Normally I endeavor to have a new reel up on January 1st – new year, new reel. This year…I finally got around to it in May. But I put a little wizard in it, so I think that makes everything okay. There’s also an avocado that moves like a clam, not on purpose.
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I know Easter happened over a month ago, but I’m not overly concerned with timely sharing. Doing it late is better than not doing, right?
Green bridge from Topsham to Brunswick, and a little sunset for color.
Beautiful little roadside pull-off on the way to Reid State Park – my sister promised me that a friendly beaver would swim up to us when we arrived. It did not. Maybe he was having an early Easter dinner with his family.
Oh my god why is she so cute? This is my niece with her face-crumpling smile, sitting on a hay bale.
Woods in the morning.
Reid State Park, many footprints, but no people.
Benny helped me rake leaves by standing on them.
I’ve made simple homemade soap with varied results in the past, but I finally found a recipe worthy of sharing. Follow along and make some too! Let’s make a big mess together and then use the soap we made to clean it up!
Being Lavender Rosemary soap, you’ll be needing lavender and rosemary, silly. I used fresh rosemary and dried lavender…but fresh lavender and dried rosemary or any combination thereof is fine. You’ll also need lavender and rosemary essential oils, glycerine soap base, and one teaspoon pulverized dried rosemary.
Pluck your rosemary and lavender until you have about 3 Tablespoons (total, not each). Pour one cup of steaming hot water over the herbs and let them infuse for about 10 minutes. That’s right, you’re infusing! Look at you! After 10 minutes, strain out the herbs.
Now grab your glycerin soap. I used a pretty big loaf pan as a mold, so I needed a lot of glycerin soap. I think I ended up using nearly 5 cups. You don’t need to make that much, whatever you have on hand, between 3 and 5 cups should be fine. Cut it up into cubes, and melt it down in a microwave or a double boiler.
While it’s melting, pulverize that dried rosemary! Probably a mortar and pestle would work best, but I don’t have one, so I used a wooden spoon. It didn’t work very well, but it didn’t really matter in the end. I sort of liked the bigger pieces.
Once your soap is liquified, pour in your infusion, pulverized rosemary, and essential oils. I don’t remember how many drops I added, but my gut says it was around 30 drops of lavender, and 20 of rosemary. I say just keep dropping till it smells good. I know this picture is blurry, but I wanted show the swirly food coloring! So pretty. You don’t have to add food coloring, but my infusion was just purple enough to turn the mixture a sickly grey, so I decided to purple it up a little bit. You only need a few drops.
Stir it all up really well, and pour it into your mold. A silicon loaf pan is great because it’s easy to pop out the soap when its hardened, but they tell me you can use a normal loaf pan, just spray it with non-stick spray stuff first.
Wait a few hours till it’s nice and solid, and pop it out!
Cut it into bars! You can use a fancy soap cutter, or just use a knife like normal people.
Wrap those soaps up! Tissue paper or wax paper both look nice. Use washi tape for extra credit!
Are your soaps going to be presents? Get crazy with it! Make them look like expensive. After all, crafting is about the praise you get when you share your work with your friends and family, isn’t it? I have a great vintage stamp set that is terrifically difficult and painstaking to use, but the results are pretty charming.
There we have it! Soaps!
Last month Dylan and I took an impromptu trip to Montreal, thanks to a special promotion on train tickets. The 11 hour train ride hugs the banks of Lake Champlain for much of the journey, which was very beautiful and very relaxing. I thought the train ride might end up being my favorite part of the trip, but just walking around Montreal took the cake. (A close second was warm poutine on a cold night.) Anyway, here are some things we saw.
I think of these as Harry Potter houses, maybe because of the Gryffindor red and yellow.
The Buckminster Fuller designed Biosphere, a relic from the 67 Expo.
We managed to get a tour at McGill University’s appointment only McPherson Physics Collection. Sciences!
Me and a giant robot.
The achingly beautiful Notre Dam Basilica.
Abandoned factory along Canal Lachine.
Ship votive at the Notre Dame de Bon Secours Chapel, aka The Sailors’ Church, where sailors stopped in for one last prayer before long and dangerous sea voyages.
The Riviere du Nord, and some little people doing something at its edge
The lovely Redpath Museum at McGill University, two levels packed with natural history specimens and ethnography artifacts.
I want him.
Puffin!
Triceratops head on a cabinet.
Olympic building from the 1976 Montreal Olympics My sister asked me to design a tattoo for her of our beloved cat, Rudy, who is now drunkenly rolling around in that big pile of catnip in the sky, RIP Roo. I might not have a future career in tattoo design, but I had a ball drawing him anyway. He was a good cat.
It’s been five months since my trip to Finland, but today’s grey and rainy Brooklyn reminded me of our grey and rainy 24 hour layover in Iceland. I hadn’t even looked at the photos since we returned. So here they are. 5 months late. As is my way.
First stop, straight off the plane, was the blue lagoon. This is the part that people can’t swim in, thus, the prettiest.
This is the store where I bought my hat. It was the most expensive hat I’ve ever owned. It took all day of hemming and hawing before I went back to buy it. I knew that buying an expensive furry earflap hat was the first stop on the way to losing it somewhere and being devestated. I lost it one month later on an Amtrak train. But anyway, look, a reindeer!
Oh, just Hallgrímskirkja, a crazy dystopian concrete cathedral.
The inside reminds me of Oz. (As in The Wizard of, not the HBO prison show)
Reykjavik is so cute.
Our hostel was a lot hipper than we were.
Though not released to the internet at large yet, I’ve been given the go-ahead to share three new book trailers I created here. Drunk with power, I also decided to make a new page on the site just for book trailers. I want to make them all the time! Do you need book trailers? Call this guy! Here are the recent three. Unlike the other book trailers I’ve done, I got to actually read these three books before I made the trailers. I would especially recommend Life After Life, coming out in March. Such a good book. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson …. Countdown by Alan Weisman …. The Hive by Gil Hornby I made this Star Trek Valentine book for my husband, and he insisted it was my best work to date, so I decided to throw them up here. If Star Trek is as important to your relationship as it is to mine, you are welcome to download the files and print them out for your the captain of your ship!
I have been waiting for months to share the book trailer I created for David Sedaris’ new book, “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls”. I’m so honored to have been able to create a trailer for an author I love so much. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls from Michelle Enemark on Vimeo. I just finished writing up an article and photo tour on Atlas Obscura of one of the best medical museums I’ve ever visited (and I’ve visited a lot!). Traveling through South East Asia last year (oh god, was that already a year ago?), the Congdon Anatomical Museum in Bangkok was one of the last places we saw before boarding that 15 hour flight. It was well worth the wait. A few pictures of fetal skeletons below, but for more photos and more about the experience, check out the article on Atlas Obscura. (WARNING: Images in the link may be disturbing to some people)
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