Thursday, June 11, 2009

All things homemade.

I'm getting back into the groove of making some things. It makes me happy.

I've been collecting fabrics to make diapers for the little French Fry. I went through my stash of fabrics last night and found some flannel that I had forgotten about from when I was making baby blankets for the hospitals. It'll make some nice covers.

Since Sue mentioned making homemade wipes...it stuck in my mind. I figured since I was at the whole diaper making thing I could look into the wipes as well. I had some old flannel sheets that are now cut into 8x8 inch squares that will fit nicely into my old disposable wipes container. We only use wipes now in the car when the kids have been snacking, but I thought I could try them out on them and see how it goes. I'm going to try out the wipe solution recipe on this page and see how we do.

Something that I didn't know about until I started reading up on cloth diapering is that if you dry the diapers inside out in the sun, it'll naturally bleach out any stains that might happen. I don't know why, but I thought that was kinda cool. I had been wondering about stains... Don't see why that theory wouldn't work on wipes as well.

On the topic of things natural and homemade...My brother who is here with us has a sensitivity to milk products so he's been doing without his Almond Milk since he's been here. Things 'round these parts are pretty generic so finding anything other than Soy is unheard of. You have to drive at least an hour to find a decent health/natural food store. My mom was nice enough to look into finding a recipe for how to make homemade Almond Milk. We picked up a 3 lb bag of almonds and took to the kitchen to experiment. It's actually much easier than it looks. Basically you soak one cup almonds for an hour or so in some room temp water, drain them, add them to the blender with 4 cups of fresh water and blend till it blends smoothly. Then you strain it through some cheese cloth and TADA! Almond Milk! Good stuff. And way cheaper than trying to order it online. The shipping alone costs more than the actual product.

We tried to save the ground almonds by making Almond Butter. But I think the whole process of soaking them and then blending them took out all the oils and things that might make the butter blend together naturally. It was a lost cause, but at least we got what we needed out of them before tossing the grounds!

Around the house...we've almost got the first raised bed completed out in the garden. I'm pretty excited about that. We laid the rock down and will put down the garden fabric next. Then we'll be ready to place the box and fill it in with the huge pile of dirt that was dug up. If we do one box a month we should be good and ready for the planting season next year. We have some seeds sprouting out back in pots in the mean time. We've got tomatoes growing already and plenty of basil, thyme and parsley.

I'm still peeling away at the wall paper in my room. The ceiling is 8ft so I have to stand up on a ladder to get at the border paper around the top. It makes me really nervous being up that high on a wobbly ladder so I've been thinking I might leave that for when Kevin gets home and then have him help me out with it. He is under the impression that it will all be down by the time he gets home and we can just mud the wall and paint. Haha! It's a lot of tedious work. You have to wait for the remover to soak into the paper before you can peel it, so there ends up being a lot of waiting around. Oh well though. It'll get done eventually.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You dry the almond grounds and then grind further for flour, almond cookies!
Grammy