More on natural dyes
I’ve been experimenting with home-made dyes for several years now whether it was dying play silks with Kool-Aid, looking for natural dyes for wool, dyes for home-made zero waste wrapping paper, or dying easter eggs. This week, I dyed some wool roving with saffron and berries and the results were nice enough that I wanted [...]
Beat the winter blues with a little green
I may still have a little chard, carrots, oregano, and rosemary alive in the garden, but my garlic’s planted, my horseradish is harvested, and outdoor gardening season ’09 is pretty much officially done. Although Seeds of Change has apparently lost its mind and started sending spring seed catalogs in November (!!), it’s early, even by [...]
The skinny on lead in crock pots – It may surprise you!
I don’t like ambiguity, especially when it comes to the health of my children. So I was alarmed when I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to the question: “Do modern-day crock pot glazes contain lead that can leach into my food?” While lead in ceramics has been an issue for as long as we’ve known [...]
A few tips on making Mozzarella
I know a lot of folks who, like me, love the idea of making mozzarella from scratch. But I also know quite a few people, myself included, who have tried it and failed miserably. This weekend, I think I finally had my mozzarella breakthrough, so of course I had to share it here. First, the [...]
Bisphenol-A – It’s even worse than we thought!
Update: Some additional resources for more information added below! With controversy still raging over Sigg’s recent admission that their original water bottles — often touted, even by this blog, as a safe/BPA-free choice — contain minimal amounts of Bisphenol-A, a Consumer Reports study released yesterday illustrates that the BPA problem is even worse than we [...]
My make-it-from-scratch philosophy
I blog a lot about things I make from scratch and I realized that I have an underlying philosophy that I’ve never spelled out. So here goes. When I was young, I was fortunate to spend many of my weekends on a farm my parents owned with a friend of theirs about two hours from [...]

