it can be dangerous.

But I have researched it recently and gained the knowledge and mainly the courage to try.

Rhonda's tutorial on Down-to-Earth was a great source of encouragement and info from The New Hard Times Handbook by Keith and Irene Smith also helped.

Ingredients

I wanted to make a vegetarian soap so didn't want to use any animal fats. I adapted a basic recipe I found to use vegetable oils. I included copha (coconut oil, which is solid at room temperature) which should make the soap set harder than just using runny vegetable oils. Apart from buying the block of copha for $2.50 I also had to buy a jar of caustic soda crystals for $3.75, I just used other oils that I already had at home.

Copha 250g

Olive oil 200g

Almond oil 100g

Canola oil 200g

Rainwater 285mls

Caustic soda 230g

Method

The method is fairly simple. The main precaution is to wear gloves and safety glasses when mixing the caustic soda and the water. It can spit and the solution does burn. Also protect any work surfaces and have the windows open so the fumes dissipate.

Instead of using plain water I made an herbal tea first and allowed it to cool.

I wanted to make it as cheaply as possible and decided against 'flavouring' my soap with essential oils. I picked some lemon balm, put in some mandarin skin and some cinnamon powder and a couple of cloves. The finished soap doesn't smell very strongly of any of these so perhaps oils would be better or maybe I could leave the water to steep for a day.

Next came the scary step of mixing the caustic soda. I had read that this could be dangerous, there could be hissing and spitting and bubbling. Frankly, after putting on Peaces safety glasses and my dish washing gloves (especially bought for the occasion) I was a bit disappointed. The mixture mixed nice and evenly, no splashes what so ever and it slowly began to heat up from the chemical reaction.

The caustic and water can heat up to 90 degrees Celsius in about 5 minutes. After this you need to allow it to cool to luke warm.



The oils should be the same temp as the caustic when you mix them so heat them and melt the copha and also allow this to cool. I don't have a thermometer so I just gauged the temperature of both mixes by feeling the outsides of the bowls. I thought that if they were roughly the same it should not matter.

Add the caustic to the oils in a thin stream and mix with a wooden spoon. Another precaution to note here is not to use aluminium or plastic containers or utensils for any part of the process.

As you stir the mixture becomes creamy.

Now if you have a family of bowl-lickers like me you must warn everybody that this is NOT cheese cake mixture sitting on the bench!

I then mixed it with electric beaters until it was thick and forming a trace. A trace is when patterns dropped onto the surface will hold their shape.

Pour the mix into a mould. I used a plastic ice tray out of an old fridge. I should have lined it with plastic so the soap came out easier.

Let the soap harden over night and then remove from the mold. Cut into bars and leave to cure for 4-6 weeks. Mine are on a piece of grease-proof paper on top of the linen closet.

I made eleven bars of soap and estimate that it cost me about $5. Now you couldn't buy pure, veggie oil soap for 50c anywhere. Oh, mine does look a bit messy but hey I'm sure it'll get us clean.

Home making

I have been trying to teach myself some more homemaking skills of late. I want to save money and be as self-sufficient as possible.

My first project was to try crocheting my own dish cloth. Well it did work out ok but it is very time-consuming for something you are just going to be using for cleaning. So next time I have my sewing machine out I will hem some old piece of towels to use instead.





I have also been trying to make bread at least twice a week. I don't think I could make enough all the time but at least this way some of our bread is made fresh from organic stone-ground flour.






And turning these beautiful pawpaws, given to us by a friend into green pawpaw chutney was fun. I now have enough chutney for a couple of months and a few extra bottles for swapping with friends.












My next project is soap making. I am going to be trying this today so hopefully will do a post on it soon.

Home improvements

For Mr T's birthday P made him a work bench.



He loves it and is out there first thing every morning.
Serendipity played a part and his grandparents gave him some new tools.
And the neighbours brought him a box of wood.


He has been trying to count as big as he can lately and with the help of his new tape measure he made it all the way to 100.

Mr T and his big brother have been working on some improvements to the new Van Cubby house.

It now has a solar panel mounted on the roof and wired up so the lights and radio work...clever boys! Zan, Rain and Mr T slept out there the other night!
And my little one is learning to climb, and I mean climb... right up into the tree house!!!

ok, the first steps

thinking about it...

almost at the top...

look at me ma!

ooh, I'm pround of myself.

With monkeys like these as role models what can I expect!

Come into the garden Maud

Come into the garden Maud
for the black bat night has flown...

This line is from one of my favourite Tennyson Poems and I always think of it as I'm walking up to the garden.

I love my garden and lately it's just getting better and better. Since we had the WWOOFers here and they dug another two beds, Peace has dug two more. So we now have double the room to grow delicious veggies. The idea is to be veggie self-sufficient soon. We will still have to buy some fruit until the fruit trees stat baring but it is a start. And we want to start selling boxes of veggies each week as well. It'd be good to get some kind of income from our land.

lovely beets

We plan to sell just one box a week as soon as we are growing enough and work our way up from there. It's all a mater of having a continuous supply...timing, getting the next batch of seedlings ready in time so they are planted out and coming on when an old crop is finishing...soundseasyfor some but a real trick when you are learning.

Cauliflowers growing bigger

Yesterday I planted out red cabbages and today more broccoli. The last crop of brocs are almost ready...so I hope I haven't left it too late. Kale is coming along nicely as are the Cauliflower. All the peas and beans I planted with the WWOOFers are tall enough to reach the fence now.

teenyweeny baby red cabbge

Peace has found a source of free sawdust so we have laid down cardboard and covered the paths with this. It's a really great weed suppressant and is nice to walk on. It also means that less time in the garden is spent weeding, mowing and whipper snipping the paths and more time is spent on the luscious plants themselves.

The lovely new paths, no more weeding...aahhh

Fresh, full of iron, beautifully curly leafed Kale

It looks like the last of the eggplants are almost ready. I love these long skinny ones. We've been eating truck loads for over three months now

Long and luscious Eggplants or Auberines to some...

.

There is so much more happening out there I can't mention it all. The cheeky rainbow Lorrkeets eating the manderines,the joey's; getting big enough to spend time outside their mothers' pouches, the herbs and the strawberries and figs...

Climbing peas

Thrift Shop Jeans...or is that genes...

My kids seem to love bargain hunting as much as I do. I took Rain into the local op. shop today so she could find a dress with some nice material that she could recycle into a skirt. I think she's got the sewing bug. When all the women working there said hello to me and all the kids by name I thought I guess I do come here often. And the children were walking around spotting things that were 'ours'. I had a big clean up and donated a whole load of stuff last week and now it's all on the shelves. I had to keep Mr T away from the toys in case he saw anything I had donated!

On the weekend Zan kept asking if we could go to the dump shop. It's funny in a way for a 14 year old's favourite shop to be the dump! I asked him what he wanted to buy and he said he was just going to browse, but maybe get an exercise bike or a treadmill for the moving parts. It amazes me the things he can make out of old junk. Last year he made a really cool billy cart. Peace finally decided that he had a few things lying around that he had no use for so got Zan to help load up the trailer and off they went! Now I didn't expect them to be back for awhile because Peace has been known to come home with more than he took to get rid of!

When they arrived their bargains included a hammock which is now hanging outside Zan's room (a great place to lie and read a book), a new mallet, some hard wood that will be good for framing an awning over the door and a new bathroom sink. It all cost the princely sum of $6.

The new hammock

And last week on his way home from work Peace bought a new hot water system. Ours is about twenty-five years old and has been leaking for awhile now. So it is wasting alot of water and water is so precious around here. It probably is not very energy efficient either. The new one was sitting on the pavement outside a Pub that is being renovated. Peace made an offer and got it alot cheaper than we'd have payed anywhere else. It's only five years old so should be more efficient.

Ideally we'd like to put in a solar heating system but it's just not in the budget right now. We are going to try to rig up a home made solar back up. I have an idea how to do it that might work...have to wait and see. It might be awhile before we get it done. The 'to-do' list is getting longer and longer all the time.

Happy day to you all.

Frugal Living

With this whole unschooling thing, I think I might be learning as much as the children. Often they will be reading something and come and ask me what a new word means. Sometimes I can explain it OK but other times I know how to use the word and instinctively know its meaning from reading and saying it but I can't define it precisely for them. So out comes the trusty dictionary. I love dictionaries. Bizzare I know. I could read the dictionary for hours if I ever had hours of spare time. (you might think I'd be a better speller with this strange affliction but alas it isn't so.) I love finding new words to use and wierd sounding words and I love knowing where a word originated. For example I found out recently that the word vagina derives from Roman slang. It was a word which meant a sheath in which you put your sword. And here I was being a feminist not wanting to use slang names for body parts! It really seems to help the kids with spelling and reading when they know a couple of word roots. Like tri- meaning three and bi-meaning two. All of a sudden it clicks that all the words with that in have similar meanings.
I've used the word frugal a bit lately and then thought I'd better look it up in the dictionary because I couldn't quiet define it. According to Collin ( of Collin's English dictionary fame) it means; practising economy; living without waste; thrifty.
So I can breathe a sigh of relief. Ahhh... I haven't made a fool of myself using it in the wrong context.
We have a new experiment in frugal living coming up. I actually read it in a magazine awhile ago and then my Dad mentioned it again to me. It's based on doing without something each day. So one day will be TV free, one will be spending-free etc. Perhaps it will save us money, perhaps it'll be an interesting experiment in how much we use and waste. The kids are all willing to try it. I won't lie and say they are really keen but they are willing. Zan is most resistant to TV free days. Rain to junk food free days, and even Peace isn't too keen on riding his bike to work on car free day. We plan to start Monday so I'll keep you updated.

Just another hole in the wall.

There is a big hole in our bedroom wall. Today we got in demolition mood and took out the window where we are going to put in the french doors. The doors aren't quiite ready to go in yet but the weather's warm enough for a bit of open-air living for a couple of days. And now we've got the motivation to finish them. Peace saw the doors at the tip-shop and when he asked how much they were the guy was pretty disbelieving that someone would want them. So Peace walked away with a five dollar set of doors!

Mr T in demo mode!

The view from the hole-in-the-wall

Then off to Pickerings for a swim.

I spent the day spring cleaning. And as I was cleaning I was thinking about when we lived in our little bus and how now we have so much 'stuff'. When we had the bus we only had two children but we lived in about 6sq metres of space. And life was so much simpler with so much less stuff.

This is a photo of Rain's second birthday at Port Douglas, with our home in the back ground.

We now have four children but we have almost 100sq metres, and I'm always saying how crowded it is! I've let stuff accumulate since we moved here and since it takes an aweful long time to build more rooms on, the easier solution is to de-clutter. There is stuff around the place that I haven't used for over two years. There is stuff around that I have never used.

We've been challenging ourselves lately about how environmentally friendly, how simply we could live if we had to. Well I think we all do have to to some extent. So the vegie garden is being upgraded, the house is being pared down and maybe we'll even save money.

While I cleaned and cleared Peace spent the day mountain climbing and abseiling and came back with some great pictures.

Our place is in one of those little green patches.

Dawson

Sew happy

Got my sewing machine out today for the first time in almost a year. Mainly because I had to, because the baby sling was falling apart at the seams. I made a new one out of a bed sheet and an old table cloth. Then the kids, all excited at this unfamiliar piece of machinery in the house wanted to learn how to sew.

Rain sewed her first skirt.

Just out of a simple rectangle of material. I did the elastic waistband for her. She's already designing some more clothing to sew.

Then we went to a birthday party down by the river. It was for Mama Bear and Papa Bears youngest boy's third birthday. MrT had loads of fun. And I met some really nice Mamas there.