Honeymoon

And after the wedding, we left on our Honeymoon. We decided to go on a cruise to Alaska for several reasons. We chose Alaska because my mother had been on an Alaskan cruise and enjoyed it a lot. We decided on a cruise because I didn't want to have to actually plan much of the trip.

The cruise left from Seattle. We had one fairly rough day at sea, which we spent mostly in bed, napping. Except for the sea sickness, that day was pretty darn enjoyable.

Our first stop was in Juneau. We went whale watching. We saw whales, including one who was breaching. That's when they fling themselves out of the water and crash back down, presumably to impress other whales. It's apparently unusual to see them do that in Alaka. Normally, they reserve that behavior for Hawaii, where they are getting busy with the mating. I didn't take any pictures of whales because, having whale watched before, I knew the pictures would all look like water with little black dots ("Oh look! It's a tail!").

In Juneau, we also visited Mendenhall Glacier. We were going to hike up to the waterfall that can be seen over Mike's shoulder, but the trail was completely flooded out. As in entirely submerged under water. We viewed the glacier from the viewpoint instead. I thought we needed quite a bit more time at the glacier. We didn't have time to go through the visitor center other than watching their 7 minute movie on glaciers.

Our next stop was Skagway. We went on an early morning train ride up into the mountains. Lots of very nice scenery, but the weather was a little overcast, so my pictures are mostly of trees with fog. We did see a bear! It was sort of meandering along beside the tracks. I happened to see it because I spent a lot of time looking down at the ground near-ish to the train looking for squirrels (never saw any). I'm not sure many other people on the train actually saw the bear because they were all looking off into the distance at scenery. The bear was right next to the train and looked up at me as we rolled on by. Closest I've ever been to a bear, by far.

Here we are, on a platform on the train. In the background, you can see trees with fog.

That afternoon, we went ziplining. The zipline people took us up into the rainforest and we went on 5 different ziplines. There wasn't particularly different, exciting things to be seen from the zipline that couldn't be seen from the ground, but we did finally see our first squirrels.

There were also salmon spawning. We saw these from the train, then walked back through the town to find them after ziplining. I was exhausted at the end of this day.

We spent a morning in Glacier Bay. We had a balcony room, which meant that we could hang out on the balcony and admire the glaciers. They were huge and blue and made all sorts of cracking, popping noises.

Here's another glacier off in the distance. There's no sense of scale in Alaska. You can tell that things are "big", but there's really no way to see how big they are. For example, the glacier behind us in the picture above is something like 250 feet tall.

Next stop, Ketchikan. We went on a tour of Totem Bight Park. There were totem poles. The tour guide was very good. After the totem poles, we went to a lumberjack show, which was pretty corny but entertaining. And that was it for Ketchikan.

The last stop was Victoria, BC. We were there at night and saw Butchart Gardens and the Butterfly Gardens. I would totally go back to Butchart Garden to see it in the daylight. It was quite dark by the time we got to the end. All of the butterflies were roosting, which made them easier to photograph, but not quite so exciting to watch. I don't highly recommend butterfly gardens after sundown.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable trip. We ate very well on the ship. I fell asleep every time I stopped moving because the rocking of the boat was just very soothing. We only had the one day of roughish weather and other than that, sea sickness wasn't much of a problem. Beautiful scenery was always just outside our door and could be viewed from bed while reading a book. What more could you want?

Major updates.

I've been very remiss about updating this blog. It's partially because I haven't been crafting, but mostly because I just haven't thought about it when I have been crafting. Also, I got married and went on a honeymoon and just got back at the beginning of this week.

One of the first things I made was a purple petticoat to go under my wedding dress. It involved 180 yards of chiffon strips from this website. I never could have done it without chiffon pre-cut into strips. Also, without my ruffler foot, purchased specifically for this occasion. This was actually the second ruffler foot I bought for the project. The first was from amazon and was much cheaper, but didn't work well with my machine. Even with ruffler feet and pre-cut chiffon strips, the project probably took easily 30 hours. But it was worth it.

 

We got married in the Peninsula Park Rose Garden, so I didn't want to do a lot of flowers. Instead, I had my bridesmaids carry pinwheels. A lot of R&D went into these pinwheels and they would have made a great project to post about on here. However, I didn't and that's that. I don't even have any pictures of them in development or production. They were fabulous and sturdy and they spun, which was what I needed them to do.

Here's me and the groom. I also made my veil, which involved hand-sewing a string of pearly beads to the bottom of two layers of shimmery veil stuff. Quite time consuming, but easy to do while sitting and watching a movie.

Here's a portion of the ceremony. We're in the middle of the chalice ceremony where we pour both of our cups into one and then drink from it.

We had a fabulous cake made by Pastrygirl in Portland. The wedding theme was squirrels and pinwheels. The cake was delicious.

In the picture below, you can also see my tie-dyed napkins stamped with a squirrel, our names, and the date. These were our wedding favors. We had about 55 guests and I had dyed about 90 napkins.. and we only came home with 6 or so, so they seemed to be pretty popular.

We also had pizza catered by the Girasole wood-fired pizza food cart. The food was great. There were three different kinds of pizza, antipasto skewers, and roasted veggies. Also, beer, lemonade and a variety of interesting sodas. Girasole was awesome to work with and I highly recommend them.

 Rather than having people sign a guest book, I had them sign quilt squares. Eventually, I'll be putting these together into our wedding quilt.

It was a fun wedding for me to be at, which was the overall goal. I wanted to have people and things that I enjoyed and to not be stressed out. It worked out fabulously well, mostly thanks to my excellent friends who helped me with everything.

The most difficult part so far has been remembering to say "husband" rather than "boyfriend". I suppose I'll get used to it someday. :)

Another batch of soap

A friend was interested in making soap with me, so this morning she came over and we whipped up a batch. I wanted to make a shampoo bar, but since it was the first time I was going to try that recipe, I thought we had better start with one that I was pretty sure would work well.

We made another batch of sudsy all-vegetable, scented with 2 oz of lavender essential oil. No color. It seemed to work correctly. We got it to trace and poured it into one of my blue plastic "soap molds".

After she left, I started a batch of shampoo bar. It's this recipe from the Crunchy Chicken blog. It's a very small recipe compared to the sudsy all-veg, so it definitely won't fill one of the molds, but hopefully it'll be fine. I'm scenting it with 1 oz of Vanilla lace fragrance oil.

Gratuitous rodent picture

Pipsqueak and The Chin

New Laundry Detergent

I've finally almost used up the gelatinous "liquid" detergent I made up back in August. No more liquid detergents for me! It's all powdered from now on, baby.

I tried Laundry Detergent #9 this time. It's very similar to Becky Ann's recipe (thanks for commenting, btw!), but adds some more soap and baking soda (both of which I have a lot of). I had about 2.5 cups of washing soda, so I decreased the recipe from the website to the following:

4 cups Borax

2.5 cups Baking Soda
2.5 cups Washing Soda
2.5 cups Bar soap (grated)

I chopped up a bar of Ivory soap, a tiny bar of hotel soap we had laying around, and two bars of my Castille Soap. Then I ran them all through the food processor (which is very small, so I did one bar at a time). The Ivory is a very dry, crumbly soap and turns to powder easily. My homemade Castille soap is wetter and more flexible and doesn't powder when food processed. I discovered that if I added some of the dry ingredients to the food processor with the soap, it then chopped up into tiny little crumbles pretty easily.

You use 1/8 cup of powder per full load. This means that with my tiny little apartment washing machine, I should probably use about a tablespoon. At that rate, this batch of detergent should last me till next year. I also have to burn through the rest of the "liquid" detergent and then a bottle of store-bought detergent that my dad gave me that didn't work well in his new HE washer.

Blocking

I blocked my first knitting project yesterday. To block knitting, you get it wet, stretch it into the shape you want it, then let it dry. You take something that looks like this:

Do this to it:

And eventually end up with something like this:

k

Soapy results

The lavender soap that I added the blue dye to is in the back. It was peachy when we poured it into the molds, but has become a lovely purple color. I think it's close to the perfect color for lavender soap.

In the front is the Crisco soap. It didn't harden as much as the others, in fact it's still roughly the consistency of fudge. My online resources say that Crisco soap is a hard soap, so I may have screwed this one up somehow. My alternate plan for this soap is to redissolve it in hot water and make it into a liquid soap (like for soap dispensers and dish soap). I'm sure it'll be good for either that or as laundry detergent.

Here's a closeup of the weirdly fudgelike Crisco soap. It might dry out still.. maybe..

This is the Tahitian Vanilla scented soap that's supposed to turn dark brown as it cures.

The shea butter soap looks lovely. It's a nice golden brown color with little flecks in it. I'm not sure about the pink spots, but they sort of generally blend in. This mold was somewhat poorly shaped for a soap mold, so we have blocks of soap that sort of look like brownies.

The white soap in the back is the peppermint castille soap. It looks pretty much like generic soap. TD cut these two soaps (and the lavender one). He did a much better job than I did - these actually look like bars of soap.

The bright pink one is the jasmine soap. I'm concerned that the color may transfer to skin when the soap is used. We'll find out in another couple weeks when the soap can be used. It has to cure for several weeks to complete the saponification process. If you use it too early, there's still lye left in it and it's really harsh (to the point of burning you if it's way too early).

I spent the morning designing a label to put on the bars so that they look a little more like gifts. If anyone has any idea on how to package soap so it looks nice as Christmas presents, let me know.