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[moltencreativity]

Thanks!! I am so excited about this that I've spent more than half my lunch spinning instead of eating. -_-U

I also have to share this thing I did. I came up with a little hack for managing my pre-draft wool fiber and I am..... I'm just shocked. Cuz I've never seen anything like this.

I had to pre-draft the already pre-drafted fluff because I'm spinning so fine, and it was getting really unmanageable because pulling it out of its already pre-drafted state was just causing it to puff and fluff all over.

So I made a little two layer burrito roll of my re-drafted fiber and just some paper towels. It's working out really well.

I made a thing! I went to a Yarn and fiber show last weekend and it was fantastic. Among other things, I found these little bone thread winder disks/stars and thought they would make great whorls for lace weight drop spindles!

And I was right!!!

I just used a dowel rod from the craft store for the shaft and a pocket knife to carve the bottom down enough to pop the bone disk on. the top is just a knob and I half hitch the thread around the top.

I am very happy with the spin on it. I had some plain white fluff from Webs and just started spinning it up. Still varying more than I'd like on width, but it's quite thin! Once I'm happy with the amount, I'll ply it and I'd like to make a super airy shawl. Something like this maybe?

(Photo from pattern: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/evelyne )

I'd only need about 230 yards for this pattern.

.....Crap. I need to make a Niddy Noddy now too.

[moltencreativity]

I made a thing! I went to a Yarn and fiber show last weekend and it was fantastic. Among other things, I found these little bone thread winder disks/stars and thought they would make great whorls for lace weight drop spindles!

And I was right!!!

I just used a dowel rod from the craft store for the shaft and a pocket knife to carve the bottom down enough to pop the bone disk on. the top is just a knob and I half hitch the thread around the top.

I am very happy with the spin on it. I had some plain white fluff from Webs and just started spinning it up. Still varying more than I'd like on width, but it's quite thin! Once I'm happy with the amount, I'll ply it and I'd like to make a super airy shawl. Something like this maybe?

(Photo from pattern: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/evelyne )

I'd only need about 230 yards for this pattern.

.....Crap. I need to make a Niddy Noddy now too.

[moltencreativity]

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

[moltencreativity]

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

[moltencreativity]

Current spin in progress! Some gorgeous orange, gold, red, and brown variegated merino top

[moltencreativity]

I hate when bitches start a project, get halfway through, and then don't touch it for days (or months)

It's me, I'm bitches.

[moltencreativity]

btw I’ve found these stretches from the WAK blog very helpful when knitting a lot:

Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!

especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it’s really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)

[moltencreativity]

[moltencreativity]

"It took me TWO years to finish this sketch book!" Well that's cuz you're not fuckin sketching. Those are fully painted pieces dawg that's a renderedbook. I've gone through four sketchbooks in my off time this year alone I just draw stupid faces and shit for fun. pussy up like the rest of us and start drawing stick figures with guns

[moltencreativity]

[moltencreativity]

Atlantis dyed by Created by ElsieB. 4oz Targhee. 275 yards of 3 ply spun as a 2:4:8 fractal, with a mini skein of 2ply from leftover scraps.

It is supremely squishy!

[moltencreativity]

Dungeon Meshi - Will Marcille's Recipe Actually Make Soap?

Howdy! I'm basti. I'm a soap maker. I never get to talk about the nitty gritty of making soap, so I'm taking this opportunity while I have it.

We're gonna make Marcille's kelpie soap today.

So let's first take a look at her recipe: -Kelpie Fat - 300 ml -Olive Oil - 300 ml -Plant & Wood Ash - 150 mg -Water - 150 ml

Ignoring the obvious that kelpie fat is not real and we would have to substitute another fat...

This would...

Not make soap.

Okay, okay. Let's get the major flaw out of the way:

150 mg of Plant and wood ash appears to be an error. 150 milligrams is only 0.15 grams or 0.005 ounces.

This small amount of lye would do… nothing. At best, some of the fatty particles would saponify but you’d mostly have a puddle of oil and water.

So let’s assume this was meant to be 150 grams and return to our original question:

Will Marcille's recipe actually make soap?

Well, yes. But actually, no.

This recipe will, chemically speaking, make soap. Will it be soap you want to use? Probably not.

My skin after using Marcille's kelpie soap 🤍

We'll get into that in a moment.

Let's talk briefly about lye.

In modern soapmaking, soapmakers use two different types of lye depending on what product they're making. Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) is used to make bar soaps and Potassium Hydroxide (KOH) is used to make liquid soap.

Back in the day, wood ash was used to make soap. The lye derived from wood ash consisted of mostly Potassium Carbonate with a little Sodium Carbonate. A higher percentage of Potassium Carbonate tends to make a more paste-like soap and not firm bar soap.

The plants used to make ash lye make a huge difference. Coastal and marine plants often produced alkalis with a higher percentage of Sodium Carbonate, which made harder soap. Additionally, salt was often added to make soap even harder. This is why places like Castile, Marseille, Aleppo, and Palestine became known for their soapmaking. The Mediterranean gave the people living there easy access to sea salt, sea water, and marine plants. (And also abundant olive oil)

The fourth floor of the dungeon is a water floor, so it's possible Marcille used marine plants and salt water to make her soap. Therefore, she would be able to make a proper bar soap.

The real issue comes in when we look at the numbers. Marcille's soap is lye heavy.

And majorly so.

Using Lard as our stand-in for Kelpie Oil and Sodium Hydroxide as a stand-in for plant ash, replicating the numbers of Marcille's soap in a modern soap calculator creates a terrifying picture to anyone who has made soap before.

If you look in the top left, there's a section titled 'Super Fat'.

-81% Super Fat is... certainly a number. In layman's terms, you would need 81% MORE oil (1090g instead of 600g) to make this recipe safe.

Lye heavy soaps can majorly wreck your skin and I certainly wouldn't use it on your hair like Senshi does.

(Note: I wouldn’t recommend lye soap for hair at all, but others swear by it. Do research before trying and stop if things feel wrong.)

Okay, so let's throw Marcille a bone and fix her recipe.

First, if we want the rest of the numbers exactly the same (water, oil), we’ll set the Superfat to 0%

Giving us a recipe of: -Lard - 300g -Olive Oil - 300g -Lye - 83g -Water - 150g

Now, most modern homemade soapmakers use a 1-8% Super Fat, which means there's excess oil in the soap. I use 5% in most recipes I make. This excess oil helps soap feel nicer on the skin and helps guarantee the soap won't be lye heavy.

I'm going to add a small (2%) Super Fat to this recipe. Notice how the lye and water numbers go down slightly.

Looks good to me, so let's make some soap.

First, I measure out my distilled water in a heat and lye safe container.

Next, I measure out my Sodium Hydroxide. Yeah. It's marketed as drain cleaner, but it makes great lye for soaping. It has to be labeled as 100% lye and/or sodium hydroxide and have no additional ingredients.

After measuring out the lye, I add it to the water. I will set the water and lye mixture aside for a while, because it creates a chemical reaction that makes it SUPER hot. Please research lye safety thoroughly if you ever plan to make soap. This post is not a tutorial.

Now, let's get my oils.

I'm using Olive Oil. It doesn't need to be extra virgin, it just has to be 100% Olive Oil and not a blend. Olive Oil has gotten really expensive lately, so other oils like Rice Bran Oil or High Oleic Sunflower Oil could be used instead. All substitutions need to be run through a soap calculator.

I also have Lard. I bought this from a local butcher shop. I'm admittedly turned off by the idea of making soap from animal fat... but sometimes one must science.

Other than the items in Marcille's recipe, I'll also be adding Sodium Lactate, a little fragrance oil, and some green colorant. Sodium Lactate hardens soap faster. Fragrance and color just makes it smell and look nice :o). I'll be donating the bars made from this batch to a local charity after they're finished curing. Everyone deserves good smelling soap!

My oils are melted and my lye water is back to room temperature, so I'll mix up my soap batter. Marcille uses a spoon to stir her soap to trace but I use an emulsion blender because I value my sanity and my wrists 💀 Olive Oil and Lard are both notorious for taking FOREVER to come to trace when stirring by hand.

The oils and lye water are mixed together to create an emulsion. This emulsified soap batter is what will eventually harden to become soap. Yay, chemistry.

From here, I split the batter in half and added fragrance and color. This is, again, just for fun and not part of the main recipe. Notice how absolutely gross these colors look? Because both olive oil and lard are dark yellow in hue, the batter looks a bit nasty. Green is often a victim of this. It'll look much better later lol

After pouring, the soap will hang out in my soaping room and solidify overnight.

The next day, the soap has solidified and is no longer that nasty yellow color. Lard makes white soap. I cut the loaf into four bars which I further cut in half to make eight bars.

I cured these soaps in a cool, dark place for a minimum of four weeks before I tested them.

The cured soaps are notably VERY hard. When these two bars are clacked together, they sound like dominoes lol.

Physically, these bars developed extreme soda ash (the white-tinged film) on both the tops and the face of the bars. This is harmless, but it definitely makes the bars a little less pretty. It'll wash off when used! It's a pitfall of soapmaking in a very humid climate :D

I've been using my tester bar at the sink for a few weeks now. The bubbles produced are rather small and the lather is creamy. This recipe is not drying at all, which is great.

It's a good 'starting point' recipe, but definitely not one I would make again. When I use up the rest of the lard I bought, I'll be using a more balanced recipe.

Still, not bad for a soap made in a dungeon!

Thank you for joining me on this extremely self indulgent post.

Want more dungeon soap? Check out my website and my new Dungeon Meshi-inspired soaps.

Want to sponsor one of these donated soaps? Donate a bar here!

[moltencreativity]

Comfy Skull

Alexander McQueen Skull Knit Jumper

[moltencreativity]

time to post the prompt I tormented @bloggerspam with on discord >:) Danny and Jason died at the same time and parts of their core jumped into each others cores, making them literal soulmates. They feel a burning tug deep in their chest ever since they got brought back to life, a desperate yearning, there’s some part of themselves that is missing. They feel hollow. After a bad coming out (as Phantom, not out of the closet) with his parents, Danny decides to follow that tugging sensation... all the way to Gotham City, where a certain crime lord also is yearning for something he can’t quite place. During the time Danny arrives in Gotham, the sense of yearning and hollowness strengthens in Jason. He doesn't know what's going on. His family is worried for him. Jason's new bedtime routine is gently rubbing a spot just to the right of his heart, silent tears running down his cheeks as he yearns for the touch of a person he's never met. It's confusing and frightening. All he knows is that the pain in his chest is now even stronger. The hollowness he's felt ever since he crawled his way out of his grave spreading past a sense of yearning and progressing to an agonizing longing. Jason tested himself for every type of Ivy's pollen and it came back negative. He doesn't know what's going on and he's scared. For Danny it's similar. The tug of his core is even stronger in Crime Alley. Every night he weeps holding his hands around his core feeling it softly cry for its other half. He knows they're nearby but he doesn't know how to pinpoint their location. All he can do is wait and hope that they stumble across each other. Danny decides to take action. He steals some of Vlad’s money and opens a coffee shop in the Narrows. Danny can feel the tugging so much stronger here. He hopes he can find what his core is looking for. Danny first meets this one extremely tired looking teen in a nice suit who always looks dead on his feet and asks for an ungodly amount of caffeine. Danny happily gives him the borderline toxic order. The man keeps on coming to his shop and they start to get to know each other. Unknowingly, Danny has become fast friends with a billionaire CEO. After multiple agonizing weeks, Tim brings his brother to the new shop that opened in his territory that sells incredibly good coffee for a concerningly low price... Danny is just working at his cafe on another average day when the door opens and in walks Tim and Him. A tall and built man with a white streak in his hair who's staring at Danny like he hung the stars in the sky.

The second their eyes locked,,, they felt whole. For the first time in years the yearning pain is no longer.

After meeting they realized a problem. It's genuinely agonizing being apart for more than a half an hour as their cores are finally healing from tearing themselves apart in their desperation to find their other half. This streamlines getting to know each other with the forced closeness. Tim helps Jason and takes over his patrols in Crime Alley as their cores mend. They found out that physical touch helps speed up the process greatly which meant the optimal way to speed up their cores healing was to sleep in the same bed.

During this time, both Danny and Jason's ghostly instincts are in overdrive. Danny and Jason both unknowingly are courting each other in a ghostly fashion and are unknowingly accepting the courting from each other, leading to an unintentional ghostly marriage (They aren't too freaked out about it when they figure out they're technically married according to Infinite Realms customs. It completes the mending of their cores after all.)

[moltencreativity]

A shooting star streaking across the sky

[moltencreativity]

Me: Oh, I'll just get some string and tie the styluses to their doodle boards.

Also Me: Spends over half an hour researching and testing different knots to find the best hold for this cord and application.

(Spoiler, it's a bowline knot)

[moltencreativity]

So my sister wants to start sewing more, because

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this