Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Adventures In Natural Homemaking: All-Natural Wood Polish

Hello! Perhaps you're like me, getting ready to host a big Thanksgiving dinner in a couple of days. And perhaps you're also like me, being motivated to do a super-good housecleaning because company's coming. 

We own a number of antique wood furniture pieces, so I was busy polishing them to a nice shine yesterday. I suppose there's people who polish their furniture on a regular basis, but I'm not one of them,so I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. 

Nevertheless, even though it's a task I don't do often, I'd rather use something that doesn't list a bunch of chemicals on a bottle. So I decided to try the following "recipe", which I found on the Internet (don't recall the source):

All-Natural Wood Polish

1/4 cup olive oil(see note below)
1/4 cup vinegar(see note below)
10 drops orange essential oil (see note below)

Add all to spray bottle and shake. Spray on cloth and wipe down furniture. 

Notes: no need for the fancier grade (ie extra virgin) of olive oil here; can use the cheaper versions. I assume that the vinegar is meant to be the plain white kind, so that's what I used. 

It seems to me that essential oils are becoming more readily available, perhaps due to an interest in natural cleaning and natural beauty routines. I got my orange essential oil in an online sale (the company has since gone under, I believe), but I've also seen essential oils sold at Meijer (a regional hypermarket chain if you're reading this from outside the Midwest). Health food stores and food coops are other options.

Since I had a lot of furniture to polish, I doubled the "recipe", then began merrily spraying and wiping away. I actually enjoyed watching the woods come back to life, so to speak, and I enjoyed the fact that I didn't need to use a bunch of laboratory-blended "ingredients" to do so. 

Of course, I had to keep shaking the spray bottle to keep the concoction blended, but that was only a minor issue. Other than that, this was a nice wood polish to use. 

Who knows, it might even get me to polish my furniture more often! 

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Get Carded: A Touch Of Dutch

Hello! Earlier this week I celebrated a friend's birthday by making her a card for the occasion. I wasn't sure what theme the card should have, so I glanced around in my studio for inspiration. 

My eyes lit upon a small pile of ads, torn from a locally-produced vintage community cookbook. This particular cookbook didn't have a date, but I guessed it was from the early-to-mid 1960's. I've lived in this community since 2002, so I noted that the majority of the businesses were either no longer around, or had moved to different locations in the area. 

Unlike me, my friend is a local, and is Dutch-American on both sides of her family. So I decided to go with a bit of a Dutch theme for her card, using one of those vintage ads as a starting point.

And once the card was finished, here's how it turned out:

Materials used:
  • white card stock
  • art paper scrap
  • serendipity paper scrap
  • facsimile of vintage tulip image
  • ad from vintage community cookbook
  • velour thread bow (thread purchased at local retirement community holiday bazaar)
  • "Happy Birthday" stamped in dark red ink
I'd never  heard of "velour thread" before, but the colors and feel of the stuff was nice, and the price was right. Several pretty colors were in the bag I purchased at that holiday bazaar, and someone had written on the bag that velour thread is meant for needlepoint. Learn something new every day!

The velour thread bow obscures the name of the business in the ad somewhat. The business is Zwiep's Seed Store. My friend seemed to like her card, but didn't recall this business ever being around. 

No wonder - I did some research online and came across the 1972 obituary for the seed store owner. The obit mentioned that the deceased had sold the store "12 or 13 years ago". Thus, the cookbook that carried the store's ad dates from no later than 1960. So it's a few years older than what I had supposed.

Always fun to come across vintage community cookbooks - and it's always fun to make birthday cards too!


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Saturday, November 11, 2017

Amish 365

Hello! I'm not sure when my interest in the Amish began, but their settlement in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is well-known. I probably heard about the Amish first in reference to that area. 

Consequently, when we ended up living about an hour east of Lancaster County, I enjoyed many trips there. Pretty countryside, fun shops, roadside stands - and I never tired of seeing Amish horse and buggies traversing the roads in the area.

I mourned moving away from that proximity to Lancaster County when we moved to west-central Indiana, but then learned we were now about an hour east of another Amish settlement, the one near Arthur, Illinois. And so I made more happy visits to get my fix of peaceful countryside, Amish grocery stores, and more encounters with horse and buggy travel. 

(I can still recall seeing one Amish buggy pass another on a quiet road in this region - just like you see a car passing a slower one in front of it. And yes, when I passed both buggies, I saw that the faster buggy was driven by a young guy, while the slower buggy driver was an older woman. So the Amish maybe aren't so different than us in that respect! At least, that was the case on that day. But that remains the only time I've ever seen one Amish buggy pass another.)

Then we moved further north, and we're now about two hours from the largest Amish settlement in these parts, Shipshewana, Indiana. I've been there a few times, but haven't made the trip that often. A four-hour round trip, plus driving around on the back roads and in the towns to check out all the shops of interest makes for a long day. 
 
But I can still get my Amish fix, courtesy of Kevin Williams' Amish365 website. Mr. Williams, who's based in Middletown, Ohio, has visited Amish settlements big and small throughout the US and even parts of Canada. Besides that wide range of travel, Mr. Williams also covers a wide range of Amish information: the good (writing about an Amish weddings), bad (reporting on Amish buggy accidents) or in between (interviewing the young teachers at an Amish school). 

And then there's the recipes. True, Amish food tends to be heavy at times, but after all, these are folks who do far more physical labor than most of us "English" (how the Amish refer to the non-Amish) do. I suppose they burn up a lot of what they eat. 

So instead, I mostly just drool over the many recipes Mr. Williams supplies. For example, today I saw recipes with a Thanksgiving theme: a mock pecan pie, several stuffing variations, scalloped corn, pat-a-pan pie crust, and more. I can vouch for the pie crust recipe, as it's the one I'll be using for my Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. It's very easy and very good! (I first encountered it in the Amish cookbook Cooking From Quilt Country).

Mr. Williams also covers a variety of non-Amish topics, such as his long career as a journalist, activities revolving around his two cute young daughters, and occasional trips down Memory Lane to reminisce about stores, restaurants and other key markers of his childhood that are now gone. (note: he's in his mid-40's, so if you're around his age, or older, as I am, these memories will often be very familiar to you as well). 

You can either read Amish365 via this link, or sign up for email notification of new postings. It's a fun way to keep up with the Amish way of life!