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Hi!

We managed a bit of a walk the other day – original intention was to go a lot further but we cut the day short a bit as there were a few pressing things to sort at home that I had been (ahem) procrastinating about.

Beautiful day hey? The track was nice and squishy and muddy – but I had remembered my gaiters so I felt a bit invincible. (We were up in Rocky Cape NP)

I might have to email parks again sometime and pester them.
About three years ago they dropped off supplies by the side of the track up here to presumably put in a bit of a boardwalk across the muddy bits and there is a sign for the hill too. I keep eyeing off the short steel droppers thinking… well… if they don’t want them…?? haha
Amazing nothing has been liberated during its long stay in the scrub.
I wonder if the job has been forgotten or if (highly likely) they are vastly underfunded.

We really need to set a full day aside to get back up here and do the proper hike – complete with picnic!

Now… moving along to soap…
Did I show you this experiment? (I re-post processed it in my trial photoshop)

I got into it and cut it… But I only tidied up these three chunks – because I did it quite unevenly, the amount of soap wasted was too much with the cut, so the rest can be ‘rustic’ and they’ll start to look great as they are used and worn down.

However… I would love to try it again, but next time fill the container right up and make sure the soap settles down evenly.  I think it will be a fun design to play with again.

The remaining colours that didn’t fit into the moulds I put into the tube and did a hurried ‘kaleidosoap’ pattern… all very groovy!

Hope you’ve had a lovely day!
Cheers!

Hi!

Wow… I am a bit daft.
Its been years that I’ve been using my ancient version of photoshop, but armed with a new computer and confidence I trotted off to our local Hardly Normal (OK – its Harvey Norman for those outside Australia – you can buy household furniture, appliances and tech stuff) to get myself a spanking new edition of photoshop.

So… I am seeing a stand with options. Sigh. These days no CD but a card that you have to follow instructions and with any luck, download your photoshop without any hitches and Voila!

I avoided the student/teacher version and asked the difference between the $150 and $250 photoshop elements. The more expensive one had video editing capability so I didn’t need that.

Wow I am thinking… a lot cheaper than I expected (This is where the daft comes in)

So… Home I go. Follow the instructions, get my serial number follow prompts and hit download.
All good until it stalled at 42%

Eventually I terminated the download and started again
Stalled at 10%
Yay… WHY did this not surprise me?
A couple more goes and I am like… maybe a glitch in something… shall we switch everything off and on again in the time honoured manner of all computer techs everywhere?

Okies…

Oh yes… marvellous improvement.
Now I found it absolutely impossible to navigate back to the download area using the serial number.  Adobe is like a rabbit warren!
I tried so many things then looked for online help… eventually got someone who informed me that the people I needed wouldn’t be back to work until Monday

Bangs head on desk

I tried downloading the trial version thinking I could maybe just add in my serial number to unlock.
Nah… it downloaded fine but no option using my number.
So… almost at tanty-time I gave it up as a lost cause until I got someone a lot more computer savvy than me to sort it.

(OK I will admit to a tanty since if you are going to sell something at least make it idiot proof to download)

I’d been busy for a few days so today I thought I’d buckle down and get this thing sorted.
Rang a number and got some clever lady in India to take over my computer and make it all better.
(And watching what she did kinda comforted me as there was no way come hell or high water that I would have sorted that out on my own.)
All done, all registered, all updated…
Time to open and play.

Alrighty… so. I expected things to have changed a bit but… ummmmm
Nothing resembling the fine tuning tools of the photoshop I’ve been used to using could be found.

Lets cut the long agonising story short.
Photoshop essentials is not photoshop. (duh) Its the lite version. Super lite. I’m thinking lets compare ‘finger painting’ to ‘Van Gogh’.

I rang HN to confirm my sinking feeling and yes… PROPER photoshop is over $1000 (Which as it turns out they don’t even have)
Happily I can send them an email, uninstall what I jumped through fiery hoops to install and they can refund me the $$

The trial version that I downloaded by accident is the one I need and I had a play on it today and its gorgeous! I only have about 3 days left of it before I have to do something about buying it either outright or a monthly fee or something.
My enthusiasm to investigate further today ran out.

So yeah… photoshop doesn’t cost $150 🙂
(I should have known really… I knew before about it being pretty pricey but because it had been so long and there were no other options at HN I figured perhaps within the digital world of things getting cheaper…???)

I really have missed post processing my photos properly.
All the ones here have been done on the new photoshop and were from this morning when I went to let the chooks out.

So many cool webs everywhere!

It was all foggy this morning but not too cold

A snap of the white garlic

Oh – when I got my email of my last blog posts, the photos turned out enormous… couldn’t see them all properly… did that happen to anyone else?
Would be good to know as I still have to get in touch with someone about not being able to reply to your messages!

Which brings me to Lee’s question about the carrots.
By the sounds of it, perhaps your soil was too rich. Esp if the leaves were all lush but nothing underneath.  I tend to plant my carrot seeds in where the beetroot was – without enriching or doing anything but weeding. The lack of readily available nutrients sends the carrots down looking 🙂
A lighter sandier soil is optimal too.
Always plant from seed… don’t transplant.
Thats all off the top of my head but what I think of as the basics for growing them.
Good luck – let me know how the next crop goes!

In the hothouse the potatoes are still looking great. No idea if they will be all top and no bottom… waiting waiting

Poor little self seeded tomato… finally gave it some compost and mulch and a good watering. It’s in the hothouse – it might take off…

I am so very glad I grabbed a few punnets of lettuce late in the season. Its so nice having them at hand.
An iceberg lettuce in the supermarket was going for $4.50!!!!!!
I can’t even….

Man Fern frond – so funny and hairy!

Ok… that was my tale of photoshop that wasn’t…
And a small morning stroll through the yard!

I hope you are all staying safe and healthy
Cheers!!

(Winter Bliss, wrapped in his warmed towel)

How is everyone going??

I am stumbling my way though the new computer (Lets not talk about the photoshop fiasco!!! I MISS the days when you bought a program, you were given a CD to chuck in the computer to load. Needless to say downloading online failed miserably, no-one available at Adobe until Monday and thats several hours of my life I won’t get back!!!)
(OK… so I talked about it haha)

Carrots!!
Pulled up the last of the patch – lots more left than I thought!
We’ll eat a lot but share a lot too. Will replant in October!

Good grief… thanks also Word Press for ‘updating’
So as well as stumbling through my new computer I am looking everywhere to find all the usual buttons to create a blog post which are all in much more inconvenient spots!!

First World Problems 😀

So… hot house doing ok… pretty sure there are little mousie mouses in there chewing things that they shouldn’t be!

The lettuce are giving us a bit of a feed and the experimental potatoes are fabulous

Some keen bunny has chewed off a few garlic shoots!!
Not Happy!!
Luckily only lost about 4/5
Did the Dodgy Bros. job and netted this patch

I can only conclude that a duck snuck into the chook coop and laid an egg!!

The middle egg is our ‘big’ egg and weighs 70g
The one on the right is a smaller 60g

The monster on the left weighed in at 116g!!! Poor Chook! Ouch!

And lastly from me before going to serve up dinner (Just got some veggies in the oven with some chicken) I did an experiment with soap…

It didn’t quite work out the way I planned in my head – will take a snap soon of the cut version. It was all very ‘rustic’ for want of a better word!!
Still… kept me amused one afternoon!!

Hope everyone is well… and sorry, still can’t answer messages. Will get on and pester someone at BlueHost soon about that!

Cheers!!

Hi!!
Just a brief note from me!

I was super amazingly lucky to get a new computer!! My wonderful parents shouted me a new HP PC (I think they might have been sick of me whinging and whining about my lame old clunky slow one and not doing anything about it)
(Can’t wait to see them in person for big hugs 🙂 )

So – I am slowly getting things working and re connecting with sites – though I think word press has changed their site this week so I was struggling to find out where they hid the button to press to create a new post!
Oh – and I can’t seem to reply to your comments!! I will try again but don’t think I am being rude and ignoring you. Clearly a lot of teething issues to work through!!

I can download photos as of today – but still need to get a new photoshop.

I am going to tackle setting up my email next …
(Maybe I should have lunch first??)
I have some lye cooling as I haven’t made soap for a week or so and it feels weird 🙂

We’ve been hiking and I’ve been slowly working on decluttering upstairs.
Today we’ve got a proper winters day.
Cold, wet, dark, gloomy and I’m loving it!!

Hope everyone is doing well and hopefully I’ll be back with a real post complete with photos soon!
Cheers xx

Hello!
Well… It was time to get my butt out of bed early and give the market a go to make some space for more soap!!
The weather was slightly iffy but not too tragic looking so I went ahead on Saturday and packed the car and did a mock set up of the gazebo with my new side shelter arrangement:

I thought it might do the job… It really helped with the wind and the little bit of rain we ended up having! (Soap not the best thing to have out in the elements – don’t want to be selling suds)

(I also had to practice setting it up by myself as Jeff was sleeping in prep for a nightshift)

Colourful hey?

Well, you know me well enough by now to know it was a bit of a hassle getting up and functioning at 6am… haha
But I did it and got myself down to the foreshore (in the dark!!) got a spot and started setting up.
We had to fill out a covid-ready form, have hand sanitiser and the market provided us with signs to put up to tell people to basically be sensible.
(Looks like Tassie boarders are going to still be closed until at least 31st August since the mainland is still struggling with new cases)

It was a slow start to selling but eventually people rolled up and bought soap!
I had visits from a few ladies that had done Sharons workshop as well which was really nice!
I tarted up my paper sandwich bags with this cool stamp I got from Japan yonks ago…

I discovered last night though that ink just goes chalky and wipes off!!! Damn.
Will have to find a different decent stamp pad. I rather liked the white.

Anyway, it was worth all the agony of the early morning as I sold over $300 worth of soap, so a good day out in my opinion… and even better, I’ve created some more space in case I want to make some more!!

Sharon and her family popped down to the market which was great – she could see what I’d been up to haha. Plus she got behind the table and helped me sell when I had a bit of a line up at one point and her husband Paul kindly bought the blueberry bushes I wanted to get but couldn’t leave my stall!!
We’ve got snow forecast (I know!!!! What??) so I don’t think I’ll be planting them this week. Its so icy out there this evening.
I stocked up on wood at the back door – planning on cosying (spell check doesn’t like my word but I know what I mean…) myself up in front of the fire tomorrow!

I hope everyone had an awesome weekend – staying safe, staying healthy and not too stir crazy!!
Cheers!

PS -Yonks = A long time

Hi!!
Days and days of these amazing winter skies and warm temperatures!
My friend thought this was called Muffin Top Hill as I was saying this is the part where we work off the muffin-tops most!!
Killer hill – now known as Mt Muffin-Top

Jeff is out walking now – but I am packing up soaps as I am optimistically wanting to go to the market tomorrow.
Working out a shelter in case of light rain. (If it looks disastrous I’ll bail on the whole idea)

Starting to notice the wattle blooming! Lovely and cheerful

I love wattle… such a splash of colour!

Anyway, hiking the logging tracks has been pretty good lately!
Apparently from Monday we can expect snow down to sea level!!!
I plan to bring up lots of firewood and move more of it to the sheltered area so we don’t have to go far to get it and less chance of it being soggy.

Another dotty soap
Fiona gave me all her saved straws and I might have gone overboard…
Was quite the process removing them.
Oh – and filling them!!! The mixture got a bit thick so it was hard getting it to go to the bottom of each hole! There was a lot of smacking and banging of the mould to get the bubbles to rise.

And then because I am a sucker for punishment, I poked out all the soap from the straws (Thanks to a crochet hook) and used them in another loaf

Pleased with the overall results!

I am looking forward to seeing if people like it enough to buy… although I can probably only use one of the polka-dot batches (The first blue one) as its just about ready.
Fingers crossed for the weather and people at tomorrows market.
I very much need some space!!
(Oh yeah… a few bucks won’t go astray either!)
Hope you are all staying safe and healthy!
Cheers!

Hello!
Going to bed is going to be so easy tonight. I didn’t bother getting dressed today and happily achieved Slothdom.
I had quite the epic soaping day yesterday trying out something I wanted to experiment with for a while.
Lucky I set aside a day as it took about 5 hours to do.

Anyway – above (Dodgy photo haha) was just a quick mix of grated soap from previous scraps and a heart embed I’d made a week or so back.

I also wanted to share with you the ‘shimmy’ soap that I tried again – and got quite a different effect which I loved.

Definitely a pattern I’ll want to continue to use and play about with.

I don’t usually like to trim and nicely finish off my soaps – I hate the waste.
But you can see the difference at the sides between the trimmed and the untrimmed.
Obviously as its used, the bold stripes will appear, but the trimmed version has ‘shelf appeal’

Right… what was yesterdays project?
I’ve watched a number of soap videos about how people create a scene through their loaf and I’ve thought its fascinating. And daunting.

But the very talented lady (Lisa!) from ‘I Dream in Soap’ put up an excellent tutorial with a nice simple design to work with, so I thought I would give it a go.
(If you have soapy interests, check out her tutorial here – She is an insanely talented lady, so worth looking at some of her creations!)

When the cardboard ‘scrapers’ are put together, you can see more what its about – a mountain scene with hills and a road. (Honestly)

When testing if the scrapers fit ok I realised that the last one needed some sides to keep it in line.

Here is one of the scrapers in action. I have poured in the blue soap mixture (sky) and its quite thick, so as I scrape the design across, it’s leaving the correct indents (Hopefully mountain shaped)

Then I’ve squeezed some white into the tips to create snow on the mountain peaks

Then I had to go and have a hot chocolate and a sandwich because my white mixture wasn’t nearly as thick as I thought it was… so I had to wait.

I muffed the grey layer a bit with not enough mixture, so I recut the next two scrapers so they went in a bit deeper.
I then muffed the greens. Too much dark and way not enough light. So the last green layer got a bit mixed just so I could fill it all up.

Waiting to cut was agony.
I wasn’t expecting a super work of art since this was my first go, but I was really pretty excited nonetheless!!

Not bad eh? I rather look forward to trying this again!
Hope you’ve had a lovely weekend!
Cheers!

Ok – sorry but this is going to be a weird post!!

Linda – who – makes -soap… Thank-you!! I got your email!
I wrote an enthusiastic reply but my email was ‘blocked by recipient’

Not being computer savvy much, I am assuming that your junk mail or some filter is not accepting my message? Which was strange because I simply just hit ‘reply’ to your email. So I def. had the address right.
I didn’t want you to think I was rude not replying haha

So… lets work on it 🙂 (Otherwise our email relationship half via blog is going to be funny/weird)

And to everyone – Hope your day was awesome!
Cheers!

Hellooooo – want a garden update?
Apparently the plum trees are ready for spring!
A mild winter so far – I checked the tanks to day… only barely half full!! Normally they’d be over flowing!!

They’ve taken their sweet time but lots of cape gooseberries are ready. I know you can make jam out of them – they have an odd flavour so not sure how brave I am to go ahead and try!

The sweet peas are slowly getting bigger

This cheeky fellow flitted about me yesterday as I ventured outside to do various tasks

Still no mulch. Still no motivation to go collecting seaweed…. soon soon

Regardless… the garlic looks fine!

The beetroot seem to have lost leaves.

Broccoli!! They didn’t really produce a decent compact head but… not bad since I’ve put pretty much no effort into them

They tasted pretty good too (Esp with some butter and my garlic salt)

The lettuce, slow of course but I think looking pretty good. Even ate a few leaves the other night from this plot!

The helbores are out doing their thing.

Caught two of the chooks UNDER the nesting boxes laying eggs. Sigh. So annoyingly awkward.
Today I got in there with a rake to fish out the eggs… collected about 20!!!

Chook-bum!!
This one is like a flea! As soon as I am in the wood pile, she is right there looking for bugs!

Today was another amazing day. Still waiting for a week of horrible weather so I can really sloth properly!
Pip was out on his lead for ages – right at that point he was eyeing off a bunny!
I let him back inside and seriously – less than five minutes and he spewed on the carpet!! He is such a jerk at times!! 😀
All that time outside yet he waits for the ‘opportune moment’

Todays long awaited task.
Leaf mould compost.

Plenty of leaves around to rake up
I decided to empty both the composts… not much left but might as well use it.

I topped up a garden bed and the potato pots

Teeming with worms!

Potatoes before and after

I also spent time sifting some of the coffee grounds to add into the leaf compost

Nice and full – I packed them down but I am sure they will drop by half over the next 6 months.

Time to give a chook a wheelbarrow ride…

This plot has been bugging me for ever – time to clear and bed down the last one in the main veggie patch

I got some enthusiastic helpers

They had a lovely time!
I topped the bed off with a bale of straw that was breaking down, all mushy and wormy

I might be almost ready for spring?

I hope everyone is having a good week!
Stay happy and healthy!!

Cheers
(Pip has a pretty rough life hey?)

My awesome hiking buddy/cousin Fiona has a broken foot and she’s been out of commission for ages.
I finally went up to have a decent catch up and took the soap making gear so I could entertain her a bit haha

We had a great afternoon and made a couple of batches of soap

This one turned out great – we used the ‘Wasabi’ fragrance along with the colours, saffron and chocolate.

The second batch was ‘Kaffir lime and sandalwood’
Its hard to see the colour but we mixed a beautiful natural green clay.

One of my readers, Linda (not Linda from Georgia – Hi Linda from Georgia 🙂 ) has been asking about sharing some of the websites where I’ve learned some new techniques!!
Very happy to do so 🙂 Its quite amazing to watch how some people create their soaps! (I fast forward the mixing bits a lot!)

Linda – I’ve tried to email you with no luck, so throw me a line – lisadyke1@bigpond.com – Love to chat soap stuff with you!
(If anyone else randomly messages me, I’ll probably answer too hahaha)

Ooooo – this is called a ‘shimmy’
Didn’t work the way I thought it would, but I think I know what to adjust.
It would also work better in a taller loaf mould. (Hmmm some soap stuff shopping coming up??)

I watched this very clever lady do a shimmy along with some soap bee’s embedded and I was fascinated with what an amazing job she did!

Check it out here if curious!

Looking forward to trying this again with some different colours and maybe fatter layers!!
Bring on a few rainy days!

Cheers!