Melt-and-Pour soap is easy and fun!

I purchased 32 oz of soap base, molds, lavender fragrance, and some dried lavender/orange peel to make soap. So far I have made three batches of soap, two of them lavender and one of them tea tree oil. What I found interesting is that even though the instructions say you can get burned, it is only likely to happen if you use the microwave. Heating the soap to melt in a double boiler is more like when you have a candle at church, and some of the wax drips on to you. It doesn't hurt, but it feels hot. Now the microwave, it will make the soap hot enough to burn you.
You might say that making soap from a melt-and-pour base is not really natural. Granted, there are some strange ingredients in the base, but really nothing that wouldn't be in ordinary soap. It is also possible to purchase all-organic melt-and-pour base at Bramble clBerry. Also you can choose to use only natural coloring and pure essential oils as fragrance. I'm not quite a purist yet with the fragrance, but I'll probably be m when I have more money to buy the essential oils. Someday I want to have a business selling handmade natural soap, hand-dipped aromatherapy beeswax candles, and undyed handspun natural fiber yarns. That would be so cool.

Crabapple Sauce and a Braided Rug

Yesterday I accomplished two things: Making a jar of crabapple sauce/butter, whatever it is called, and finishing a braided rug. It was easy to braid the rug once I figured out to overlap the rag strips instead of sewing them together. It ended up about the size of a mini trampoline. That was from a big garbage bag of rag strips. The crabapple sauce involved picking the crabapples, chopping off the stems and flower ends, cooking them, adding more water and mashing them in through a colander to remove the seeds and fibrous bits (mind you, this was learned partly through trial and error and got a lot more dishes dirty than necessary), adding cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and honey, and boiling it down. Maybe next time I will figure out how to take pictures of all the steps. Meanwhile, the tomato plant is making two tiny tomatoes and a few flowers, while a few radishes came up in the planters. And I had a weird dream about rabbits half the size of gerbils, and the other week I dreamed about pigs the size of guinea pigs. Weird!