Finally! Flannery's birthday post! We had an wonderful birthday bash for her. Unfortunately as we were leaving my stomach felt unsettled. I thought it was the cake that Isabella made, as she decided to put some whipping cream in the frosting. Ever since we got the Norovirus a few weeks ago my stomach has been reacting to eggs and milk. However the following morning a few other kids were complaining of being sick to their stomachs. Hmmm. And then the following two nights I was up in the middle of the night with sick children...the dreaded tummy bug!!! So this post kept getting pushed off. I had tried to correct a few pictures in PE as the white balance was off. Flannery loves this one setting on my camera, but when you take pictures in the dimmed light...well everything is yellow. Something is messed up with my PE because it wouldn't let me edit the white balance! So below you will see a lot of yellow pictures. And like the recent few posts I've had, Flannery has taken most of the pictures.
This year she asked for a birthday party with friends. She has never had one with friends before so we said, 'yes'. With being so ill for so many weeks that left little time for making things up ahead of time. I wanted to try to stick with our budget so we had to get creative with what we had on hand. We opted to make our first batch of soap, crochet some wash cloths, put together some note pads and package it all in some cute handmade bags. This was all done the night before and the morning of the party! Above is the beeswax we used in our soap.
The handy dandy stick blender. This made the soap trace in about two minutes time!
The scale we used to do Jed's weigh in's has found a new use :-) Soap making ingredients need to be measured by weight (with the exception of the water/milk).
This step I messed up on. The beeswax was the only solid fat in the recipe I was using. I melted the wax on the stove and when I poured it into the other oils it instantly solidified. I thought that the heat of the crockpot would have remelted it. I was wrong. After giving it ample time to melt I had to take it out along with some of the liquid oils to remelt the wax.
Flannery helped me with everything except the steps that included working with lye. Here she is filling the molds with the soap.
Our soap came out very rustic looking :-) All those lumps and bumps were in the finished product. But hey, soap will still work no matter what shape it is in.
The following morning we pulled the soap out of the molds, just waiting to wipe off the extra oil (used to make sure it didn't stick to the mold.
All cut into bars and ready to be packaged.
These are the bags we made to put the soap, wash cloth and paper pad into. I thought they came our very cute.
We put the recipients name on the draw string with beads.
Just a neat picture by Flannery.
Isabella made the cakes, and Flannery got to help decorate them. The frosting is melting a bit as it is made with a ton of butter. The party was also located at an indoor pool, so it was a bit on the warm side.
We all had a wonderful time. We were all wiped out afterwards! I am sure a lot of that was due to us having the beginnings of the illness in us (without our knowing). We are starting to feel better today. I plan on going around spraying everything with thieves oil. I think part of the problem was that I was so worn out from being up all night with sick kiddos that I wasn't on top of wiping everything down like I needed to be. We shall see.