Challenging times

I have mixed feelings about the challenges that people post on their blogs. I quite like occasional ones, like Mumma Troll's eat for £1 a day challenge. These are a nice way of starting conversation and links between blogs, building little communities in blogland. On the other hand, I'm not so sure about the regular ones like documenting your plastic waste every week.

I'm not quite sure why I feel uncomfortable about these regular challenges. Louisa touched on one aspect in her post on extreme frugal challenges, which was the competitive, one downmanship. There's also the regular commitment required. Of course, this can be a good thing, if it encourages the development of good habits. In the context of writing a blog, though, this is not something I want. Some people use weekly features to structure their blogs, and I often enjoy reading these, but for myself, I'd rather write about things as they occur to me; I don't want the blog to become a chore because I've set myself the task of writing about a particular thing each week.

There's also the nagging feeling that by signing up to someone else's programme of challenges, I'm letting them do my thinking for me. In general, I don't think it's a bad thing to find someone whose principles you agree with and follow their guidance on the day to day decisions in life. I'm aware that humans, as a species, do most things on auto-pilot and if we think we're making conscious, deliberate decisions about every aspect of our lives, we're kidding ourselves. On the other hand, I'm as vlunerable to the illusion of conscious control as the next person, and so I choose not to delegate my decisions to someone else.

All that said, I've been following Change the World Wednesday for a little while now. The idea of this blog is to have a little challenge each week that lots of people can sign up to, and spread the word about, with the aim of encouraging widespread behaviour change for greener living - a most laudible aim. Notwithstanding my reservations about signing up to things, I've tried the last couple of challenges.

The first challenge I tried was reducing shower times to five minutes. Ironically, since I stopped using shampoo, I tend to spend longer in the shower. Without the routine of shampoo - rinse - conditioner - rinse, I just stand under the water and my mind wanders, for 15 to 20 minutes sometimes. I've been thinking I need to do something about this, and the challenge was the nudge I needed. I found the timer function on my mobile phone, set it to five minutes and put it on a shelf in the bathroom as I stepped into the shower. When the timer pinged, I finished rinsing off the shower gel or whatever, and got out. Easy! I'll be sticking with that new habit.

The second challenge was to avoid using paper towels for a week, which confused me until I realised that this are what I call kitchen roll. I thought this one would be easy, as I hardly ever use them anyway, but then I remembered one thing that has me reaching for the big tissues without hesitation:

Cat sick, hiding on the hideous carpet. I'm so glad this wasn't a few inches further over, or I'd have stepped in it with bare feet.

I use washable cloths for cleaning up other things, but couldn't face the thought of cleaning out a cloth after using it for cat sick. I had a bit of a think - might there be an alternative to kitchen roll that I could use once and dump straight on the compost heap? How about big, soft leaves? I have comfrey...

As comfrey plants go, this one's quite small.

When the inevitable happened, I headed out into the garden and picked a few leaves. The first thing I discovered was that comfrey leaves don't hold together so well as paper towels - it's quite easy to put a finger through one. However, with two leaves together and a bit of care, that wasn't a problem. Once the bulk of the mess was gone, it was a bit more difficult to clean the remnants off the carpet, as the leaves started to disintegrate with scrubbing. If the puke in question had been wetter, I think I'd have had to give up and use... well, I could probably have coped with a cloth for that bit - it's a bit less icky by that stage.

So, could I give up kitchen roll for cleaning up cat sick? I'm not sure. The leaves are only available in summer, and this time it happened to be a nice, sunny morning and I wasn't in a hurry to do anything else. The leaves also weren't very good. I did manage to clean up the mess, but kitchen roll would have done it better. Still, the important part of that is that the leaves did work - the job was completed successfully. It's more faff and not as effective. Maybe I'll do it this way sometimes, but mostly I suspect I'll be back on the disposable paper, just for this.

How could she be guilty when she's so cute?

Leftover soap

This is not a post about bits of soap that are left over from nearly using up a bar, but soap that is made from leftovers. I've been saving meat fat for some time now. I was using it for cooking to start with, then it occurred to me that it would be healthier to cook with oil and make soap with lard, rather than vice versa. I've been saving it up for a while, and the little pots are cluttering up my fridge.

Two pots of chicken fat, two of lard, and one of lamb tallow, which turned out to have lard in the bottom as well.

As you can see from the picture, whilst this stuff keeps fairly well, it's not perfect and there are little bits of mould that needed scraping out before I used this. Some of this has probably been in the fridge for well over a month.

I looked up the sap values* and found that for these three fats the values were all the same, which meant I could mix them and weigh the whole lot together, reducing the inaccuracy of weighing lots of small amounts. Having weighed that (pretty much exactly 1 lb in total), I added a bit of hemp oil (2 oz) that I still had in the kitchen, untouched since last time I made soap.

I then turned to a couple of online calculators to work out the final details of the recipe. This one has a neat little adjustment where you enter the size of the mould you're using and it resizes the recipe to fit. Using these, I added a bit of sunflower oil (1 oz) and tweaked the superfatting** adjustment to 7% so that I'd get a nice round number for the quantity of lye required (2.5 oz). Just for completeness, the amount of water in this recipe was 5.8 (a slightly generous 5 3/4) oz.

Having settled on the recipe, I put all the fats and oils in a big bowl*** and put that in the oven, which was still hot from bread-making, to melt the meat fats. While that was melting, I weighed the water into a plastic jug, carefully sprinkled the required weight of caustic soda into that, then took it outside so it could give off noxious fumes into the atmosphere rather than my kitchen.

When the fats were melted, I took them out of the oven and scooped off the small amount of scum that had floated to the top. Hmm, that could be a drawback of using saved fats. I may not have got quite all of the bits out, but still, I'd have plenty of time to fish them out while waiting for the mixture to trace.

Melted meat fats, looking an uninspiring brown colour

Being rather less nervous about the whole process the second time around, I may not have waited very long for the two liquids to cool down before mixing them together. I did, however, follow John Seymour's advice and added the lye very slowly to the fats, stirring as I did so. The fats started to change colour immediately.

What amazed me was how quickly this reached the trace**** point. I didn't time it, but it seemed barely five minutes before I saw the first signs of it, and not more than twenty at most, before it was definitely tracing. I didn't even use a blender - I was stirring with a good old-fashioned spoon. Forget your fancy Castile soaps, this is the way forward!

Somewhat less than 24 hours later (i.e. this morning), I turned the soap out of the mould and cut it into blocks.

Ten small bars of meaty soap

It was very soft when I turned it out, but it's hardening (and getting paler) with each hour. Just in case you were wondering about the smell (and I suspect you were), it smells lovely! Not at all like meat, just very soapy. Now, does anyone know how long lard soap takes to cure?

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* Saponification values, that tell you how much lye to use for a given amount of fat or oil.

** The amount by which you adjust the quantity of lye in the recipe, to be on the safe side, i.e. erring on the side of a sloppy mess rather than something that'll eat through your skin.

*** Last time I used a bowl that was only just big enough to hold the oils, which made it difficult to mix without sloshing over the edge. I learnt from that mistake and used a very big bowl this time.

**** When moving a spoon through the mixture leaves a 'trace' behind in the surface. This is the sign that you can stop stirring and pour the soap into a mould.

Laundry gloop isn't very good

I tried making laundry gloop a while back. At the time, it seemed fine, but as I've used it more I've been less impressed by it. It's OK for things that aren't very dirty - clothes that have been worn once, mainly - but things that need a bit more elbow grease - towels that perhaps should have been washed a bit sooner, maybe - it leaves them smelling, well, much like they did before they were washed. If they're then hung on the line in the fresh air, they get that lovely fresh smell from the breeze, which I believe is ozone, but if it's raining and I have to hang them indoors, that's not so nice.

I wondered if choosing a recipe with borax in would give better results, so set about finding some borax. This turns out to be more difficult than you might think, especially if you're reading American websites. It turns out that the EU have recently classified borax as a hazardous substance, which makes it somewhat less available than it used to be. In my investigations, I got the impression that this classification is not to protect the consumer, but to protect the miners who did the stuff up, and are inhaling the dust all day every day. This is health and safety doing what it should: Protecting the workers.

It's still possible to get hold of borax, but at a much higher price, presumably to cover the cost of the extra protection for the miners (she hopes, naively). There is also 'Borax substitute' available:

Borax substitute: Sodium sesquicarbonate

I say available; it's still not that easy to get hold of. I prefer to buy from actual shops rather than online, where possible, so I trawled around town, eventually finding it in the second of the two excellent hardware shops in Aberystwyth (in the first I tried, no-one had ever heard of borax).

So, I made up a new batch of laundry gloop, using larger quantities of soda crystals as well as the new borax substitute, together with a bar of grated soap. Result: No discernible difference from the first batch. You know how lists of tips for reducing your carbon footprint often include Turn down the temperature on your washing machine. Modern detergents can cope with cooler temperatures? Well, this isn't a modern detergent.

I looked up what borax substitute actually is as I wrote this blog post and found that sodium sesquicarbonate is probably just a mixture of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and sodium carbonate (washing soda), so it's hardly surprising that adding it doesn't improve the performance compared with plain washing soda.

I have another idea for laundry liquid that I'm going to try in the autumn, but in the meantime I've gone back to buying Persil. The clothes do smell nicer, but it's striking how artificial that freshness smells to me now.

Liquid soap for cheats

It is possible to make liquid soap from scratch, using potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide, and I intend to try it someday. In the meantime, we've run out of shower gel and I have no potassium hydroxide. It's pretty easy to make solid soap into liquid; just grate it into hot water and stir.

Soap in hot water

You can stop there if you like, or you can add glycerine if you feel like it, and anything else that seems appropriate. For the first attempt, I added a very small amount of glycerine, because that was all I had, and a bit of shampoo, which turned it pink and scented it surprisingly strongly. This shower gel was rather drying on the skin, probably also due to the shampoo. That one went into a handwash bottle and a second batch attempted. This time I just added glycerine, but quite a lot of it (having bought some more in the meantime*) - probably about one fifth of the total quantity.

This soap-in-water is most peculiar stuff. After it's cooled it remains the consistency of water for some time. It's only about 24 hours later that it becomes a gel.

Yes, this picture is supposed to be this way round. I'm showing you the jelly-nature of the shower gel.

This one is much less drying, though I did get complaints of 'tackiness' on the skin. Maybe not quite so much glycerine next time.

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*Glycerine is sold in Boots as budget cough medicine, at £1.69 for 200ml. It is also sold in supermarket home baking sections, from 65p for 38ml, which is twice the price and much more packaging.

Laundry gloop

Working my way through the list of things I can make, rather than buy, I get to washing machine liquid. I've known for a while that other people make their own, and found a link from someone's blog to a list of recipes (sorry, whoever's blog it was. I've forgotten where I found this). Quite a few of these use borax, which I don't have, but a couple just use soap and washing soda, both of which I have in the house. In fact, recipes 5 and 7 both use just soap, soda crystals and water, but in rather different quantities...

Grated soap. Please ignore the state of my cooker.

I started by grating a bar of homemade soap (plus that leftover bit of Imperial Leather) and added hot water while I considered quantities. Both recipes call for roughly equal amounts of soap and soda, though expressed differently. I decided to match by weight, as that'll be easier to replicate if I do it again. The first step, then, was to weigh my other bars of soap to find out how much I'd just used. It was about two and half ounces, so I weighed out that quantity of soda crystals.

I then moved on to water - i.e. how concentrated do I want this? Comparing the two recipes, one suggests using four times as much soap/soda as the other per wash. Clearly, this isn't an exact science. If I take the average, that's recipe #5, but use one cup per load. Now, I'm used to using a concentrated liquid, so I'd like to end up with something similar. More to the point, I'd like to be able to fit it in the bottle - even scaled down, this recipe makes over a gallon!

So... I've scaled down the recipe to half, as that's how much soap I grated. That would give me 1.25 gallons, with instructions to use one cupful per load. One cupful is quite a lot - 240 ml, whereas the concentrated stuff I buy uses 35 ml per load. If I want to stick with the same cap measure, I need to reduce the total quantity by that ratio, so ten pints (1.25 gallons) x 35/240 = 1.46 pints. Hmm, how much did I put in the saucepan again?

I hadn't actually measured how much water I put in at the beginning (my excuse is that I thought I'd be adding more to it, and measuring the total). I took another saucepan of similar size and poured two pints of water into it. They looked about the same volume, maybe a bit less in the soapy one, so one and a half pints probably wasn't far off.

With the occasional stir between calculations, the soap had all dissolved (that's probably not technically correct, but I can't think of the right word) into the water, so I stirred in the soda crystals, mixed, and left it to cool. I was a bit concerned by the recipe note that it will gel. Having made it so much more concentrated, would it set solid? By the time it was lukewarm it still looked like milk, and I couldn't be bothered to wait any longer. I poured it into the old bottle, and most of it went in. There was about 100 ml over, which I put straight into the little ball for washing and put a load on. That's about three times as much as I'm expecting to use normally, but what else was I going to do with it?

Results:

Washing drying.
Note the bird feeder still on the line - perhaps not the best combination.

The washing looks and smells clean, at least with that quantity. After a night in the cold (the washing machine lives in the conservatory), the liquid had set solid, with an unattractive crust of suds on the top. I stirred it with a skewer and it turned into a gloopy liquid, just like the bought stuff, though not as smooth. I can live with lumpy laundry liquid - if it's effective it'll save us a fortune! OK, not a fortune - we never spent that much on laundry, but really, this homemade stuff is very cheap.

Sod. Now I've said that, I'm going to have to work out just how cheap it is. My homemade soap used 23 oz oil/fat, which this helpful conversion page tells me is approx 733 ml. Without bothering to look at each oil separately, that quantity of olive oil costs £2.38 at Tesco prices. Caustic soda costs £2.50 for 500 g at Boots and I used 3 oz, so that's... [can you hear the cogs whirring?]... 42.5p, making a total of £2.81 for the whole batch of soap. I used one twelvth of that for my bottle of laundry liquid, so that's 23.4 pence worth of soap. Not forgetting the soda crystals @ 92p/kilo, or 6.5p for the 2.5 oz I used, that makes a total of 30p for the bottle of laundry liquid. This compares favourably with the £4.30 we'd pay for the stuff we used to buy, I think you'll agree!

Soap and marmalade wine

A couple of updates here, as I left these two projects hanging, blogwise.

When we moved into this house in October, the previous owners had kindly left a bar of Imperial Leather on the bathroom basin. I did intend to use up this bar of soap before starting on my homemade stuff, but I got impatient...

Towards the end of January I gave in and started using my very first homemade soap. Here it is, next to the remains of the Imperial Leather. Don't you just love our beautiful basin? Our loo and shower tray are the same colour.

Half-used soap, next to remains of still-unfinished Imperial Leather

The reason the Imperial Leather is still there is that the new soap is actually much nicer, which is hugely pleasing. It does tend to go a bit squishy if it gets too wet, so I was worried to start with that it might just dissolve in a couple of washes, but as you can see, this hasn't happened. Although I gave away six bars as Christmas presents...

Fresh cut soap, left, and packed up as a Christmas present, right

... I still have six bars for myself, which could well last until next Christmas.

The marmalade wine was ready at about the same time as the soap, i.e. end of January. At least, some of it was ready. I had it fermenting in various different sized bottles, and the smallest one finished first. I tried some, and it was OK... I tested it on visiting in-laws, and they liked it too - enough to accept refils, so I'm fairly sure they weren't just being polite (though they are, of course, very polite people). Really - I was expecting it to taste 'interesting', which it certainly does - but it is surprisingly drinkable. There's definitely a bitter edge to it, from the bitter oranges, so it's not like other wines. Apart from that, it's not particularly orangey... I don't think I'd make a very good wine columnist, but you get the general idea. I like it. I gave away a couple of bottles as birthday presents (to people who like trying new and unusual drinks) - I hope they liked it too.

Since then, I've been drinking the bottles as they've finished fermenting, or in some cases before they've finished when I got impatient. The last bottle was bigger and took ages to finish. When it finally got there, I siphoned it off into bottles:

Pebble supervising the siphoning of the last bottle of marmalade wine

This batch is a fair bit stronger than the earlier bottles. Judging by its headache-inducing effects, there may be some methanol in there, too. I can't have more than a glass in an evening, and even then I feel the effects the next day.

That's really not good, is it?

Hmm, better do something about that.

OK, methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol, so it should be possible to drive it off by heating...

Putting the old sugar thermometer to good use.

I looked up the boiling point of methanol, in Farenheit because my thermometer is very old (149°F, in case you're interested), heated the rest of the wine to somewhere near that temperature, and kept it there for half an hour or so. I meant to leave it for about 15 min, but got distracted and left it rather longer. I probably lost some of the ethonal too, but I think there was some to spare. I'm drinking a glass or two this evening, so I can let you know tomorrow whether the heating was effective. Either way, it still tastes pretty good.

Friday update: Yay! No headache this morning! I wonder if that's why I've been feeling a bit rubbish this week? I've been poisoning myself. Oops.

Soap - first attempt

I was quite scared of soap making, to be honest. It's not particularly difficult, but it involves caustic soda, and if you get the quantities wrong you can end up with caustic soda in the soap, which is really not something you want to be washing with. However, I'd decided to give it a go, so after much procrastination I pulled myself together, gathered up my ingredients, donned safety goggles and rubber gloves, and started measuring things.

Ian found the goggles and gloves highly amusing, so he took a picture

Part of the procrastination was lack of internet, which slowed down the research. I'd seen some information - and there's plenty out there - but hadn't settled on a recipe. Being me, I didn't just choose a recipe then set about following it, because most of them include some fairly exotic ingredients, like coconut oil. I'd read some general introductions and learnt that basically, you mix alkali (or lye - either sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide) with oil or fat in the right quantities and you get soap. Too little lye and you get a sloppy mess; too much and you get something that will eat through your skin. Unsurprisingly, most recipes build in a margin of error in the direction of the sloppy mess.

The decisions to be made were which oils and fats to use and what quantities of the various ingredients to include. I found excellent websites that told me what kind of soap to expect with various ingredients, calculators for what quantity of lye to use, and one that even adjusted the quantities to suit the dimensions of my mould.

I had thought to use just oils, but with research got worried that the soap might not be hard enough, so chickened out and included some lard (I did attempt to render this myself from leftover bacon fat, but didn't keep an eye on it and ended up with brown, smoky smelling lard. Not so good for soap). I also had some hemp oil, which apparently makes luxurious soap, so that went in. I ignored the bit about it having a short shelf life - seemed fine to me. I'd bought peanut oil for moisturiser, but what little information I could find suggested this was quite similar to olive oil, which I had in much larger quantities having restocked twice by mistake at some point. I also found someone eulogising about sunflower oil, which appears to be much less available in the US (rarity value possibly contributing to the eulogy), whereas this is my main cooking oil, so I was pleased to be able to include some of that.

The recipe I finally used went like this:
Lard: 7 1/4 oz
Hemp oil: 3 3/4 oz
Olive oil: 8 1/4 oz
Sunflower oil: 3 3/4 oz
Caustic soda: 3 oz
Water: 7 1/2 oz

I'd played with the recipe resizer to get a nice round number for the lye (how deep you fill the mould is somewhat flexible) and rounded the other ingredients (mostly up) to the nearest quarter ounce, because that's the smallest weight I have with my scales. There was also a minor adjustment due to adding-up failure; the original version had less olive and more sunflower oil.

So to work.

Step 1: Mix the lye with the water. Yes, it does get hot. Yes, it would have been a good idea to do this in a well ventilated area.
Step 2: Melt the lard then mix with the oils in a bowl.
Step 3: Wait for them all to cool down to about 110 deg. farenheit. This is boring. Also, I didn't have a thermometer that I was willing to put into caustic soda, so I had to guess. 110 is a bit above body temperature, so should be fairly easy to judge, though the rubber gloves did make it a bit harder.
Step 4: Add the lye and water to the oils and stir. The usual advice is to use a stick blender for this, alternating blending with stirring. I don't have a stick blender and thought I might use an electic whisk instead, but one site helpfully explained why this isn't a good idea - air bubbles don't make for a nice soap texture. I started with a tiny manual whisk that I could keep completely submerged, so whisk without drawing in air. This proved difficult in rubber gloves, and before long my hands got tired, so I gave in and used the electric whisk. I should point out that the stirring took a VERY long time. At one point, I took a break and went to off to consult John Seymour's self sufficiency book. He gives very sparse instructions (no warning about how long it might take, for example), but advises adding the lye slowly, otherwise it won't mix, which I hadn't seen elsewhere. No mention of a stick blender here, either, just 'stir gently'. I wondered if the blending was necessary to compensate for the too-fast addition of lye at the beginning. Too late to do anything about that now.

Eventually, after about an hour and a half, I saw the first signs of 'trace', which is what I was waiting for. This means that the spoon leaves a trace in the surface of the mixture as it moves through it. It came on gradually - at first only visible when I flipped drops across the surface. Bubbles from the blender became more evident, so I stopped using it at that point and just used the spoon to mix. It also started to smell less like oil and more like soap, which was encouraging. Even better, it smelled like Grandma's soap, and she only ever bought the best.

Once I was sure I could see the trace, I added some fragrance (but not too much - I didn't want to lose the Grandma's soap smell). I'd bought two bottles - just cheap stuff for scenting rooms - so had a choice of white musk or rose. I had chosen white musk, but the mixture was a soft peach colour, which I thought suited the rose better. I had plenty of time to think about it! (Actually, it finally set to an ivory colour, which would have suited either - I'll know next time).

I have to say, I was very excited to see the mixture finally turn into soap - all that time stirring it must have built up the tension!

Step 4: Pour into mould, cover and leave for 24-48 hours to set. Within 24 hours it was hard enough to remove from the mould, so I cut it up and, as instructed, wrapped it in a towel and...

Step 5: Leave to cure. The amount of time for this varies a lot between recipes. For some it's as much as six weeks. A bit of research told me that the time required varies according to the choice of oils, and that olive oil takes as long as any. Oops - these are supposed to be for Christmas presents and I don't have six weeks until Christmas. Doh! I'd really like to test a piece before giving it to people, but I guess I'll just have to give it with instructions not to use it for a few weeks. Oh well.