Use Your Loaf

Okay, okay. I give up. A woodworker, I am not. I'm going to buy a 2 lb. loaf mold today. And groceries. Shut up.

(Blogger's note: Last but not least, originally posted January 13th.)

Tell me 'bout it, stud.

That was a line from our high school senior play. Can you guess which production it was?Grease, of course, and it was awesome. A dear friend of mine starred as Sandy alongside the guy half the girls were madly in love with at one time or another, whom she was madly in love with at that time, who...let me say...didn't have to stretch much to fit Travolta's role as the smoking-hot leader of the T'birds. My friend wasn't terribly shy, but she wasn't so super-confident as she is now (what seventeen year old kid is, right?), so when she had to cozy up to Danny, slide her finger down his chest seductively and purr out the line, "Tell me 'bout it, stud," she got a little nervous.

Today, I'm a little nervous. Not the act-out-seducing-your-high-school-crush-on-stage-in-front-of-hundreds-of-people-including-your-grandma nervous, but a little nervous, nonetheless. As many of you know, there's this groovy little website called Kickstarter designed to fund creative projects of all types. If you want to record that heavy-metal-meets-bee-bop album no one else seems interested in (and dude...really...no one else is interested in this...move on already), you can submit your project to Kickstarter and see if people are willing to fund it. Want to take your obsession with cats to a whole 'nother level and start a line of pet portraiture for your upcoming art show (okay...so maybe someone else is interested in this (says the lady with six pets)), slap that sucker on Kickstarter and get those peeps to bankroll it. Before you know it, you'll be ballin' like Mike (Jordan, that is (Can I just say that I always feel kinda creepy using that word to refer to the high life? I'm sorry, I just can't think "basketball" when I hear the term.). I knew nothing about the aforementioned grooviness until my little brother, who is far groovier than I am, told me about it last night, but I was so impressed with said grooviness that I submitted a project of my own - to bring 1000 vegan soaps to the huddled masses of Smalltown, LA skittering about the local arts and crafts festivals. We shall see if it gets approved, and then, you can all go see what an awesome project it is (and bankroll it, if you like...I won't stop you.). But I'm a little nervous. Will they like my project? Will they like my soap? Will they like me? (Well, of course they will, but still.)

So to compensate for this nervousness, I'm keeping my goals for today simple: buy groceries (shut up - it's a big goal when there's a moody two-year-old in tow, the closest decent store is forty minutes away, and there's still no asparagus), and find a stud. Bolt. A stud bolt. I'm trying to copy a design I found online for that stupid broken soap mold, and the thing involves stud bolts. I didn't even know what the heck a stud bolt was and of course, the guy who made the original mold didn't say what materials he used, but I squinted at the picture long enough to figure out what the hardware looked like, then scoured the five billion different types of fasteners on the Home Depot website until I found one that looked right. Yeah. That was fun. My husband does this on a regular basis - he'll spend hours looking at fireplace tools and fascia and...get this...he likes it. I don't like it, but now at least I know what the heck a stud bolt is. I need some wing nuts, too, but at least I already knew what those were and how to use the little suckers. I thought the whole mold would have to be trashed, but I think I salvaged the thing with some wood glue and the leftover nails and caulk from the chicken coop (shut up...the thing's going to be beautiful). And no. I'm still not posting a picture.

(Blogger's note: Yes. This looks familiar because it, too, was on the old blog - January 12th. This'll all be over soon.)

Power Tools and Pixie Cuts

First post. I'll jump right in here and tell y'all a little story about today's project, but I have to back up to get where I'm going, so stick with me. After having hair longer than my toddler is tall for the last twenty years or so, I decided enough was enough and got it cut last weekend. And when I mean cut, I mean cut. Like Samson and Delilah cut. Like enough for a new Cousin It wig. Like I cut off so much God would've accepted it as a substitute for Abraham's circumcision. Okay, well, maybe that's pushing it a bit far, but you get the picture. It's a precious little pixie cut now, if I don't say so myself.

Apparently, this new boy cut has brought about the desire to do other boy-things, as well, like play with power tools and wood. Now, that's not to say women aren't perfectly capable of using power tools with the best of them, but this woman isn't. I've used power tools for exactly one project in my life, which was a chicken coop I built last summer for my tiny backyard flock, and let me tell you...that is one sad looking chicken coop. But it gets the job done. After only five pounds of wood screws, half a tube of Liquid Nails, and a gallon of caulk, those chickens are warm and cozy in this frigid south Louisiana winter. But I digress.

Over the holidays, I sold my first handmade soap. It was a pretty big deal, and a pretty big turning point for me. I've always been a wee bit crunchy, and I've always been a wee bit crafty. I used cloth diapers, made my own baby food, mixed my own household cleaners. I spend days making the kids' birthday cakes - little fondant pigs and ducklings and chicks and sheep last year, pink caterpillars, purple toadstools, baby blue butterflies this year. But never before had someone expressed a desire to buy something I'd made. (Well, there was that one time when this freaky guy at WalMart wanted to buy my...ahem...services, but I don't think that counts.) And yet, here was someone offering me money for soap I'd had a grand old time making at home. It wasn't particularly special soap. I spent a fair amount of time on the project, simply because I was making so many of the little suckers, but I didn't kill myself. It was melt and pour glycerin soap in simple molds. It was, however, vegan, entirely cruelty-free (unless you count me forcing Thing 1 to help or Thing 2 to watch Diego while I worked as cruelty), and inspired by my lovely husband. As a long-time vegan, he suffered with store-bought (decidedly not vegan) soap for years. As a vegetarian, I'd been suffering with it myself because a) there are bunnies in that soap (okay, maybe not bunnies, but definitely some big brown-eyed cows, maybe even ponies), b) because, come on...like I can find vegan soap in a town where I can't buy Boca burgers or fresh asparagus, and c) despite the big bucks us teachers/grad students make, we can't seem to afford LUSH bars at $8 a pop plus shipping. And then one day, it suddenly dawned on me: Make The Man Some Vegan Soap. And so I did.

During the holidays, I had another epiphany as I was trolling the stores for inexpensive but thoughtful gifts for Thing 1's homeroom-art-dance-P.E.-science-computer-library-basket weaving-fly fishing teachers: Give Vegan Soap To The Teachers. (Okay, Thing 1 doesn't take basket weaving or fly fishing, but she has a lot of freaking teachers.) What was I thinking wasting my money and time and patience and sanity fighting the crowds at Tar-jay for candles and orange-scented antibacterial hand cleanser? (Hey. Take it from a teacher. We love the antibacterial hand cleansers. Your kids are great, but they're germy little suckers.) And so I did.

Fast forward a bit and one of those teachers is asking me to make some soap for her and...get this...offering to pay me for it. Pay me? You mean...you're going to pay me to do something I love? Pay me to spend a few hours fiddling with essential oils and infusions? Dude. I am on it like chickens on a cricket. Fast forward a bit more and she's telling me a local shopkeeper wants to chat with me about starting a local line of soaps for the spring. And so I did. Or am. Or something.

Which brings us back to the original point (sheesh...I promise, not all the entries will be this long): I can make soap. Cute, yummy-smelling, good-for-you, better-for-the-bunnies, cruelty-free soap, but I can not wield a power tool to save my life. My attempt to make my own wooden soap mold with a built-in miter option - one that results in those nice, normally-shaped 4 oz. bars - was not a success. It looks so pathetic, I won't even post a picture of it, especially since I broke the darned thing before I could finish it. (Probably because I was using two barstools as saw horses - don't tell my husband.) Yes. I broke the mold. But my peppermint patty soap smells great and works better, even if the bars are completely wonky.

(Blogger's Note: Okay, this is really the first post from Tuesday, January 11th on the old blog, Milltown Soapworks, but I'm trying to achieve some continuity here. Bear with me through the reposts.)