Thekla McDaniels

Rebecca Widds wrote:Backed, and used the opportunity to grab a hard copy of A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen as well. That book gave me far too much joy to just live on my Kindle! Congratulations and good luck, Kate!

You might like the small batch cheesemaking book too, Rebecca!  She did for cheese what the current book does for sourdough!

I backed it too!

Congratulations Kate!

What’s a suicide king?

Jennifer Kleffner wrote:Long time soap maker here. This is a cut and paste from Dr. Dunn, who wrote the Scientific Soapmaking book (he's a chemistry professor who uses soap making to teach his students chemistry). Highly recommend his books. Short answer, no.


What was the question?

Kevin Dunn I'll weigh in on two points here. As many have pointed out, natural does not mean good or safe. We have been hurt and killed by nature since the dawn of time. Tornados, rattlesnakes, gizzly bears, and hemlock are all natural. The dictionary defines "natural" with several meanings, but none of them equal "good" or "safe." Can you find sodium hydroxide lying around without any human intervention in making it? No. The closest you can come is "trona," the mineral from which baking soda and washing soda are made (by humans). There is no official governmentally sanctioned definition of "natural" as used in commerce. Therefore, anyone can legally claim that any product is natural. The word just doesn't mean what people want it to mean.

Kevin Dunn The second point is that the active ingredient in wood ashes is potassium carbonate. If you burn sea plants, you get sodium carbonate. Yes, you can make soap with either of these, but for a hard bar soap, you want sodium hydroxide. The traditional way to get the hydroxide is to react wood ashes with lime (calcium hydroxide). My book, Caveman Chemistry documents the history of the alkali industry, and has several projects on making alkali from ashes and lime. Reacting wood ash with calcium hydroxide produces potassium hydroxide. To get sodium soap from potassium hydroxide, you add salt once the cook is done. Sodium soaps are less soluble than potassium soaps, so they float to the top, where you can skim them off. Making soap from wood ashes is a challenging, but rewarding project. It is part of the "Level 3 (master)" certification for the HSCG.

Kevin Dunn 1000 pounds of wood leaves about 5 pounds of ash, from which about 1 pound of potash (potassium carbonate) can be extracted.

I can’t quite figure out what is going on in this post🤷🏻‍♀️

Are these quotes from Kevin Dunn? And with regard to what?

His book looks interesting but taken out of context I can make nothing of it.

Quarter century of soapmaking😊

Thanks

Use in cob and adobe has been mentioned.  If you have no horse manure for your natural plaster, then you could use straw cut up fine.  String trimmer in a trash barrel is one method.

And, I have no idea about where I am now.  I moved here in September of 24, and new to the area so I don’t know what is normal.

Then we got golf ball sized hail late spring.  It shredded the leaves on the plants I had overwintered in the greenhouse and was hardening off.  AND broke the glazing on the green house.

Then the grasshoppers came.  At plague levels.  It was pretty discouraging. They stripped the leaves off the willows and cran apple trees.  There weren’t any tomatoes or peppers available if a hungry horn worm had showed up!

Excellent!

I routinely buy bales of straw for animal bedding.  In winter I just keep adding clean sttaw to the top.  After some time there’s a deep layer, which is urine soaked deep down, and permeated with goat (or sheep) poop… little pellets.

Eventually it begins to ferment and generate heat.  By the time February comes around (a couple months after solstice in Northern hemisphere) it’s quite warm.  Compost thermometer reads 90- 100 F.  Perfect for new born kids when snow is deep outside and icy winds are blowing.

So I am using the straw for winter heating .😊

I used to do this so I could stsrt the milking season 3 months earlier.

In the springtime, I clear out that 1 foot deep compressed mass.  It goes into the compost pile, or gets used as mulch.  Some years I have stacked it in to a square of pallets, then watered it adequately to restart the heat, and then used it as a hot bed for tomato and pepper starts.  I live at 6000 feet.  Snow and winter retard the growing season.  When the tomato plants are in the pallet enclosure on top of the used bedding straw, I put a cover over the top at night or when the weather is too cold.  What this gets me is robust plants ready for full sun, tight compact foliage.  Must everyone in my town has plants with root systems in tiny containers, and 2 feet tall spindly plants.  When I take them to our tiny farmers’ market they are so clearly superior that I can charge 5 times as much for them, AND no one else can sell any of theirs until I am out.


You could also use the heat generating decomposing straw to heat a greenhouse!

Interesting conversation.  I don’t know what difference it makes overall, but I am glad someone is recognizing that the lye from wood ash is potassium hydroxide.

I extracted lye from wood ash once, and then boiled it down to a crystal.  Then worried because I had children in the house and the crystal was a very interesting shape, and I assumed it was highly caustic, so I didn’t want it around!

I used to use stainless steel for dissolving lye for my soap, but noticed a little bit of sediment in the bottom of the pot, consistently, every batch.  When I switched to a plastic bucket, no more sediment.  Not that I like plastic, AT ALL!  But soap making is one of the few uses for plastics in my life that I consider legitimate.  It is something a person might want to know if lye is a regular part of their diet.


I’ve read that to use wood ash lye for soap making, reduce the volume of dilute lye solution until it’s dense enough to float an egg, but didn’t ever see any ratio of fats to wood lye solution.

So interesting to hear people refer to the lye as having various flavors depending on what wood was burned.

I guess I have a lot more to learn about lye.  I might try it added to soup, but not the drain opener pure sodium hydroxide I have for soap making!  Winter is coming and I will have ashes available!

I hope the pretzels came out, Nancy😊

Your picture of your first loom reminded me of mine.  But mine was a wooden box with nails across 2 ends as pegs to hold the warp.  First I wove a rectangle the size of the box.  Then I wanted a longer piece of weaving.  I figured out how to get longer warp threads, and how to wrap and “store” them.  You went way beyond me though in your discovery and innovation process.

Thanks for posting all this.