Making soap…

Well, I do have a lot of time on my hands.

Some months ago I got bitten by some sort of beekeeping bug. With that came honey, beeswax and related areas of intrest, one of which was soapmaking. At the time, this was sort of frustrating, since I lived in the flat of a friend and didn’t really want to handle caustic chemicals in her kitchen (or maybe I just couldn’t get my hands on any lye). Now, I have moved and I live with my father who – not that surprisingly – happen to have plenty of lye in his cellar (don’t ask, someone was probably trying to toss it and there you go).

A couple of weeks ago I made a honey and lavender olive oil soap:

I was a bit heavy on the honey (and perhaps also on the raw beeswax), which probably is the explanation of the small red dots in the soap (not pictured). According to Google-wisdom, this apparently disappears with the curing of the soap and doesn’t affect the quality of the soap. Double-checking the numbers I discovered that I had made an extreme water reduction (water at 25% of oils, when 35% is recommended for beginners). Maybe this was the reason for the red spots? I rebatched everything (hot process soap, see pics) but a couple of slices of the soap, adding some milk-and-honey mixture. The rebatched soap still smell good, has the expected tan colour (from warm milk and honey) and is very soft (unlike the non-rebatched bars I saved). The smell is lavender, but with a caramel over/undertone, which is very nice. It is supposed to be cured for a looong time, at least six months, but preferably longer. Looking forward to see how t developes.

Sort of embarrassed over miscalculating the water-oil ratio I decided to make another batch today. This time a beer soap. Beer is another one of my obsessions. I used one of my favourites, actually. Sotholmen Extra Stout by Nynäshams ångbryggeri, my close-to favourite Swedish microbrewery. I calculated (correctly, this time) and made sure to reduce the beer with a pince of salt and the peels of two lemons until I reached the proper amount of fluid. Making cold process soap is not that difficult, but it is very important to get the oil-lye balance right. I recommend lye calculators and/or the iPad app Soap Calculator before making any cold process recipe. There are a couple of different calculators available. I bought the Soap Calculator for a small sum, choose it for the easiness in changing to metric (seriously, change your bloody measuring system already!).

Sotholmen Extra Soap
Oils: Olive oil 600g, Coconut oil 180g, sunflower oil 20g, canola oil 60g, beeswax 10g.
Fluid: 300g, 150g reduced stout boiled in lemon peel and some salt and honey. 150g water.
Lye: 120g (in a 45% solution, so 120g lye and 150g water was already in solution).
EO: 5g lemongrass essential oil.

I choose to rebatch/Hot process parts of this soap (just because), adding cocoa powder, ground coffee and ground oats. This is the result:

Home-made soap is different from commercial soap in several ways. The glycerin (an humectant) in industrial soap is commonly extracted, making common household soap more of a detergent bar than a soap bar. Of course, there are more fancy forms of commercial soap as well, many of which have added glycerin and other ingredients. Another advantage, making your own soap you can be perfectly sure what goes in it. It also gives you an opportunity to avoid palm oil, which is very common in commercial soap. Besides, it is fun!

There is plenty to read about soapmaking on the internet. Below is some links to get you started, or just to gawp at the pretty swirls and colours (my next soap project).

Soapmaking Forum: a great forum with plenty of inspiration.
Miller’s Homemade Soap Pages: plenty of information.
Offbeat + Inspired, category soapmaking: a great DYI blog with a very nice design. I can warmly recommend the Introduction to Cold Process Soap Making for Beginners-post and I can’t wait to try the Peppermint Mocha swirled soap.

The Nano Vivarium

This is the reason I haven’t updated the blog in a while:

Another obsession of mine is tropical orchids and plants in general. I have, together with my father, made plenty of glass houses/vivariums/orchidariums/paludariums over the years, but none with moving water and none with an aspiration of looking semi-natural. Inspired by the aquascapers nano aquariums (just google it, you won’t regret it), I decided to make a nano vivarium. I decided not to make it from scratch, since I plan on having this one at my place of work in the future. Places of work tend to shun home-made containers of water, for obvious reasons. Since this has been some sort of a trend for some years now, a small terrarium was easily aquired.

Container: ExoTerra Nano 20x20x30 cm
Pump: ExoTerra ReptiFlow 200
Important Notice: Yep, this might seem a little overkill on the construction side. Smaller containers are more sensitive to disturbances and actually harder to keep than bigger ones. My experience tells me that making sure all parts of the container is well ventilated is paramount. I plan to add a micro (2.5 cm) computer fan for air movement. Some of the plants will have to be removed, since they will probably outgrow the container. I will continue to work on the interior, gathering micro-mini plants and really try to get some moss growing. Update is coming in about six months or so.

Shops (OBS: nothing is sponsored in any way!)
Herpers Choise: the terrarium, the pump, Pleurothallis niveoglobula, Rubellia (or possibly Pleurothallis) lateritia, Sigmatostalix radicans. The ONLY thing I didn’t like about this shop outside of Uppsala is that they didn’t exist until I moved away from there. Warmly recommended.
Dusk Tropic: Hygrolon and Epiweb, also inspiration (take a look at the pics on the homepage).
Dartfrog.co.uk: Xaxim, tropical moss, Kyoto moss spores.
My aquarium: Java moss (probably Vesicularia dubyana), Java fern (Microsorum pteropus).
The woods: sphagnum, which I nuked in the microwave to get rid of pests like snails)
Local garden shop: coconut fiber, Chirita tamiana, Cryptanthus species, Ficus pumila (a great little climber and impossible to kill).
Local lawnmover shop: rubber fuel line. The only thing flexible enough to work for the waterfall. I am ambivalent, but liking the out-of-the box thinking I did on this one.
Fellow orchid/plant enthusiasts: Angreacum distichum, small Dendrobium, Sinningia Rio das Pedros seeds.

Forums
Vivariumforum: rather inactive, but with plenty of inspiration and how-to.
Dendroboard: Poison Dart frogs stuff, but loads on building terrarium habitats.
Pilgift.se : Swedish Poison Dart Frog society and forum.

Behind the cut is several images of the building process (pic heavy):

Off to London!

This sketchy sockbird will keep an eye on the blog while I am away.

I hope to visit Cass Art again, this time to buy some Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes. I’ve been planning to buy some for several years and I now feel that I have earned it since I have practiced and perfected my technique with the one series 7 brush I own. I am also going to Cornelissen, hopefully to get ahold of a proper lumpe sanguine and perhaps also silverpoint equipment. I plan to draw at both the British Museum and Natural History Musem. We’re also visiting Pollock’s Toy Museum, another place where I hope to make a lot of drawings and drolleries. A visit to Kew is planned as well, as always. A small cactus I bought at Kew a couple of years ago perished in the move, so I hope to find something to add to my plant collection.

Speaking of plant collections, I bought a nano terrarium yesterday. I plan to grow small orchids, mosses, ferns and gesneriads there. Pics upcoming. Also, I made cold process soap. Yep, I do have a lot of time on my hands at the moment!

A Drawer of Sockbirds #12: the Grey Gourmand

I have finally found my scanner. Here we go, the first of two grey sockbirds. I got the idea of sockbirds specialized in woolen socks since I bought grey-striped knitted (knit?) socks at a Christmas market last December.

Title: The Grey Gourmand
Size: cut from A5.
Equipment: Parker 51 EF with Pelikan Black. Parker 51 Fantasy Kullock (demonstrator) with J Herbin Gris Nuage (so smooth, like drawing with a brush). Washed partly with water, partly with the grey ink. So, many shades of grey, came out quite well. For comparison, I have added a copy converted to greyscale behind the cut. To illustrate the many shades of “dirty” grey coming out in mixes/shades with other colours.
Computer alteration: Scanned, slightly brightened and heightened contrast. Removed a couple of spots of unknown inky origin. An ink drollery on the back of this drawing shone through (sic), which led to a need for a bit more brightening than I would have liked. I like texture. Proper, IRL texture. Part of the reason I have yet to go digital.
Important notice: since the grey sockbirds haven’t got any colours (really, even if there are hues of other colours), they have the diagonally striped feathers in black and white (or: my excuse for getting to draw the near-ubiquitous striped bands I like. See background, top right, for example).
Paper: Clairefontaine 90g.
Inspiration: Lost socks and the birds responsible.
Notes: Well, obviously this bird isn’t comfortable. In fact, he looks rather miserable. This made me able to identify him as a gourmand. Woolen socks are obviously a bit harder to digest than standard striped socks. Since we see only one sock in the picture, the other is likely swallowed and making trouble already.
Upcoming: another member of the grey gang. Also, a couple of general updates. I am also working in clay again.

Behind the cut: the same image, in greyscale.

A gray Sockbird and a Very Last View

A while ago I ordered samples of different greys from Goulet Pens. I really like the opportunity to compare inks. If shipping to Sweden weren’t so expensive, I’d order more often. My favourite grays were J Herbin Gris Nuage and Noodlers Lexington Gray. J Herbin is more blueish, without wandering too far into blue territory. I found the full bottle of ink at Sandbergs Pappershandel in Umeå, where I passed through for a job interview a week or so ago. Great little independent shop with knowledge of fountain pens and ink, but no homepage.

My new EF Parker 51 I bought via Ebay to replace the one that broke has a slightly different personality than the original one. It is drier and doesn’t like Noodler’s black. I tried Pelikan Black, which works a lot better in the pen, but for drawing I still like Noodler’s Black better. Maybe I’ll try J Herbin Perle Noir or some other black ink in the upcoming months. Noodler’s does have a couple of different blacks as well, I might try Borealis Black if it still exists. Have to look that up. Finding the right black is very important.

A proper Drawer of Sockbirds post is upcoming, as soon as my scanner arrives. This is just a teaser of the next group of sockbirds, the Grey Gang. The Grey Gang specialise in wool socks. The pens are my new “Birger” black extra fine with a gold-filled cap and the other a translucent fantasy Parker 51 demonstrator from the Argentinian seller Kullock on Ebay. The latter pen has a broad, wet nib and I used it for the Gris Nuage ink. The brush is series 7 W&N, I have forgotten the size. It is small, perhaps a 2? A great brush. Also, I really like the design on the Clairefontaine sketch pads, I am glad I picked one up on looks alone. Fortunately the inside matched the outside in terms of quality.

Last but not least, an image from the very last evening I spent above the Arctic Circle (unfortunately not with Aurora Borealis). The building is the church of Kiruna, a very special building you can read more about here. I now reside down south, soon signing the contract for the upcoming position I have accepted in a small coastal town in the south of Sweden, by the Baltic Sea. I begin in August. In the months that remain until I start working again, I plan to read, make a lot of art and hopefully travel to Colorado, Gotland and Köln. Of all places.

Drolldragons

Quick drolldragons made on the plane home. I love making quick sketches (ugh, there is that ugly word again) that has movement. Fibertipped pens, since it is definitely not advisable using fountain pens on airplanes…
Today I am introducing a new category, Recently Read. I read a lot, so I will not be able to blog about everything I read (that is for book review-blogs, like Little Red Reviewer my favourite and one of the few review blogs I have the time and inclination to read regularly). I hope to make some illustrations in the future when I feel extra inspired by certain books, like I did with the New Crobuzon Nightmare Cityscape illustration after having read Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

Title: Drolldragons
Size: Very small.
Equipment: Fiber-tipped pens, Artline Drawing System 0.1 and 0.05.
Paper: Clairefontaine
Computer modifications: all sorts of them. The camera on the MacBook in the dark isn’t the best, but everything I own is in boxes, so…
Inspiration: Fear of flying and dust mites.
Notes: I try to make them move. Not perfectly satisfied with these, but they are OK.
Recently Read: Half-Blood Trilogy by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey. Have to check out more by Norton. Perfectly entertaining high fantasy with an absolutely enjoyable “screw you, elves!”-trope and dragons. On the downside, sort of shallow world- and magic-building (promising, could go deeper but doesn’t), a bit too much telling instead of showing and some instances of god-in-the-machineish interruptions on my sacred suspension of disbelief. I’d happily give the engaging story, some original takes on ideas and general enjoyable classic fantasy-ness of these books 3 stars of 5 (equals enjoyable, but would probably not read again). I am definitely picking up more Andre Norton.
In Other News: job offer #1 making me happy. The place and position I was hoping for, I wrote about it in the previous post. No written contract yet, but everything should be signed and sealed in a couple of weeks. Next week I am going skiing again. An adequate and enjoyable way to wrap this Arctic Circle-thing up!

Interlude: In Between Jobs and Other News

Look, another Thumbbird! I had almost forgotten they existed.

Today is my birthday. I am not one for lavish celebrating of birthdays. I do not mind, though. I seem to have missed out on the fear of aging that so many of my contemporaries suffer from. I like getting older. I adore (to my fiancées amusement) my approximately ten white hairs that annoyingly showed up in the middle of my scalp, not at my temples (which would have been way more distinguished-looking). They also have a tendency to stick right up, since they are coarser and shorter than the other hairs. I see this as a prelude to me becoming a very odd sort of little (well, 5.9) white haired mad scientist-type lady.

Seems like I will stay above the Arctic Circle another month, til the end of March. There will be a week of skiing and I have two great interviews planned. I expect to get at least one offer, if not two. I think I am a great fit at both places, one in particular. If I get the one I really want, I’ll not commence working until after summer this year. Economically this is a bit suboptimal, but it will give me plenty of time to read, make art and spend time with family. In other words, things that are more valuable than making money. I’m of the frugal sort anyway, so it’s not a huge problem.

Another view, this time of the mine:

I’ll miss this place!