Thea inside her Booth

I have so much fun at these fairs.  I meet lots of people and do LOTS of talking.  Conversation is absolutely necessary to sell your product.  Generally, if I miss an opportunity to talk to someone, I miss a sale.  Out of all the hundreds of people I talked to over the weekend, I had only one woman respond to my products oddly – everything she sprayed or sampled, she would screw up her little face,  stick out her tongue, and shudder!  It was hard to keep from bursting out laughing and I gave in to that impulse as soon as she left!  Goodness!  All things considered (lower traffic numbers than last year, fewer vendors) my sales were pretty good and I made what I hope will be good contacts.

My word count is already high, but I must mention that I went elderflower harvesting today.  Distilled elderflower is what I use in my “Everday Hand and Body Cream” that I think everyone should use all over themselves everyday.  It is so creamy, smooth, delicious and good for your skin!  All organic beeswax, grapeseed oil, and a  hint of sage make it yummy food for your skin and it smells good. In fact, I just finished smoothing some into my hands …  and, I can smell it emanating from my distiller right now!  Even though it’s fairly late to be starting up my distiller, I went ahead and started it up around 7:00 p.m. while hubby Scott finished the dinner dishes.  I should be able to unplug it around 10:30 p.m.  Scott took this picture of me loading up “the tin man” and I’m including a picture of what I harvested today, too.  Two buckets of elderflower which is two loads in the distiller, and two shopping bags full of cleavers that will also be two loads.  I hadn’t planned on harvesting cleavers today, but I felt the gentle yet persistent tug of them on my pants leg (hence the name) while I was busy reaching skyward for elderflower.  I thought…  oh, could it be my old buddy trying to catch my attention?!  Yes!  Cleaver!  It was such a lovely, dense mat of the dear things that I could not resist.

Loading Elderflower

Capping the Tin Man

Green Cleavers, White Elderflower

Okay, one absolutely last thing…  I am reading the most hilarious book.  It’s called “Bitter is the New Black OR Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office” by Jen Lancaster.  Jen, wherever you are tonight, you have been added to “my hero” list.  If you have not read this book or heard of Jen Lancaster, please Google her right now!  You will be glad you did.  Written by a former dot-comm-er, she chronicles her soaring star, her meteoric fall back to earth, and processes her new self and new reality with a comic truthfulness that is irresistible.  Thank you, Jen, for making me laugh and giving me hope!

I have been very busy the last six weeks finishing:  three art commissions commemorating a decade of Seven Devil’s Play-writers conferences.  These pieces incorporated a decade of photographs that I printed on specially treated fabric using my Epson Stylus printer with archival quality inks.  They turned out quite well and are right now hanging in the Alpine Playhouse for the duration of the 2010 conference where fans and conference attendees are encouraged to sign the back.  Here’s what they look like:  and yes, I know, I need to learn how to “crop” and use my “RAW” function on my camera.  I can’t afford my art photographer anymore so I have to learn all this new stuff!  So much new stuff to learn, how can one do it all?  That’s a topic for another blog….

Sheila's Quilt

Detail Paula's Quilt

On the upside of all the wet and cold, it has been a great season for mushrooming!  Husband Scott thinks I’m trying to poison him when I collect  and serve puffballs, but he has come to love finding, drying, and preparing the precious morel mushroom famous in our area.  You can find them fresh at gourmet groceries for about $20.00/lb and dried for an astonishing sum by the ounce.  Doggie Ethyl enjoys the hunt as well.  Here are the two of them back from a hard afternoon of ‘schrooming:

Scott, Ethyl, morels

Evening Couch Time

I could say a WHOLE LOT MORE but I’ll hold off for the next blog!

Hot Cross Buns!

Anxious to exit the kitchen after all that work, husband Scott, doggie Ethyl and I went for a walk along the Payette River just to the south of us.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.  It is still very much winter here and it is becoming painful for me to speak with my friends and sisters who live in warmer climes and speak of green grass, blooming spring flowers, and sitting outside in the sun.    At least it is very beautiful here and the love we have for each other, and our good friends make it seem warmer!

River Ice

Happy Easter!

Easter Sunday Walk

Besides crabbing about the weather, I wanted to share this very cute picture taken of my husband and our doggie Ethyl just a few days ago (reference above paragraph re:  weather).  They are cutting logs to use as support beams in a straw bale home Scott and his client are building.  The client is excited to be using timbers from his own woodlot and we’re all looking forward to the experience of building a straw bale home in Valley County!

Logging Dog

Scott has also been busy doing his part for Thea’s Bee Beautiful.  He is building display units for me to use in the rapidly approaching summer fair season of 2010.  In this picture, up front and to the left are one of the units awaiting sanding and varnishing.  I really like them – they are a HUGE improvement over what I was using last year…  nothing!  I just piled pyramids of my stuff on a farm table.  My whole booth is a big improvement this year.  For starters, I HAVE a booth!  A lovely LightDome that I can put up all by myself if I need to.  We have practiced putting it up once inside the garage (reference first paragraph again… ) and it is really efficient, lightweight, and strong.  All the things I wish I were!

Man Cave

I have held the opinion for some time that off-shoring most of our manufacturing in this country would prove to be unwise, no matter how much people yelped about it being a “good business decision”.  Short term “good decisions” rarely turn out to be truly good – or wise.

Now that our economy is in the tank, most of us are seeing the wisdom of buying things made in the USA and hoping for manufacturing to start up again on our own shores.  I am always encouraging people to buy USA products.

I had an opportunity to test that out personally last week.  My daughter and I came up with the idea of doing travel sizes of my products, have the different products in baskets and allowing clients at my booth to select 5 different ones to place in a muslin travel bag with my logo on it.  We shopped online for muslin bags.  I found a company I liked and was faced with the following dilemma:  Buy a greater quantity of bags of higher quality muslin made in Indonesia, or a lesser quantity of bags of lower quality at a higher price but made in the USA?

Well, I had to logoff and think about it for awhile.  It took me around 3 days to decide I had better practice what I preach and buy in the USA from the USA.  So I did and I am happy with my decision.  I felt it was worth blogging about because we are all faced with this everyday on purchases as simple as toothpaste (many are made in Mexico now!) or as complex as stereo and TV equipment.  Please start checking labels and help our economy restore itself.  Even if it’s a bit more costly in the short term, what are the long term effects?  We’ve seen the result of short-term thinking.  Let’s turn it around!

Muslin Made in the USA

The route designated for my partner and I took us down a remote valley road on Friday.  As we were cruising along, talking about our lives and families, I spotted a wondrous thing…   three large MALE cottonwood trees just LOADED with big juicy buds!  Listening to my partner with half my consciousness, the other half duly noted the location of the trees and vowed to return the next day with my trusty harvesting bucket.  I could hardly contain my joy.  I knew I would be coming that way the next day with another Census partner and that we would be done early in the day.  I now had plans for the rest of the day.

Male Cottonwood Trees

Cottonwood trees are either male or female.  The buds on the male trees are easily four times as large as the female buds and just oozing with the lovely red fragrant  sap that gives my infused oils their ruby color and heavenly scent.

The next day dawned sunny and cold (20 degrees!) and I drove the 30 miles to meet my partner.  We finished in ample time for me to return to the cottonwood grove where I had a picnic lunch while listening to NPR parked underneath the biggest of the male trees.  I got out of my car and went to the back hatch to retrieve my five gallon bucket and pruning hook planning on cutting off a branch and stuffing parts of branches into my bucket so I could pull off the buds in the comfort of my home.  I glanced down into the ditch between my car and the trees and was immediately captivated by the sight of a very large branch, absolutely loaded with buds, in the bottom of the ditch.  Eureka! I had struck red gold.  Down into the ditch I scuttled where I gleefully snapped off bud ends into my bucket.  I scoured the area for more such branches and found a few.  Cottonwood branches are quite brittle and will snap off  in stormy winds and if you’re lucky, you’ll find them when you want them!

Look at the size of those buds!

So today, after much house cleaning, laundry, and pie baking (strawberry rhubarb in honor of my mother’s birthday who passed away just two years ago) my husband and I snapped off buds while watching a great documentary on public TV about a man who hand built his own cabin in Alaska and the age of 53 and lived there until he was in his late 80′s.  A wiry old geezer, he hunted, fished and grew his own food.  I’d like to get the book and read it to find out what his personal motivation was for leaving his son and family behind for the wilderness.  He looked very happy!  I’ve always been entranced with stories like this and am a bit like that myself.  I am happiest outside, in the woods and fields of central Idaho…  OR, in my art studio…

Anyway, I have enough buds to fill three two quart mason jars (the old fashioned kind that you can’t buy anymore – pictures in the next few days) half way.  Then, we poured in organic olive oil to fill the jars and infuse with the buds.  The jars are sitting in our living room window right now and by morning, the green olive oil will be ruby red.  It’s like magic and I love it every time I do it.  I use this oil to make Thea’s Bee Beautiful lip balm in a tube, and a 1/2 ounce pot of the same balm that also serves as a first aid balm.  The pots are handy for campers, hikers, and river rafters when space considerations and serviceability of your gear is important.

Off to eat pie now while it’s still warm and say a silent “thank you” that I live in such a beautiful place and have the adventures, life, and love that I have.

Horehound, while a wonderful herb, can be pernicious.  We were pulling it out of Darcy’s dad’s field and “garbling” it by the old horse shed.  “Garbling” is the process of cleaning dirt and twigs from the herbs.  On our heads are wreaths of bright green willow branches fashioned by Suzanne.  The bright green of newly leafing willow trees is truly one of earliest and prettiest harbingers of spring.

Garbling the Horehound

Harvesting horehound is all fine and good, but I moved on to sprucing up my beehive after a bit.  I brushed out some dead leaves, cobwebs, and scraped old wax and propolis from the frames.  You can see my newly cleaned frames leaning up against the shed behind me along with a box of brownish, sludgy “bee food” we leave out in the spring to get our buzzy friends jump started.

Thea and Hives

Cherry Blossoms, Hives, and Salmon River

Friend Renee thoughtfully regards the task at hand

We get back to the Studio by mid-afternoon so we can clean up and prepare whatever herbs we’ve gathered that day.  Here, Bob and Shaun clean up teasel roots and leaves.  The rest of us spent our time making lions mane, and horsetail/nettle capsules.

Today, I made a new test batch of toothpaste adding ground lomatium as it reduces plaque.  My daughter finished a new label for it so I’ll be putting that product into production soon.  I also added peppermint oil and rosemary oil to my mint body cream and it is definitely a cooling mint cream now.  Very nice.  I dropped samples off to my girlfriend “guinea pigs” today and will await their response before I alter the recipe and put it into production as well.

Any census workers out there?  I was hired today and start training next Tuesday.  I will be a “numerator”.  That’s kind of like an AVON lady only also asking for name, age, and permanent location.  I expect the job to last around 6 weeks so I will be very busy doing that AND getting ready for the Moscow Renaissance Fair which is May 1st and 2nd.  I am so pleased that my products and I were accepted into this fair and will do everything I can to make my booth welcoming and successful.

In Valley County, this is the special time of year where we all get to go Field Skiing!  In all the years I’ve been here, I have never been field skiing until this year and it is glorious indeed.  This is a spring event because the snow surface needs to be set up, settled down, and crusty – something that only happens here in the spring.  Usually, fresh snow is continually falling and keeping the surface too soft for field skiing.  In spring, when the higher profile of the sun warms the surface each day, we get to go FLYING on skies across normally inaccessible fields.  We fly across little bumps and moguls created by coyote tracks and snowmobiles.  Little tufts of yarrow, sage, and field grasses poke up through the surface and remind us that summer will indeed arrive again.  Not being a fast girl in any sense of the word, this is an indulgence for me that I thoroughly enjoy as you can see by my face in the pictures below:

Other big events…  my birthday!  Celebrated with yummy chocolate-bottomed coconut macaroons from Evening Rise bakery here in McCall and champagne.  Very satisfying, again as evidenced by my happy face.  Note the big white bandage on my thumb.  I discovered that carving linoleum block tiles is not my best art medium while also discovering that my husband is very adept at applying butterfly bandages.   I will leave this wonderful art form to those who are MUCH better at it than I am and I now have a new respect for this lovely medium that I am not so good at.  Please note our lovely new art center where I engaged in linoleum block printing in a very good class given by local artist, Deb Yensen.  This beautiful building contains classroom space with roll-up doors for “plein aire” work, gallery space, studio space,  and will soon contain pottery wheels and kilns for people who wish to rent time with them.  I am so excited by our new art center!

Thea's Birthday Celebration

Commerce St. Art Center

Thank you to all who gave me such good feedback on my toothpaste recipe.  I am now ready to move forward on its production with minor changes.  I will decrease the sea salt content, add ground lomatium dissectum as a plaque preventative, and add anise as an additional flavor for those using homeopathic medicine since mint negates homeopathic remedies.  Look for this new product on my website!

Also coming up will be two new wonderful creams:  “Fancy Face Cream” made with yarrow and cleaver hydrosols, and “Refreshing Mint Body Cream” made for hot weather relief with mint hydrosol, mint and rosemary essential oils.  The rosemary essential oil is what provides the “cooling” action of the cream.  I have friends testing these for me now and will write more about them when I have the recipes firmed up.  Both seem to be absolutely dreamy…  I am so in love with the face cream I could just roll around in it!  The scent is slightly spicy like those spiced multi-colored gumdrops with a vanilla low note.  Very nice.

Thea goes field skiing...

... with husband Scott and doggie Ethyl

Here’s the report on the toothpaste I promised you – I know you can hardly wait!  Well, it’s wonderful.  I am so pleased with it.  The picture doesn’t capture the intense green color of the paste or the lovely spearmint scent.  It DOES show the gorgeous amber-colored glycerin infused with propolis I created.  I’m so happy the infusion worked out.  There are no clear instructions regarding this process that I could find, and I’m just guessing that people keep these methods “secret” once they figure them out so as to keep competition down.  Can’t blame them, and it keeps me working at things my own way so it’s not all bad!

Minty Horsetail Toothpaste!

The sprig of green on my windowsill next to the toothpaste is the actual horsetail plant I use in my paste.  Horsetail contains silica, which is the scrubbing agent in the paste, and loads of chlorophyll – which not only gives it the great green color, but is a natural breath freshener and is good for your digestive tract.  So if you’re camping or on a river trip, you can swallow it if you wish and it is actually good for you.

Why am I making my own toothpaste now?  Because commercial pastes are so darned TOXIC!  Commercial pastes contain too many carcinogens for me to wish to  ingest anymore.  Our poor bodies take so many carcinogenic hits per day that why not do everything we can to reduce the load and reduce our risk of cancer?  Who wants that?  Having watched a husband and my mother die from cancer, I can tell you that no one wants to go that way.  We take many hits per day from body lotions, shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, you name it.  Almost everything we put on our bodies from commercial producers is carcinogenic.  Makes you feel great, huh?  Well, change your buying habits.  Yes, organic products are more expensive and even those you have to watch for lethal ingredients.  It is worth educating yourself to avoid certain ingredients (like phalates, parabens, and sodium laureth sulfate) and decrease your cancer risk.  What is more expensive?  Body products now, or cancer treatments later?  Believe me, I struggle with this issue too and I am not entirely “clean” – but I’m trying.

I am also back into making my ART!  I love it.  I live to make my creations.  I can honestly say that my studio time is what keeps me sane and is the only time I can disengage from nagging concerns like taxes and mortality.

Red Winged Song

I finished this piece a few weeks ago.  It represents my winter hopes for spring.  The red winged blackbirds return to central Idaho right around Valentine’s Day – they were right on time this year!  In this piece, you can see the spring sun emerging from the gray skies of winter.  Song waves are issuing from the crow’s mouth and culminating in a brass screen of beaded and spangled notes.  I cannot tell you how much fun this piece was to create and how much I love it.  My good friend Darcy bought it immediately but I will put it on my art website anyway as part of my gallery.  I’m hard at work on another piece right now…  “Fire in the Belly of Winter”.  Wait til you see!

All for now, my friends.  Have a wonderful day!  Though I am no longer a church person (I would attend a Unitarian church if my community had one), I keep a Sunday Sabbath of my own.  Usually outside in deep appreciation of my woodland environment.  Today, it’s skate skiing with doggie Ethyl!

Ethyl looks in the Kitchen Window