Invasion of the lizard people

I don’t know about you, but winter means one thing to me (obviously it doesn’t, it means more than one thing. I mean this rhetorically): it means I turn into a lizard. Yes, come early October, there I am with my hideous lizard skin until March. Sometimes there is a bit of variety, which makes the suspense more exciting. What will it be this year? Will I have cracked hands and spend the winter months juggling plasters and neutrogena and swearing every time I have to go near an orange? (Seville oranges! Coming tomorrow with Dave the veg box man! For marmalade!). Will it be the flaky legs? Face like a 2000 year old mummy? No, this year it is dry and itchy ribs and general skin malaise. Fortunately, the worst part of my transformation into a lizard this year has coincided with my decluttering zeal, and I have rediscovered the Whipped Shea Butter I made last year which I got so bored of whipping I squirrelled away into a cupboard. I have un-squirrelled it, and I have been using it, and actually it is rather good, so I thought I would give you the recipe.

Whip that sucker! Whip it into a frenzy!

Now fasten your seatbelts for just a bit of my anti-corporate ramblings, I know this brings out the worst in some people (in fact, I may have to name and shame. Every time I write about the evils of Tesco, my Aunty Kath goes out and does a shop there. Yes she does!). Hmm hmm, clears throat. Home made whipped body butter doesn’t have the same texture as bought – it is oilier, and mine is heavier, because I’m not sure I’m very good at whipping it (but you might be better! Do let me know if you’re successful). Because my skin is so sore, though, I feel ok about putting it on because I know what is in it and none of the ingredients are harmful*, indeed some of the ingredients you can eat. Also, because it doesn’t contain water (which is why it is heavy), it lasts for ages with no need for preservatives. Out of interest, I looked up the ingredients of a commercial body butter which contains shea, like mine. This is what is in The Body Shop shea body butter:

Aqua (Water) (Solvent/Diluent), Butyrospermum parkii (Shea Butter) (Emollient), Cyclomethicone (Emollient), Theobroma cacao (Cocoa Butter) (Emollient), Glycerin (Humectant), Glyceryl Stearate (Emulsifier), PEG-100 Stearate (Surfactant), Cetearyl Alcohol (Emulsifier), Cera Alba (Beeswax) (Emulsifier/Emollient), Orbignya oleifera (Babassu Oil) (Emollient), Lanolin Alcohol (Stabiliser/Emollient), Phenoxyethanol (Preservative), Parfum (Fragrance), Methylparaben (Preservative), Propylparaben (Preservative), Xanthan Gum (Viscosity Modifier), Benzyl Alcohol (Preservative), Disodium EDTA (Chelating Agent), Linalool (Fragrance Ingredient), Coumarin (Fragrance Ingredient), Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone (Fragrance Ingredient), Limonene (Fragrance Ingredient), Butylphenyl Methylpropional (Fragrance Ingredient), Sodium Hydroxide (pH Adjuster), Citronellol (Fragrance Ingredient), Citral (Fragrance Ingredient), Geraniol (Fragrance Ingredient), Eugenol (Fragrance Ingredient), Caramel (Colour), CI 19140 (Colour).

And this is what the cosmetics database says about its toxicity. The other Body Shop body butters get higher toxicity scores (I’m not singling out The Body Shop here, I’m using it as an example because they had their ingredients online – I suspect the ones which don’t have their ingredients online are worse!). Now, I will be honest with you and say that I do not understand chemistry on any deep level, and I can’t pronounce convincingly on the cumulative effect of using parabens & things day after day. My rule in life, though, is the less commercial processing, the better, and anyway I think it’s nice to have an alternative so you don’t have to use commercial products all the time if you don’t want to. So here is my alternative body butter, and I hope it’s useful. The advantage of this is that if you make soap or lipbalm you are liable to have these ingredients hanging about, if not and you are in the UK I use The Soap Kitchen or Fresholi and they have both been very good. (I have also used Aromantic, they were good too).

* Unless you are allergic/ sensitive to any of them. I’ll trust you to know if you are!

Makes about 2 small pots (easily doubled/ halved/ trebled whatever).

100g Shea Butter
30 ml Jojoba Oil (you can buy this in health food shops. It is cheap)
50ml Olive Oil (I just use whatever’s in the house)
1/2 tsp Vitamin E (I add this for extra preserving power – you can leave it out if you want. You can buy it in health food shops too)
Essential oil, probably around 20 – 30 drops or whatever you think. (I tend to use a mix of lavender and patchouli. Also, if you’re pregnant, you need to check the essential oils you’re using are safe).

Melt the shea butter in a pyrex bowl in the microwave (keep an eye on it). When just melted, add the oils, and the vitamin E, and stir thoroughly. Then put in the fridge. When it is starting to cool and thicken up, take it out of the fridge, and whisk for a few minutes with an electric mixer. Whisk until it’s thickened a bit and isn’t thickening any more, then, put it back in the fridge to cool further. After 20 mins or so, get it out again, whisk again, then put it back in the fridge and wait a bit longer if necessary. What you are aiming at is a whipped cream texture – just try to get as much air as possible into it in the cooling process (if it never looks like whipped cream, it will still work fine, it will just be a bit heavy). When you have whisked it up to your satisfaction, or alternatively until you want to bang your head against the wall, add the essential oils, put in little pots or jars, and store in a coolish place.

Happy anti-corporate moisturising. What effect will this have on Aunty Kath? I hope it won’t be too inconvenient! ;-).

How to make Sugar Scrub (and a tiny bit more anti-capitalism).

We nipped off to London quickly this weekend for a weekend away before Partner starts autumn term (Partner works for the university, I'm not involved with a sixth former). I had fun eyeing up brightly patterned things in Pop Boutique in Seven Dials and wondering if I might wish to make such cushion covers.

I wish my house looked like this and actually I don't know why it doesn't

Cupcakes may also have become involved.

That is Partner's hand. Oh my God, he said, are you photographing your bun? Stop it! None of your blog readers care about your bun

And (and if anyone wants to give me a gold star here I think one is probably warranted,) I braved the tourists at Portobello Road market on the Saturday morning to get to the man under the railway bridge who sells vintage scarves. I had a nice time popping into Books For Cooks, and admiring the shops and stalls, and pondering what seems to be fashionable in vintage this year. I think I may (casually buffs nails on lapel) have been ahead of the game with my sparkly butterfly top, which I will dig out and show you when we have some light here which is not grey. It is quite a top, and fine if I don’t sit in front of any lights, although if I do they reflect off me like a disco ball which can be a bit embarrassing.

I feel the thing which improves an antique shop more than probably anything is when the outside is sparkly

But then unfortunately, oh no. I came upon something which annoyed me.

Lush. Not entirely my idea of local, I would suspect. Not entirely my idea of fresh, either, come to that

Local, I thought? I don’t think so. Lush is a national chain. So I looked on their website, which tells me about 3 UK suppliers, although there could obviously well be more, and also tells me that Lush operates in 46 countries, which I didn’t know. I suspect their idea of local is ‘some of our ingredients are produced in the UK’. Which is fine, and there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, good on them: but that isn’t my idea of local, and I think that advert is disingenuous and misleading.

Now, is this important? Possibly it isn’t, and I’ve got to say, if I was going to go for the Heartless Face of International Capitalism I wouldn’t start with Lush. They might well be an excellent company, who deal with their suppliers really ethically, and I doubt it's possible for them to source all their ingredients from the UK, anyway. But it just hits a bit of a sour note with me. I have to confess, I probably wouldn't have found this so annoying if it hadn’t been right in the middle of an enormous street market full of people selling handmade and vintage things, and possibly some local produce, including a man with a stall full of handmade cold-process soap (and no marketing budget). Life is tough for independent businesses. It might be tough for the man with his cold-process soap, I didn’t ask him. And for a multi-national company to say that buying their stuff is buying local to take advantage of a shift in what customers want, well, I just don’t think that’s entirely playing fair. But I might be doing Lush an enormous disservice: so that’s why I’ve emailed them to ask how their products are local to the shop I saw, and if I’ve got the completely wrong end of the stick, which I do admittedly get sometimes, I’ll let you know and we’ll add Lush to some kind of mental Retail Heroes List (or even an actual one, because I'll be writing a links section one of these days!).

Finally! Someone else whose idea of minimalism is the same as mine!

And, as a thankyou for staying with me through my anti-capitalist ramblings (and I promise you we’ll have a break for the rest of the week, because I feel my focus shifting to sheep and to Ely Wool Shop where I had a marvellous but financially ruinous time today, I feel it shifting irrevocably), and just because genuinely handmade cosmetics (and on this subject Vivianne from Kismet's Companion has just put some of her soap up for sale! Congrats Vivianne) are actually rather nice, here is my recipe for Brown Sugar Scrub. If you’re in the UK, you can buy ingredients for stuff like this from your nearest health-food shop, or from Helen at Fresholi, who is terrifyingly efficient but in a good way. If you don’t have cup measures, just use anything (or use a small mug) but keep the proportions.

You need:
1 cup brown sugar (I tend to use demerara).
1/2 cup Sweet Almond Oil or olive oil or a mixture.
1/2 teaspoon Vitamin E oil (you can leave this out if you haven’t got it).
1 tablespoon Aloe Oil.
About 15 drops essential oils (whatever you like – I always think lavender/ geranium and patchouli/ ylang ylang go well together. Coffee and vanilla would be delicious).

Basically – just mix everything together in a bowl. That’s it. You can keep it in any kind of container with a top (e.g. a tupperware). You might have to mix it together a bit each time you use it, as the oil tends to separate, but it will last a good long while. Do give it a try, it’s dead easy and nice. And who doesn’t want a gently exfoliated epidermis? I certainly do, but I wanted Malabrigo Lace more. And now I’ve got it! But more about that tomorrow…

A recipe for solid perfume

Here is my dilemma. I love perfume. However, sometimes it brings me out in a rash (I once had a very dramatic reaction to Gucci Envy when I was a young thing) and this forces me to think about what might be in it that possibly isn't very healthy or indeed very eco friendly. Indeed, I imagine it's one of those things that the more you look into how it's produced the more horrified you are. There was this article in the Guardian recently, for example. Anyway for these and various reasons I have been experimenting recently with making my own. First I tried adding a couple of drops of essential oil to Sweet Almond Oil, and I thought this worked ok (I will be doing this again, perhaps with alcohol.) Then a lovely person on Self Sufficientish suggested I could try making solid perfume out of equal parts oil and beeswax. So this is what I tried yesterday, because I love the idea of solid perfume, but the ones I have tried have all been a bit too solid, if you see what I mean, and I end up scraping at then with my thumbnail. This was the result:

And I have been dabbing it on ever since. I rather like it. I will tell you how I made it so that you can make some too (if you want to, obviously, don't feel pressured. We're all busy. I understand.)

I bought these pots from Boots for £2:

However they were a complete waste of money. What I didn't realise was that they all screw on to each other, you can't separate them. So I shall struggle on with them for a bit and then I will look for some proper ones on ebay, or go and find some small pots that I can repurpose. I had some sweet almond oil already (you can buy this from Holland and Barrett), and I bought some olive wax (this is a beeswax equivalent) from Fresholi while I was buying some soapmaking supplies. I hadn't bought from Fresholi before, but I will definitely use them again – the delivery was so quick it actually took me by surprise, and I opened the door to the postman while wearing my furry booties. I think postpeople are trained not to look at you askance, but it was clearly an effort for him.

Anyway. As I was making only one tiny pot, I used one scant teaspoon of olive wax pellets, and I tried to melt them in the microwave. Reader, I tried and I failed. I don't know if this was because my pot was a stupid shape and didn't touch the bottom properly, or what, but I began to feel I would be standing there all day jabbing at the buttons on the microwave with tumbleweed blowing through our kitchen, so I sat the pot in some boiling water and melted them like that, stirring with a skewer. When they were melted (I did this a bit rubbish, you can see it looks a bit lumpy in the picture!) I added 1 scant teaspoon of sweet almond oil, and stirred till they were mixed well. Then I added essential oils. This was what I added as far as I can remember (give or take a drop or two, as I am a bit cackhanded this week.)

(Remember (this is my caveat) - I don't entirely know what I am doing with essential oils, I am still learning – they can be harmful to pregnant women/ people with various conditions – if this is likely to be you, please check!)

4 drops Sweet Orange essential oil,
4 drops Neroli essential oil,
2 drops Ginger essential oil,
2 drops Cedarwood essential oil,
2 drops Ylang Ylang esential oil.

Then I stirred thoroughly again, and left to set.

The oils have blended in well, and I think the amount per wax/ oil is about right (although the perfume is quite soft, so I might play about with the wax/ oil ratio.) This smells to me incredibly like Lush's Karma, but on balance I probably prefer this one. The ginger is quite a dominant note – definitely add it slowly and see how you feel after each addition. This is a lovely combination for people who like that kind of spicy fragrance. I don't, particularly, but I do quite like this, and I will wear it for a bit longer and see how it matures. The essential oil combination would probably work well in soap as well. (I'm going to be making another batch of soap soon. Woot! But I think I'm going to try patchouli and ylang ylang. Or perhaps lavender and mint. Anyway, we will see. Jo Malone probably doesn't have to be too anxious just yet.)

In other news:

I've signed up to Wardrobe Refashion. I've pledged for 4 months, to start 1st July. I'll post more details when I've started (and I'll try to think of some interesting projects to do!),

++ I just wanted to post a couple of interesting things I've read recently. Janel made a dress from her Spiral Skirt pattern – I love this, and I see one in perhaps some light corduroy for winter (over a long sleeved top and boots.) I love her spiral skirts, too, I must have a go (perhaps one for Wardrobe Refashion?)

Down to Earth did an interesting blog entry about how we've been frightened away from making our own stuff, and how this makes it easier to sell us things. This is so true – I won't bore you now (but I will definitely bore you some time) with my thoughts about all the bad things that come from separation from process of production. But let's seize the process of production back! (Or some of it, at least. I know I'm starting small.) :-)

How to make your own washing powder

Before I start telling you about my washing powder, I’d like to start with an unrelated warning. You, like me, might be new to yoga. If you are, let me warn you that there is more than one kind. From my own experience, there are two kinds. One of them is very much about not pushing your body, being in tune with your breath, being conscious of how you are feeling, general happy fluffiness. The other involves straps, and putting your legs into positions not found in nature. It was into a class focusing on the latter that I wandered last night, and today I can’t walk. So be warned, and as soon as anyone brandishes a strap at you and expects you to lift your leg against a wall in a way you wouldn’t do normally, please realise that you will spend the next day complaining and whimpering. I’m sure it’s doing me good.

Right, washing powder.

I am washing some things with this as I write, and nothing has gone wrong yet (i.e. there are not suds all over the kitchen floor/ the washing machine hasn’t set on fire) but obviously since they haven’t come out yet I can’t say whether or not it is any good. It did look credible, though. This is based on a recipe from Make Your Place by Raleigh Briggs (which is an excellent book! And very cheap, go out and buy it!) but I have made it English by translating the ingredients and weighing them rather than using cups (so the weights might look a bit strange but I promise you I did it properly.) This makes enough for 3 washes. If it works out OK I will make a bigger lot. I have not worked out how much this costs per wash yet but I suspect it works out cheaper than Ecover (which is the one I buy normally), especially if you buy your ingredients in bulk.

Mix all the following in a bowl:

30g grated soap (I used some of my homemade soap – it used about 3/4 of a small bar. I grated it on the middle hole of the grater.)
115g bicarbonate of soda (this used up about 2/3 of one of those small tubs you get from the supermarket. I used this because it needed to be used up but you can buy this in bulk and it is cheaper.)
25g soda crystals (you can buy these in the supermarket, near the washing powders.)
45g borax (don’t get me started! I could only find this at greenshop.co.uk.)

Then squash up the lumps (the bicarb and borax can be quite lumpy) and add a couple of drops of essential oils. If you are thinking that will not be enough to scent it, be reassured that our kitchen smelt like Lush. I put a third (a couple of tablespoons) in the washer, and I stored the rest carefully in a passing Tupperware.

I will let you know how well it works when I have done a few loads of washing with it. (I feel like one of the women on the soap powder adverts. How white will my whites be? Well, they weren’t all that white to start with. My standards aren’t high.)