More Crafts!

I don't think you can consider crocheting a NEW hobby exactly since I've been knitting and this is a yarn related craft.  Also the only reason I'm crocheting in the first place is to make cute toys for the baby bean.  I stumbled onto Creepy Cute Crochet back in December when I was busy looking for knitting projects for the bean.  While I was instantly smitten, I hesitated to buy the book because I didn't know how to crochet.  This was quickly solved by the purchase of a beginner's crochet book by Klutz.  I think if you know how to knit, crocheting is not too hard because you have some degree of yarn sense.  It took me about a day to feel comfortable and to make a couple of the projects in the book.  I forgot to take pictures of my crocheted flowers and Tony is sleeping over one arm now so I won't be able to remedy this, but here you can see a picture of the soap bag I made.  The tension is not quite even throughout the bag, but you can't really tell  with the soap inside.  This is a bar of my lemon milk soap.  I wasn't sure if I would be into the idea of using a soap bag (sort of like a washcloth wrapped around your soap), but I gave it a whirl last night and it was nice! I think it's especially nice for the soaps that I didn't add texture to (lemon milk and the recent almond cybilla).  

And speaking of soap, I just whipped up another half pound batch.  I used my basic milk recipe and the oatmeal milk and honey fragrance oil from Brambleberry.  This scent actually seems quite subtle, I'll have to see what it smells like over the next few days.  At trace, I added...oatmeal milk and honey.  The oatmeal was roughly ground with my mini food processor and I added just a couple of dollops of honey.  I'm not sure if it was the oatmeal or the honey, but I didn't hit immediate trace with the addition of milk as in previous batches. I ended up stirring this for a while until it looked pretty thick to me and then I poured it in the mold.  We'll see if there are any color changes with this batch.