The love of the craft

As a result of my international shipping scam blog posts, I made the wonderful long-distance acquaintance of Rosa Ziv from Carmel Gifts in Israel, who offered me the incredible sequence of contacts she'd had with a shipping scammer for publication in my blog post International Shipping Scams: Part 3.  Thanks to Rosa's help, thousands of people have read about exactly how these scams work, and many have been saved substantial time, trouble, and money in the process. 

The spike in the number of visits to my blog immediately after
publishing the post on which Rosa and I collaborated.

And, as a result of our having collaborated on the shipping scams post, Rosa invited me to write a guest post for her store blog!  I was delighted to be asked, and greatly enjoyed doing it.  (Amazing how the Internet can build relationships between people who would never meet or cross paths in any other way!)

As I considered various ideas about what to write, I finally settled on talking about – and correcting – a few of the common misconceptions people have about handcrafted soap.  I focused, for example, on the issue of soaps vs. synthetic detergents because in my experience, many people don't fully understand that there is a difference, or what that difference is. 

I talked about the environmental and skin care ramifications of using cleaning products that are manufactured with chemical vs. natural ingredients.

I also addressed the issue of whether handmade soap made "has lye in it," which is another area of misunderstanding for people who are unfamiliar with the basic chemisty that converts oils and fats into soap.

Given this, you might wonder why Rosa chose to title it Handmade Soap Contains Love. 

One simple reason.  As a crafter myself, as one who has always delighted in the uniqueness of anything that's handcrafted, and as one who's had the privilege of meeting, getting to know, and working with crafters in many different media, I know that what draws and binds us to each other is our love of what we do. 

As I put it in the post for Rosa's blog, "whenever you buy anything that’s handcrafted, you’re also getting – at absolutely no extra charge – all the love and care that went into making it.  You can’t put a price tag on that."

Urban wildlife

Pic of the day. Sixteen years living in Edgewater, and maybe three times -- always at night of course -- I've seen an opossum on our back porch deck. They're very unnerving, as they look at first like enormous rats, and the Lord gave them the ugliest tail of any animal on earth. They're relatively benign creatures, though, so I've always just let them be.  But this is a first.

 

This one was apparently feeling a little too tired to go home last night -- maybe a few too many cocktails? -- and decided to crawl up into one of our potted purple fountain grass plants to sleep it off.  Been there all day, too, completely unfazed by the workmen who are going up and down our back stairs all the time as they rebuild our chinney. Kind of cute, in a way, but find somewhere else to crash tomorrow, buddy!

There's another part to this, however, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  Chicago's urban environment is overrun with animals that have no natural predators.  Squirrels.  (Rats with bushy tails.)  Pigeons.  (Rats that fly.)  Opossums that spend the day sleeping in people's potted plants.

But on the other hdand, if natural predators were around, that would be a huge issue.  Foxes in the park?  Coyotes in my back yard?  No way.  We've got peregrine falcons for pigeon control downtown, but that's clearly ineffective.

So we have a quandary.  We have animal pests we need to control but we don't have an acceptable natural solution.  Suggestsions anyone?

Welcome to my blog! It's named Life and Soap because the two intersect in many ways. A perfect example is this article, which I e-mailed to everyone on my Edgewater Soaps list and posted to my facebook page. http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/triclosan-and-dolphins
It's about triclosan, which is the primary ingredient in practically every commercial antibacterial soap product. It's in nearly 1,000 consumer products, according to the Skin Deep database. Tons of it are washed down the drain every day, and it's now showing up in the ocean food chain.
And what really gets me is that it's totally unnecessary for any normal cleansing need. You don't need to kill germs and bacteria, you just need to wash them off. Plain old soap does that very effectively.
Regrettably, people think they're actually doing something healthy when they use these products, not realizing that they've been sold on a need that doesn't exist . . .