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A New First

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When I have huge to-do lists, of things that just REALLY need to be done RIGHT NOW, I always find the motivation to do those (other) things I've been wanting to do for a long time and have never gotten around to. So, about 2 weeks ago I finally tried making liquid soap! For years I've used my plain lard bar soap to make fake liquid soap – I (or actually the boys) shred it, further cure/dry it on sheet pans in the oven for days/weeks (until I need to use the oven), then zap it in the food processor and store it for when I need it to make laundry soap powder.

Where Did October Go?!

Holy Moley!  I’d say I can’t believe its been a month already, except it feels like it’s been 2 months since my last post!  I have been making soap, prepping wool, felting soap - and not much else.  I estimate that since the first week of October, I have sold something around 400 bars of soap!  And I am operating in an almost-constant state of just-about-out of soap :).

Whew!

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I did it!  I finished my big soap order on Tuesday, and got the last of them shipped out this morning - 234 bars of felted soap!  It was a lot of work, but definitely worth it.  Now, I have to make a bunch of soap to catch up :)  I knocked out 5 batches today and Monday, so that's a good start.  Then I just need to get caught back up on fleece, since I used most of my prepped wool for felting these soaps.  I need to skirt, card and dye a lot more to be ready for the next time I felt soap.

Soap & Wool

In my busy life, dealing with alpaca fleece always ends up taking a back seat to a myriad of other priorities - not from lack of interest, just lack of time and it seems like everything else is more pressing.  It takes something specific to suddenly bring fleece to the top of the to-do list, and that happened about 2 weeks ago. 

The Week of Rendering

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Every winter, we try to get some pig fat, and render the lard for my year's-worth of cooking.  Last year, I didn't really pay attention, but I probably rendered 1-2 dozen jars of lard, and put them in the freezer.  I use that almost exclusively for cooking (there's a few things that just have to be sauteed in butter, but otherwise it's lard for us), so I go through quite a bit in a year.  About 2 weeks ago, I realized that we were about out of cold weather to be cooking down large pots of fat, so I told Caleb to see about getting some.

We're Still Here!

I  definitely set a record that time, for length of time without a sign of life on a blog - but we're all still here, chugging along, life's just been in overdrive for a while!

My last post was early November, so a quick roundup of happenings since:

Soap, Soap, Soap!

I was sitting here thinking that I needed to write a blog - but about what?  There's so many topics, even just things we've done in the last week, but I don't want to get into a cycle of "this weekend we did this and this and this...)  I'd rather do a better job addressing single subjects at a time - and then I realized I haven't talked about soap in a while - there's been too many animal and other things going on (and still are!).  But I didn't want to neglect my soap!

Much-Needed Updating

It's been way too long, but I finally found some time to get on both my store here and my Etsy shop and get my items updated.  I added a few things - I didn't have my goat milk soap listed! - especially some yarns and knitting, and delisted a few things that I've either sold elsewhere or used myself :)  I still have a few more items to add - the rest of my soap, for instance - but it's definitely better.  Pop over if you get a chance and see what you think.