Childbirth and felted Booties.

One of my very good friends gave birth to her fist child on sunday morning after 24 hours of labour...OUCH! Not that I need any excuse to get crafty I sprang into bootie making action when the news came through that baby Alice had added her heartbeat to the world.

I didn't want to make them in advance in case God forbid anything bad was to happen. My friend is Sweedish so I made the booties in the Sweedsih national colors of blue and yellow, not very girlie I know but hey. They are made with 100% merino wool fleece and I used soap that I made myself too.

I then had the idea of doing a photo tutorial for felted booties, so I got to making another pair. I have my photos on the computer just waiting for five mins to put it all together. I love learning new crafts soap making being my latest hobby and I really appreciate it when people share recipes or techniques on their blogs. I figure that you have to give to receive.

So be sure to check back over the next few days as I will be posting a hand felted bootie photo tutorial.

New Etsy Shop Name

Right then, previously when you signed up to etsy you weren't able to change your shop name and I didn't realize that your user name was your shop name. So I got stuck with sammi10 as my shop name.

Not very effective right? So I made my shop banner say all that glitters as I wanted this to be what people remembered, but as you can imagine there was no continuity. I have been a bit absent in recent months due to the renovation of our flat and while I was sleeping it has now become possible to change my etsy shop name.

"excellent" I thought I went to change it to all that glitters and yep you guesses it that shop name had already been taken. So I have a new name in mind but I would like to have your input too. If you have a name to suggest to me please comment on this post and let me know.

New Felt Fuzzy Wonders

So this is what I have been up to in between working and making soap ready for Christmas. I have finally started restocking my ETSY shop. I have to admit I have been neglecting it what with living in a building site doesn't do wonders for the ole creative juices. So slowly but surely I'm filling it with fuzz.

I also have an annual sale with a friend of mine that makes amazing crochet hats so that has been a good kick up the backside too to get off Facebook and get crafty. Check her site out it's called Get Smitten you will find the link in the left hand side bar.

Now I'm back at home in Chamonix i'm not sure what the public are going to think of my new stuff, I have been making felt now for a year and a half or so but the people who come to my sale have only ever seen the beaded jewelry work I had done in the past , so I am a wee bit nervous about it. I mean everyone thinks their kids are beautiful right, do I just have my rose tinted specs on?

If anyone actually reads my posts to the end I would love some comments, feedback, color combo suggestions anything really. Just let me know you are out there.

FELTED SOAP

How perfect! I make felt, I now make soap, so felted soap is such a perfect combination. I have quite a few miss shapen soaps from my first few batches that are nice soaps but just don't look very pretty, so I'm going to tart them up so they won't get left out of the little christmas hampers I intend on making.

I was supposed to trim the soap to get rid of the hard edges but I forgot so this one is a bit wobbly. This one was more of a test than a gift effort, this one will probably end up in the bath with me.

For any one who has made felt before it is a very simple procedure. You follow the standard layering in opposite directions dampen rub ect. I think if anyone is interested I can make up a photo tutorial.

You don't have to be a soap maker to make felted soap gifts, look around the shops for interesting shaped soaps and felt them adding your own little stamp to it. I think the felted soaps will make fab Christmas stocking fillers.

CP Soap progress update

So in my last couple of posts I ve been going on about making soap. Well its been about 6 weeks since i made my first batch. I love anything crafty and do have a tendency to get hooked right away, soap has been no different for me.

My first few batches were rustic looking to say the least but in the tub are actually very nice and so different from one another.

The shapes are all wobbly, not refined at all. The kind of beige soap is the first soap I ever made, the goat milk castile soap. The dark orange colored one was my first attempt at my own recipe. It looks kind of awful but is so gentle. The pale yellow one is another of my own recipes. Once you have made a few batches don't be afraid to freestyle a bit.BUT!!!!!! Always run your recipes through at least 1 or two lye calculators go to www.brambleberry.com or www.soapcalc.com

So after a month and a half of making soap on a saturday here is a picture of where I am at now

If you're interested in soap check out you tube it has a hole bunch of useful videos...enjoy

My First Batch of Soap....????

Ok so I made my first batch of soap this afternoon and wow how stressful was that!! Like I mentioned in my last post, for my first attempt I chose to make a goat milk castile soap. So that's an olive oil and goat's milk soap. Using milk in soaps is apparently very tricky as there is an added reaction with the milk and the LYE which turns the lye solution yellow/orange and it makes the solution really hot.

Thankfully i had watched a million and one videos on youtube about making goat's milk soap. I added the lye to the milk and the water very slowly and yep what a surprise it almost instantly started turning yellow.

I should have taken a photo at this stage for me as well as for you but as I'm sure you can appreciate I was a little stressed at this stage as my lye mixture was turning more and more yellow bordering on orange and the temperature was way up near 180f. So I put my lye solution in an ice bath as I had seen done on you tube and it did bring the temperature done quite quickly but I don't know if it helped with the colour at all.

I don't think the solution turned bright orange but it was definitely on the orange scale of colours. I thought what the hey it didn't say anything bad would happen to the soap if it went a bit orange in fact it said that it probably would and if it curdled to blast it with a stick blender. Luckily I bought one this morning...how glad was I! I nearly didn't buy it coz i was feeling tight this morning and didn't want to spend anymore money after buying a 14 euro chicken!

So when my oil and beeswax and my lye solution were within a couple of degrees of each other 125degrees about I poured my lye solution into my oil then got to it with the stick blender. It didn't take to long to reach "trace" this is when you lift out your blender or spoon and dribble a bit on the surface it leaves a...yep you've guessed it trace. Trace is like the consistency of custard...hmmm custard.

I have a number of friends and family that suffer with eczema and I wanted to make a soap for them so once I had reached trace I poured roughly half the mixture into the moulds before I added some essential oils to the remaining half.

I used bergamot and cedar wood essential oils both of which are supposed to be good for the treatment of skin irritations. As you can see from the picture my soap turned out a kind of a honey colour it started to curdle a little bit but My ole mate the stck blender soon sorted that out.

So as far as I am aware I think I have just made my first successful batch of Goat's Milk Castile soap but we won't really know for 4 weeks. I think I'll get me some PH strips tomorrow.

Virgin soap

I am sooooo excited about tomorrow!! My husband has gone away for the weekend to a school reunion (snore snore) and I am going to take this opportunity to make my first ever batch of soap! I didn't think my delivery of ingredients was going to get here in time but to my joy it was here when I got home from work. YAY.

I am going to make an olive oil soap, they call these "castile" soaps. But I have the fear. The recipe I have chosen is from a book by Melinda Coss and it sounds yummy, in fact i have chosen it because i have many friends that suffer with really bad eczema. I have heard that goat's milk soaps are really good for eczema sufferers. But I have also heard that milk soaps are notoriously difficult to master.

So am I getting out of my pram a little bit here or am i worrying for nothing? All the you tube videos I have watched say you should freeze the milk, but the recipe I have calls to heat it up agghhhhh!!!! Its not a pure milk soap so perhaps the fact that the liquid content is half milk half water changes things.

I will try and take some photos as I go along tomorrow and post them tomorrow evening then once I have had a few goes I might even try and make a video of my own.

So watch this space...I'm popping my soap cherry tomorrow.