The Hangin' Tree & Renderin'

The bluebirds are constant visitors around our place now that spring is near..Lacy Diamond Dishcloth

And I've done bit of dyeing with this wool rug yarn for an upcoming project.

Here's the result hangin' to dry on our "hangin' tree"...lol.  Besides giving nice shade to the yard it doubles as a dryer sometimes.

As you may remember from a previous post or two, I make all of our soap. I got this beef suet from a butcher for renderin' down for soap.

I like to get it pre-ground, but this time it was in huge chunks so I had to grind it in my meat grinder. The smaller the pieces the more tallow you get when you render it down.

So I spent another day at the fire pit adding water and suet and letting it boil till all the fat was released.

I had to strain all the bits of non-fat out before it could be used for soap, so I did that and put the leavin's into pans to freeze for feeding birds. Suet, for the birds. That's how that's made.

Now, for soap - I used the tallow for a pretty large batch of soap which I pour into all sizes of molds...
There are lots of soap recipes online and in books at your local library. I use Norma Coney's The Complete Soapmaker as my soapmaking and rendering guide.

This is a batch of plain soap, pure and natural.

I make a lot of different sizes. It takes 2-3 weeks for it to dry. We're looking forward to using it soon as we are running low on plain soap. I used to make a lot of scented soap, but Goodman prefers it plain these days.

(Note: I've been having trouble with leaving comments at two or three favorite blogs that I read. As you know, I read them from my phone these days and sometimes the comments just disappear or I don't get a link to leave them at all. It's very frustrating after all the time it takes to text it in to begin with, and I hope you understand if that happens.)

(Edited to say: Thanks to A Joyful Chaos I found out that the fairly newly chosen embellishment to transform my quite dry sounding profile ID Tea to something more fun was strikingly similar to political events taking place around the country. (Well, how dare they use my new moniker! ;) Anyways, I don't watch the news or anything really since I don't own a television so I was in the dark about that. I'm happy this way so don't worry about me, eh. My tea events actually involve tea with milk and sugar and a lot of knitting besides. :) Btw, if you haven't visited A Joyful Chaos you might want to do that. The author Mary Ann grew up Amish and has gifted us with many wonderful stories about her childhood and young married life. I'm enjoying it quite a lot.

Here we are nearly done with February...

Have a great week, Y'all!

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