Newest Soap Curing

Today I will be cutting and setting these two batches of soap to cure. One is Lavender Ylang Ylang(pink), and the other is a new scent that I think will be rather successful. It has, among other essential oils Grapefruit and Jasmine(light yellow). It is lightly citrus and has an exotic feel to it; it is a sweeter floral than I have made previously I did not use the essential oils that have a spicy tone to them so this bar is a bit more feminine than the other florals. The scent of Jasmine is not overwhelming, but it helps to round out the citrus in the bar. In future batches I will probably add a little more scent to make it stronger, but for a first try I am rather happy with it.

My Oldest Son's Talent

My oldest son is a very talented boy. We butt heads often when it comes to school work, which can be very difficult at times, but I have to admire his artistic ability. He is very artistic in many areas and enjoys lots of the different arts. He has been taking guitar for about a year now and does fairly well, loves acting in plays and operas that are put on by the local university, and has a passion for art and drawing. He started drawing at two, and we were rather impressed by what he accomplished. But the odd thing was he was never without a notebook and pencil and by the end of that year I had a box of notebooks and paper. He still goes through several notebooks a year mostly drawing Star Wars, various weapons and Superheros. And it has rubbed off onto his brothers who draw on everything also(Nathan never drew on walls...the other two are a different story). So to the point of this post, we asked him to draw some cards for family members and one in particular stood out. He took a tee shirt that had a bass printed on it and began to draw it. Below is a scan of his picture.

Although I am able to draw a little, I don't think that my talent even came close to this at the peak of my college years. Matt is quite an accomplished artist and was very impressed at Nathan's ability at this age. Nathan is 10 years old.

One Week Left

Well we are down to the last week of pregnancy...It went by faster than I expected. There is so much to be done until Monday. I am pretty sure that I have planted my last plant until the fall...maybe. Everything seems to be growing really well now and we actually have vegetables on the plants. Yesterday we picked our first cucumber and yellow squash. Matt made a trellis with some of the sticks from the trees that were in the yard for the cucumbers to start climbing on. All of the tomatoes have now been staked and yesterday we noticed that many of the plants now have marble sized tomatoes on them. There are also several small zucchini and yellow squash and what looks like a pumpkin, and a melon of some sort growing also. The watermelon seedlings seem to be doing pretty well so far. The eggplants are doing okay, but seem to be growing a little slow. I am not too sure of the bell peppers that were planted, something seems to be eating them and they don't seem to be growing very well yet, they may need a supplement of some sort to get started. Yesterday I planted my hot peppers and pimento peppers. It doesn't look like the onions are going to survive this year, we will have to try again next season with those and maybe some garlic.

My last Farmer's Market for a while will be this Saturday. Either Matt will be out there, or Katherine at Broken Magnolia Farm will have a table at her stand for me until I am able to return. I think that this weekend will be the last 'ice pop' weekend until I can get up and around again, hopefully that will only be a couple of weeks.

Soap has to be prepared and Ice Pops have to be made for the weekend. One of the local papers will be doing an article on me and the soap, so today I will be making a couple more batches of soap so that pictures of the process can be taken. It is so exciting to have an article in the paper.

My Sister-in-Law will be here this weekend with her children, to visit and help out and we just can't wait until she arrives. They live in Texas so we don't get to see them nearly enough of them.

This will probably be the last post for a while too, If I get a chance at the end of the week I will post pictures of the new soap, one of them will be a new floral scent and I am leaning toward a combination of jasmine and grapefruit.

Just an Update

I have really been trying to keep current on the Blog Front, and realized that it has been a while since my last post. The Taylor Farmers Market was excellent for the opening day. I really hope that it keeps up this momentum through the year. It was great fun to see old faces as well as new faces. We had a great time and a successful day with both the Soap and the Handmade "Ice Pops". It is a weird combination to have with soap and we did get odd looks and lots of questions, but they were well liked and I am hoping that as the summer continues to warm up they will be a big hit at the Market.

Juggling Life, Kids, School, Market, Chickens, Garden, and House will become increasingly difficult in the next couple of weeks. Time has just flown by and we have a just over a week before we will be welcoming baby Zerangue into the family. June 21st is the date scheduled for my c-section. So there will probably be another unintended gap in posts on the blog, not to mention everything else coming to a screaming halt for the next month, but we will adjust and work through it just like everything else.

On the Garden, everything seems to be growing well. It has gotten rather hot in the last couple of weeks, so watering has been more essential lately. We are continuing to put in new plants when we get a chance. There are a few that really need to be planted this week. The herbs are growing well, and the watermelon although slow are starting to get true leaves. The squash, zucchini and my mystery vine now have small fruits. Tomatoes have grown to about 3 feet, were tied to stakes last week and are beginning to flower. The cucumbers are starting to climb and produce flowers. The blueberry bushes that we bought are full of berries, but won't be planted until the fall, mostly for ease of taking care and making sure they get the proper water over the hottest part of the summer.

The chickens are really doing great. They are enjoying all the garden weeds and vegetable/table scraps that they get daily. As much as I would like to let them forage it just isn't possible without building a portable pen(which will just have to wait now). They are really fun to watch especially when you put a favorite food in the pen, not only is it usually a race to see which of the chickens get to their favorite, there is also usually a few that get chased around because the others want that same treat.

So for tomorrow at the market we will have the following soap choices:

Oat and Grain
Mojito
Lemon Basil
Rosemary Mint
Spicy Citrus Shaving Soap
Patchouli Lavender

Orange Eucalyptus

Sportsman

The Ice Pop Choices will be:

Sweet Tea with Lemon

Strawberry Lemonade

Blackberry Limeade

Pear Blueberry Polka Dot

Berries 'n Cream

Also, CypressLakeSoap Etsy site has been updated today. I would really like to have a stand alone website for my soap and products, but for now I think it best to just keep things the way they are and not make it more complicated.

The site name is http://www.etsy.com/shop/cypresslakesoap