Nettles, Treadles and Love

Alice Duvernell is an amazing herbal body-care teacher currently working in the Bay Area.  She taught a Handmade Hydrosols workshop at the local herb store Gathering Thyme in San Rafael, Ca.  This was truly low-budget DIY distilling in your kitchen.  But she did bring a beautiful copper still from Portugal for demonstration purposes.

The basic tools were pretty simple.

A stainless steel  multi-cooker would be the biggest investment, unless you already have one, which I did.  But she recommends that you gather supplies that you will use exclusively for making hydrosols because sterility is so very important.  Other than that you will need a ceramic or glass bowl to fit in the cooker, a glass Pyrex measuring cup, a stainless steel funnel, ice, zip-loc plastic bags for the ice, and unbleached coffee filters.  And you will need 91% rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle to sterilize EVERYTHING.  Disposable gloves and paper towels are also necessary.  As well as tinted glass spray bottles to contain your hydrosols.

Again, STERILIZE EVERYTHING.  I sterilized the spray bottles in the oven at 175 degrees for 45 minutes.  Then rubbed everything else down with the alcohol.  Make sure your space is well ventilated for this part.

Now I am going to insert my own home-made hydrosol process in my kitchen.  I gathered my supplies –

Now the last and most important thing you will need is the plant material.  Alice recommends 1/2 to 1 lb. of dry plant material or 2/3 to 1 lb. of fresh.  She says using fresh usually gives better results.  I ordered a pound of Helichrysum (Immortal or Everlasting) from Mountain Rose Herbs online – a wonderful anti-inflammatory for the skin.  You will need about a gallon of distilled water.  The herbs go into the bottom of the pot along with the water.

Then you will put in the shallow multi-cooker insert.

Then place the ceramic dish inside.  It needs to be large enough to capture the water, low enough to fit under the lid, and small enough to allow space for the steam to go around it.

Then you will place the lid on UPSIDE DOWN.

The lid here is acting as the condenser.  Once the water comes to a boil you will put a bag of ice on top of it.  When the hot steam hits the cold lid it will condense and drip off of the lid into the bowl.  The handle of the lid is actually important here.  You want the lid to have a heat resistant knob handle, not a long handle handle.  This will facilitate the dripping better.  Also, if your lid has a tiny hole in it meant to let steam escape, like mine does here, you want to fill it with something.  I used a piece of cork from a wine cork.  You could also cut off a tiny piece of a silicone spatula.  You want the lid to be properly sealed.

You will then put your pot on the stove and bring the water to a boil.  Watch it carefully because as soon as it starts to boil you will place a bag of ice on the lid and turn the heat down to medium-low.  Alice says that the softer the distillation process, the better quality of the hydrosol.

Again, you need to keep an eye on things because you will likely need more than one bag of ice.  I used four.  As one bag melts, add another.

You will know you are done when the ceramic bowl is full of water.  Then you will turn off the heat and leave the mixture to cool and gather the final drops.

This process of making a hydrosol is exactly one and the same process of making an essential oil.  Essential oils, however, require VAST amounts of plant material.  For example, it takes 700 lbs. of rose petals to make 1 oz. of essential oil.  That is why it is so expensive.  And essential oils certainly have their place and profound usefulness, but hydrosols are, as Suzanne Catty who wrote a book on hydrosols calls them, “The Next Aromatherapy”, meaning an aromatherapy that is economical and conservative of precious plant material and one that is safe and doesn’t carry most of the health concerns with using pure essential oils (see this article for further discussion).  It also has unique therapeutic qualities all it’s own.  Hydrosols are slightly acidic, with a PH of 4.5 – 5.5.  This matches the slightly acidic mantle of our skin, which makes it very bio-assimiliable, and particularly hydrating for our skin.  It is a great alternative to incense for those who do not want to breathe in smoke.  Hydrosols can also be used in plant propagation because plant roots really like water that is slightly acidic.

So here we are back in the classroom with our chamomile hydrosol.  You can see the blue essential oil forming on the lid:

and the drops forming on top of the water:

You can use a dropper to try to extract some of the oil, but it is usually in such a small amount that it is often not worth the effort.  At this point you will pour your water through a coffee filter nestled in your funnel into your measuring cup.  The oils will soak into the filter.  If you want you can throw the coffee filter into your bath or a foot soak to use those oils.  Then you will pour your hydrosol into your prepared spray bottles.  Voila!

Because we were so good about sterilizing everything, then we should not need any preservatives.  Keep any unused hydrosol in the fridge to extend freshness.

A hydrosol mist can be a relaxing or stimulating self-care routine.  Mist, sit and breathe.

I made more of my little wash cloths for family this winter.  And paired them with small bars of locally made soap.

This was the first time I’ve used the technique of blocking.  After knitting a washcloth the tension was all wonky (I forgot to photograph this wonkiness.)  Blocking is the process of washing a new hand knit and then laying it out to dry, carefully shaping it to make it all symmetrical.

more about making my first washcloth here.

I have been negligent in my blogging duties.

The garden right now is actually quite sparse as we have been pulling out and cutting down spent plants, weeding, and pruning back overgrowth.  Also planting seeds for our Fall crops.  And many plants have gone to seed so we have been seed collecting.  SO much abundance with seeds.  Amazing.

But I do have pictures from the Spring and Summer growth I’d love to share.

chamomile

artichoke

fig tree

Borage – the bees LOVE it

Bees also love Basil

new furniture

hollyhock

abundance

pickles!

microgreens

baby zuchini

crafter’s gourds

Happy Autumn.

I have very basic knitting skills – knit, purl and decrease.  So making this simple washcloth actually introduced me to two new knitting concepts – “yarn over”, which is basically an increase, and “binding off”, which I had learned before, but since the only knitting I have been doing over the last few years have been hats, I never used it, so I lost it.  Also, I got to knit on the diagonal for the first time.

I had bought a hemp knitted washcloth years ago, but never used it because it was not what I was accustomed to.  I finally decided to get over my resistance and just try it, and I quickly liked it.  It is very different from cushy absorbent cotton cloths.  It is actually quite rough to the touch when dry, but when it gets wet it becomes quite soft and pliable, and I have grown to appreciate the texture so much.  So I decided to knit a bunch more, and this is my first attempt.

Surrounding myself with beautiful, functional hand-made things.

Living out on the ranch is truly inspiring us to get our hands dirty and get a garden going.  Sean has been connecting with his inner carpenter and building our garden infrastructure.

This was what it was like in the back yard in September when we moved in.

The Autumn rains started greening things up.  We got some cow manure compost from the land owner.

The first big task was to tackle the evil weed (not sure what it is called, but it is viney with purple flowers and completely invasive and tough as rope.)

Then to tear down that silly fence and connect the side and back yards.  And keep tackling that evil weed.

Sean had the brilliant idea of using scrap pallets to build a functional walkway.

From the other direction  – before…

…and after.

So beautiful.

He also built a compost bin.

Then he built some raised beds and we sifted the rocky soil into them.

Then we got a mountain of free wood-chips from a local tree service.

Sheet mulching is a process that uses layers of cardboard and wood-chips to smother weeds and create a thick insulation for the soil to keep in moisture.  The wood-chips also help attract healthy fungal and microbial life to the soil to build up a healthy foundation to a garden.  Healthy soil equals healthy plants.

more beds.

and more beds, including a modified hugel-type bed (in the middle surrounded by bricks), which contains lots of woody materials actually layered into the soil in the bed for more water-holding capacity.

We eat a lot of squash and Sean started saving our squash seeds to start our garden with.  Just to see what would happen – since he hadn’t planted a seed before – he planted one squash seed in a tiny pot on our windowsill.  It took off.

And so did many others.

That squash seed planted in the ground.

Then we bought many many more seeds and seeding trays and started planting them too.

Then potting those seedlings up into larger pots.

After setting up a table in our house and having seedlings taking over our tiny home we decided to get a small greenhouse.  Sean built the base for it.

And assembled the structure.

It’s cozy in here.

and he made a little step for it.

It sure feels good being here.

I love Staghorn ferns, and for this past Winter Solstice I decided to try mounting them on scrap wood pieces as gifts.

I ordered eight baby plants on amazon, followed some google tutorials, and threw my first one together.  Basically I made a circle of nails, nestled the fern in a pile of Sphagnum moss, and tied it all together using fishing twine.  As it grows it will eventually adhere to the wood on it’s own.

I can’t wait till the “antlers” grow on this skull.

I potted up the extra babies and will let them grow larger before mounting them too.

Yes, it has been a little over a year since my last blog post.  I unintentionally took a sabbatical because I was unknowingly getting ready to make a big move.  One month missing a post turned into two, then three, then a year.  I kept telling myself that I needed to use the time that I was not blogging or crafting to start getting rid of years of accumulated stuff in preparation for moving out of the city, which we intended to do someday, even though we were not actively looking at the time.  But I felt the urging.  And did I heed that urging?  Not even a little bit.  I just kept looking at my garage full of boxes of who knows what and thinking I must shed, but not one box did I open.  Nope.  Not until the day in August when we went to look at a cottage for rent on the property that friends of ours had also been renting at – a large cattle ranch in unincorporated Novato, Ca.  That day we knew that this was the place that would get us out of the city, and we had two weeks to pack up everything and make the move.  I guess I need a deadline to get things done.

We’ve been living in Novato since September 2014 and are loving it beyond our imagining.  Getting really settled of course took a while, but now it feels like we’ve been here forever.  In terms of indoor space we did have to downsize to make the move, but even so there is actually a tiny room big enough for a lovely craft space.  And let’s be clear, in terms of outdoor space, we have monumentally upgraded!  We have access to 900 acres of rolling cow pasture and native woodlands.  Right out our back door (the buildings in the picture at the top are where our house is.)

out our back door

We also have permission to tend and care-take the immediate space around our cottage, and I have a feeling many future posts will be about this space and the work we do there.

Another deadline that I set for myself was to get my craft room up and running by January, and get the blog posts going again.  So here I am honoring my commitment to myself and getting things in motion.

My new craft space.  It hasn’t been actually utilized yet, just getting organized and ready for use.

I was worried about both treadles fitting, but they just do.

gourd art made by my mama. basket by me.

The treadle-powered serger is quite the contraption.  There have been many steps in the process of getting it all together, but it is still not working yet.  I have all the hardware needed – bought the thread stand online – but I was only able to get two of the threads successfully threaded.  The third is a mystery.  I will have to search out a sewing machine expert to come and help me figure out the threading.  So complex.  There will be a whole blog post in the future all about the serger saga.

The photo of the hands was taken by my aunt Amy Cantrell and is of my grandmother’s hands when she was slowly being crippled by Alzheimer’s disease.  Lillian was a prolific sewer her whole life, and I have a blog post about her here.

The framed image on the right is a Seasonal Color Wheel of plants that grow in the SF Bay Area used as plant dyes, during different seasons and with different mordants.  You can read a nice blog post about the artist who made it here.  ‘Make Art Not War’ is a print of a piece by Shepard Fairey.

I recently got my dream sheepskin from Meridian Jacobs at the Fibershed booth at the Temescal farmer’s market

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Pictures of my parents and grandmother.  Leaf bowl by mama.  Collage cigar-box by Judy Beck.

Let’s hope the space will be as functional as it was fun to decorate!

My Solstice gifts this Winter were tins of a very special body butter – literally.

The simple ingredients are:

50% coconut oil, 50% grass-fed ghee, beeswax, and lavender & vanilla essential oils.

I first melted the coconut oil and ghee separately.  Then mixed them together 50/50 and added the beeswax into the warm pot to let it melt.

Then added the essential oils and poured into the tins to cool.

It is a very sweet yummy smelling balm.  It can be slathered lavishly on any part of the body.

The ghee provides plenty of important fat soluble vitamins for direct absorption into the bloodstream through the skin, as well as enhanced healing on the skin.  Coconut oil is high in anti-oxidants, lauric acid and medium chain triglycerides.  Lavender is calming and vanilla is warming.  And the beeswax is magic.

Electromagnetic radiation and wireless radiation are now ubiquitous.  It is almost impossible to entirely escape them, and most people could not imagine why you would want to.  But particularly as the wireless radiation proliferates, more and more people are becoming sensitized to the negative effects of these technologies.

I particularly noticed my own sensitivity when the doctor that I work for changed her entire computer desk setup to wireless – a wireless monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer and a cordless phone.  Within minutes of sitting there my face would become hot – cheeks pink and flushed – and I would feel wiped out, exhausted and ill.  She also started experiencing symptoms and eventually she changed everything back to their wired versions, and now I can sit there for hours at a time.  This is a pretty dramatic example, but I think that the effects – though subtle and unnoticed most of the time – are impacting most of us at the level of our cells – creating deep chronic inflammation and irritation.  And chronic inflammation is being recognized by science as an underlying indicator in almost all disease.

As my own awareness of the dangers of this constant exposure has grown, I have also become aware of some ways to mitigate the exposure.  My friend Elan (techhealthy.com) has recently gone through part of the training to become a building biologist – someone who can evaluate the health and safety of your home based on specific criteria and help you to mediate areas of toxic exposure.   He also is and has for many years worked in the tech industry, so is intimately familiar with all sides of this technology.  I was lucky enough to be his first client after his training.  He came over with his suitcase full of new meters and measuring gadgets.

It was a very methodical process – the ultimate goal being to create a bedroom space as close to the natural environment as possible so your body can rest and heal while sleeping.  This includes reducing body voltage exposure and wireless radiation exposure as much as possible.  I sat in my bed holding the body voltage meter, watching the numbers fluctuate, while he ran around the house turning fuses off and on, putting up shielding fabric here and there.  Seeing and hearing the concrete measurements shift was very eye-opening.

Apparently I am surrounded by 8 or more cellular antennas within a half mile radius.  Also, the wiring in my home is old – called knob and tube – which is common in San Francisco and causes high electric and magnetic fields throughout the house.  And my next door neighbor has a cordless phone directly opposite my bedroom wall.

To reduce the negative impacts of these exposures he suggested the following steps:  to paint the walls in a carbon-based shielding paint (which is black and needs to be painted over.)

We painted the walls chocolate brown, with cream ceiling and trim.

The walls are grounded through a grounding plate connected to a cord which connects to…

…a grounding rod in the earth.

I also have shielding fabric as curtains over my windows.  And then I have an added layer of protection using a shielding fabric canopy over my bed.  The shielding fabric is silver and copper thread covered in polyester or cotton.  On top of these measures I also shut the power off to the bedroom at night. The final meter measurements under the canopy had body voltage levels as if I were far out in nature and not in the middle of an urban center.

It has only been a few days now sleeping this way, but I have already noticed a reduction in symptoms and profoundly deeper sleep.  I am hopeful about the long term beneficial effects of giving my body, for at least 8 hrs a day, a respite from the constant effects of wireless radiation, and high and low level electro-magnetic frequencies.

We are electromagnetic beings, and I don’t think this fact should be underestimated.

An excellent documentary about this subject has been made and is available to watch for free online – Resonance: Beings of Frequency

As things currently are, much of the ambient electrical fields around us is actually trying to ground itself through our bodies.  Compile this with the fact that most of us rarely bring our body into direct contact with the earth, the body voltage we are carrying is extremely high – when it ultimately wants to be at Zero.

This is why grounding or earthing your body can be a significant health aid because you are allowing your body to discharge the extra voltage, as well as absorbing from the vast pool of negative electrons that the earth offers – creating a potent free-radical fighting anti-inflammatory process in your body.   Earthing is accomplished by getting as much surface area of your body as you comfortably can in direct contact with the earth, being sure to remove any insulating materials, such as rubber-soled shoes, that may be in the way.  20 – 30 minutes is an ideal amount of time to reap the benefits of this practice.   caveat – please be cautious that the earth you are grounding into is safe.  High EMF environments, like cities, may have levels of voltage moving through the ground.

I am not a total luddite, although admittedly I tend to lean that way.  I just think that we are barreling forward for convenience and profit at the expense of the precautionary principle.  Let’s create incredible technologies that don’t poison us at the same time.  Let’s create living spaces and cities that are actually regenerative and increase health and vitality.  The technology already exists.

I took another felting workshop with Katharine Jolda in August.  This was a full weekend long vest making workshop.  It was held at Bodega Pastures, a sheep ranch in the coastal hills of West Sonoma County.

We had lots of wool to choose from thanks to the local sheep.

Katharine introducing us to the process.

After picking our wool we began the process of fluffing – a long process of separating the fibers by hand or with hand carders or a carding machine.

But this day was extra special because Katharine had hired two members of Kitka to come out and sing Eastern European folksongs to us as we worked.  A truly magical experience.

A butterfly wanted to help me with my fluffing.

Katharine’s famous bicycle-carder.

After a long day of fluffing and carding in the sun, measuring and cutting out patterns from plastic garbage bags, then getting a tour of the barn, we had a potluck dinner and set up our tents in the field.  And had a campfire before bed.

Then breakfast with the sheep.

We started early laying out our fluffed wool on bamboo mats.

After pouring on warm soapy water, pressing gently, then patting, then rubbing, and rubbing rather briskly the wool began to felt.  At a certain point we layed out our patterns.

Then it was ready to be rolled.

Katharine demonstrating the proper rolling position.

Two lovely examples of felted vests.

Katharine’s vest with abalone buttons.

The vest takes a couple days to completely dry. ta daa!

I still haven’t added the gorgeous buttons I got from Wooly Moss Roots.

But now that it is getting chilly I will finish this up soon.