Chamomile-/fjallagrasa-oil turnes into salve/lotion

The big day has come... no, I´m actually not talking about prince Williams and K.M´s wedding - even if it was really beautiful... I´m talking about my herb-oil that I could finally turn into a salve/lotion. I´ve been looking so much forward to doing this!

This is what I did:
1. I started by filtering out all the herbs
This step was a real mess but the smell of chamomile and oliveoil was so nice and it was such a great feeling, having those herbs in your hands and squezzing the oil out!

This is how the filtering looked like:


and some more filtering:


and some more filtering:


2. Melting the beewax in a saucepan.
The smell of the melting beewax is really special!

3. Finally I mixed the oil and the beewax together - and my curative and healing salve/lotion was ready!



I decided to call it "Seiður" (seidur) - this word was used to describe an old way of nordic magic, that people believed to be very powerful (you can read about the meaning here: http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiður)

What am I going to do with this: maby I´ll give some lucky friends a little bit on their birthday, I´m going to use it on my boys dry and sensitive skin - for my own hands that often get too dry and my husband is going to use it for his very dry hands and feet - I'm sure it will be useful for some other things too - we´ll see. One thing is sure: I´m going to make a lot more of this kind of thing, in different versions, out of different herbs, I just love doing this!

A really good blog with infos on homemade cosmetics (and a lots of other things) in icelandic is this one: http://seidkona.123.is/Blog/Cat/3683/

charity-knitting

At the moment, I´m really busy, knitting hats for a "charity-event" called: "help Japan" (hjálpum Japan). If you read icelandic, you can read about it on the following link:
http://www.postur.is/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-29/26_read-1501/
It´s the first time I participate in a thing like this. I decided to knit hats for this event, because hats are a really fun and quick knit, so you hardly get bored making those. I also decided I wouldn´t knit anything but hats for this charity-event for the rest of this month! Above you can see 5 of the hats I´ve already made. I had 2 more, but I gave them away - 1 to a birthdayboy and 1 to a little german boy...

A favorite one - old and new

Freyr wearing his new green hat
Freyr wearing the new green hat

Bidenam wearing the old green hat


Freyr wearing the old green hat

This hat has a history of it´s own! When Bidenam was born, somebody gave him a lot of used clothes - one of those clothes was a green hat with stripes made out of fine cotton. Bidenam really liked it and we used it a lot! When it got too small for him, Freyr Dasima started using it and it became his all time favorite hat. He even had this green hat on inside (no matter where he was) and he even slept with it on - so when it became to small, he was soooooo sad and of course I had to make my sad boy another one! But it had to look exactly the old one - so I had to make 3 different versions of it until I finally had one that looked just like the old one! I´m so happy with the result and I´m definitely going to make Bidenam one for the summer too.
The great thing about this cotton-hat:
1. you can wash it in the washing maschine
2. it´s not too hot in the icelandic summertime (sometimes cold wind)
3. it´s soft and cosy!!

Progress on chamomile-/fjallagrös-oil

My chamomile/fjallagrös-oil has been standing in the kitchen window for over 2 weeks now, so I opened the jar for the first time to see what has happend in those last 2 weeks. It was really exciting to find out , that the oil has a really mild and pleasant smell of chamomile and when you rub it in, your skin becomes really, really soft! So the experiment seems to be a full succeed! I just have to wait for 1 week now to make my salve and other exciting things out of it!

Origami

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There is something about Origami that I love. It looks so beautiful, graceful... and complicated to do! ;-) Therefor I´ve been wanting to know how to fold some Origami for a few years now, but I´ve never had the time and peace necessary to do it - a good thing:
nr. 1: that I´ve got plenty of time and peace at the moment
nr. 2: I´ve been rediscovering youtube in the last few days
nr. 3: stumbled over some beautiful but cheap origami-paper the other day

I just found this great Video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4L5nDDgEEk that helped me make my beautiful butterflies. My friends and family can be sure to get an origami-butterfly on every card and gift they get from me in the next months! This is soooo much fun and I just can´t wait to learn some more!!!

Progress

A while ago, I posted this one: http://kh-handcrafts.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-project-verkefni-mitt.html
I´m still working on my "grandma-afghan" and still loving it. I often take this project with me when I go somewhere or when my other projects get boring and I need a brake! :-) I want it to be very big so I´ve got a looooong way to go - but I don´t mind because the way I see it, some project are quick ones while others are a long-term-thing. In the end, it will get finished.

homemade necklace

When I was surfing around the other day, looking at all the pretty things other creative bloggers have been creating I found this interesting blog: http://paperraindrops.blogspot.com. This blogger made herself a dino-necklace out of a almost nothing, and I really wanted to try this out. Today I went on a hunt for things that I could turn into something special and found this: tiny plastic-toy-animals, acrylpaint (silver, gold etc.) and hooks in "Smáralind". At home I found some other things, like old jewellery that I have been using to decorate my knitted stuff, a jewellery chain etc. After painting a squirrel with silver paint and fixing a hook in it - and combing it with some old stuff this is what came out:

Treasures of nature

I´ve always been interested in the healing-power of wild herbs, especially the icelandic ones. Since I´ve got the time to do different things now, I started some experiments with herbs, after reading a lot about the healing-power of herbs, homemade balms, creams and oils on the internet. My first thing to do was to mix up some dry chamomile with olive oil in a glass jar, which I then put in my kitchen window, since it´s the sunniest spot in the flat - now I have to be very patient (so hard!) for 2-3 weeks and after that I can mix it up with some other things to make a balm and some other things out of it! This is so exciting!