Green bridge from Topsham to Brunswick, and a little sunset for color.

Beautiful little roadside pull-off on [...]]]> 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.

Crocuses! It’s spring!

Being Lavender Rosemary soap, you’ll be needing lavender and rosemary, silly. [...]]]> 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!

I thought the train ride might end up being my favorite part of the trip, [...]]]> 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

 First stop, straight off [...]]]> 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.

We kept jumping out of the car the whole way there, as we passed beautiful alien landscapes. Here we have Dylan proudly perched on some mossy volcanic rock.

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!

Hey, what is that extremely out of place futurist building?

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.

24 hours! Not nearly enough, Iceland. Not nearly enough.

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls from Michelle Enemark on Vimeo.