A Book about Salt, and a Field Trip to Friendship

I read a very interesting book about salt the other day.

Salt: A World History covers the history of human production, transportation, and consumption of salt, from the first evidence of its processing and usage to today. Because salt is ubiquitous today, in most places easily accessed and cheap (you can get free packets of iodized salt in fast food restaurants--the Ancient Chinese would have flipped!!!), it completely blew my mind to learn that once upon a time the ability to access and process salt defined where you could live, and that the production and transportation of salt once upon a time made and broke the fortunes of nations. It's an unnoticed component of a lot of world history and human geography, and makes a lot about the world make more sense.

Like words! Ancient Roman soldiers at one point were paid in salt (which had an AWESOME resale value!), so that's where the world "salary" comes from, and also the phrase, "worth his salt." They salted their raw veggies before they ate them, so that's where the word "salad" comes from. 

That chapter right there is where the book hooked me. Y'all know how I feel about etymology!

And then I got completely invested in how ancient sources of salt were discovered and processed, and then improved with technology, and then, like as not, taken over by the government. 

Like the Salt March. Here's me showing off my ignorance, but how did I watch that entire Ben Kingsley movie as a little kid and yet still I knew nothing about the Salt March? Helped my older kid with her entire AP European History class (and she got a terrific score on the exam!), and still I knew nothing about the Salt March! In Colonial India, the government tried to monopolize salt production (thereby raising the prices, taxing it, shutting the former owners and laborers of saltworks out of their businesses, etc.) and forbade citizens from collecting their own salt, even though it was readily available, historically an activity that everyone did, formed these big crusts on the beaches and was LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. Gandhi's peaceful protest started by simply walking to the beach and... picking up salt.

In contrast with how they messed up India by putting artificial restrictions on salt production and trade, England messed itself up by having basically no restrictions on its own salt production for centuries, during which salt was a super lucrative commodity. In England, "wich" was a suffix given to places where there was production activity or trade, so many of the places in England with names like Norwich and Greenwich had saltworks. Whole families would be out there constantly pulling up brine from springs and boiling it in pans, never taking a break or letting the kids go to school because that would eat up their profits. They burned coal to evaporate the water, so the atmosphere was toxic, and much of the salt that was produced was put on ships to West Africa... where it was traded for captured Africans, who were then taken in those ships to North America and sold into slavery.

England just really, really sucked for a while, didn't it?

In the late 1800s, mysterious sinkholes begin to develop all over Cheshire County, where you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who'd dug a well and was pumping up brine and evaporating it. The sinkholes could emerge anywhere, and destroyed streets and houses and fields. There was no way of predicting where they'd show up next. But they did eventually figure out what was causing them. Apparently the entire county was underlaid with rock salt, and the brine that everyone was pumping up was groundwater that had dissolved some of this salt. When they pumped up the brine, more groundwater replaced it, and then that groundwater dissolved more salt until it, too, reached maximum solubility. Then it, too, got pumped out, until there were just vast open spaces underground that couldn't support the earth above it and collapsed.

And that's just one example of people messing up the land. Not specifically salt focused, but salt adjacent, is how Israel built a canal to siphon water from the Sea of Galilee, which flows into the Jordan, which Jordan also siphons water from, so that so little water finally makes it to the Dead Sea that it's growing ever saltier and ever smaller and if you ever want to see it while it still exists you should probably go ASAP.

Other interesting facts: iodized salt is politicized in many places (side note: I wonder if I should consume more iodine?), the bodies of LITERAL CELTS were found in Austria in a prehistoric salt mine, adding to my list of places that I really must visit, and former salt mines make excellent bunkers for precious artifacts and nuclear waste, because the openings that you make into the vault will recrystalize and seal the vault up as if it had originally grown that way.

After I finished this book, I OBVIOUSLY Googled "saltworks near me." You never know--maybe there's a cool old salt mine somewhere near! Maybe it has a slide!!!

I didn't find any salt mines with slides within driving distance, alas, but I DID find that a nearby creek is aptly named, and that in the 1800s after the state was snookered away from the Miami, settlers pumped brine out of springs and evaporated it to create salt. Some more digging informed me that sometimes they'd go door to door and sell the salt by the cupful to individual households. 

So, I really REALLY wanted to see if I could find any evidence of these historic saltworks, but the problem is that the entire Salt Creek Valley was actually dammed in the 1960s to make the lake that we now use for drinking water. Salt Creek feeds into it from the north and flows out of it from the south, but there's no way that I can figure to find out if any of these old brine wells are still above water. 

Nevertheless, there's definitely some old stuff over there on the north side of the lake, stuff that I've never wandered around to look at before, so on an overcast late afternoon recently, my partner and older kid agreed to come check it out with me.

This is supposed to be a marsh, but I guess only seasonally? The Corps of Engineers manages it, but I couldn't figure out if it was always a marsh, or only since the valley was flooded:

This is the cemetery of Friendship, Indiana, which was created by a guy who figured that his saltworks were so successful that there should be a whole town around it. I don't think anyone ever actually lived in Friendship, but the stones of this cemetery are all from the 1800s, when the town was trying to be established:

It's interesting to contrast it with the Mt. Ebal Cemetery, which seems to have been most active a little later and is still well-kept and visible. This cemetery is just a little clearing in the woods, accessed by dirt road, overgrown and old and fascinating:

It's limestone country, of course, so many of the stones are limestone, easy to identify by how they've weathered:

The spiky plant growing around almost all of the stones is yucca, which is not native to Indiana but was super popular to plant around homesteads and in cemeteries. I absolutely covet a yucca of my own:

Because this cemetery is mostly undisturbed, I guess, I also thought it was interesting to be able to see clear differences in the ground over where I assume the burials are. The ground is slightly indented, and there's a different groundcover just in those spots. It reminded me of that Irish henge that was discovered because of very slight differences in the composition of the soil from the ancient rotted posts:

And as always, there are examples of beautiful stone carving:

There's pretty much always someone who's grubbing around looking for frogs and cicada shells instead of gazing at historic stone carvings, as well. Tell me you spent the day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on without telling me that you spent your day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on, sigh:

When we got home I put the nail brush in her hands and told her not to come out of the bathroom until she was sanitary...

This one has a creepy poem!

And this one I didn't see until I tripped on it:

Afterwards, we drove around tiny backroads for a while (I think I found the iron bridge referenced in that article on the history of the local saltworks!), stopping to look at the pretty things--

My well-traveled traveling companions report that the zoo they visited in Lima, Peru, had an exhibit of white-tailed deer.

--then we hiked down a gated road to see where Google Maps had geotagged the Friendship Church.

Found it! Or, rather, we found what's left of it...

So, no brine springs or saltworks, but a great old cemetery, hundreds of thousands of black-eyed susans, some zoo-worthy white-tailed deer, and a very interesting and decrepit staircase. 

And a VERY interesting book about salt!

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

WIP: I Finished Piecing the Road Map Quilt Top

 Matt refers to this as "mission creep."

My original objective was to make my baby niece, who likes cars, a simple little roll-up road play mat. 

Then I got left at home alone for too long, started a five-hour podcast about a school group that got stranded on Mount Hood, and things... got out of hand.

This is the Fishing Net quilt pattern. I'm not proud of my visual design sense (although I do think it's improved over the years), so thank goodness that one of my kids has a GREAT visual design sense and the patience to hold my hands and reassure me as I continually disturb her to ask things like, "Would it be weird to have some black roads and some grey roads?" or (holding up several coloring pages of this quilt pattern that I have filled in with crayon) "Do you like the way I colored it here better, or do you like this one better? Or this one?"

She liked the alternating grey and black roads better, so that's the way I started planning it!

I DID iron all my fabric, but animals kept lying down on my layout and then the robot vacuum got into it, as well.

Syd was also required to look at every piece of flannel that I own and help me come up with believable prints and colors for a road map, then lay them where they ought to go:

Here we have a park, two neighborhoods, two construction zones for the epic mini Tonka trucks I bought her, and a ginger cat without a thought in his head:

Now I've added a couple of rivers, a couple of parking lots, a dino dig site, and an ocean:

And now I've got everything!

I was actually just finishing cutting out the pieces for this quilt as Matt and Will pulled into the driveway, home from Peru. Neither of them are big communicators, especially when they travel, so imagine my surprise when instead of coming straight in for hugs and celebrations and snuggling on the couch, Matt backed away from me when I met them on the driveway and asked for a COVID test.

And then imagine how I felt when both their COVID tests were so chock-full of COVID that they pulled up that dreaded second line right away. By the time the fifteen-minute timer actually went off, I'd already partitioned off part of the house, fetched the air mattress and extra sheets and towels, and was busy sobbing quietly to myself in the bathroom.

Friends, let's follow Grandma's on the Roof rules with your loved ones: if you're traveling and wearing your mask like a baller but have to take a six-hour bus ride with some maskless stranger wetly coughing behind you the entire time, maybe just, you know, go ahead and tell your loved one at home that. And then a couple of days later, when you're finally heading home and you arrive at the Chicago airport and you've got just a four-hour drive ahead of you and you start thinking, "Huh, I'm starting to feel kind of crappy," maybe just shoot your loved one a quick text along the lines of "Hey, feel like shit, COVID tests on the driveway before hugs!" That way your loved one, who's barely seen two sentences in a row out of you for the past two weeks and misses you a LOT, can, you know, modulate her excitement with some fair warning.

I mean, hypothetically.

ANYWAY, you know what spending the entire next day after a huge disappointment disassociating from your sadness does for you?

It makes you SUPER PRODUCTIVE!

The instructions had me piece big triangles as if they were log cabin quilt blocks. It was a little tricky to wrap my head around, but I only had to pull out the seam ripper once, so yay for me!

So then the quilt actually comes together as four big triangles, with that one road that runs corner to corner pieced last as a sash:

Especially considering that I wasn't really able to picture how it would look pieced, even with all the pieces laid out (darn my visual-spatial thinking deficits!), I am SO happy with how this road map quilt top turned out!

My next visual-spatial reasoning challenge is to add just enough applique road map embellishments to give a hint as to the purpose of each different part of the map, without having the embellishments look tacky or ugly or overwhelming or too restrictive.

Decoupaged Pressed Flower Greeting Cards, and a Real-World Practicum in First Aid

My Girl Scout troop's Folk Arts IPP meeting is a wrap!

Alas, for I did not meet my goal. At one point I asked the troop to start cleaning up after soapmaking while I went to see if the beeswax and coconut oil were completely melted for candlemaking. I swear I was gone for approximately fifteen seconds, but I came back into the room to the following:

KID #1: "[Name Redacted] hurt herself."
KID #2: "I see blood."
NAME REDACTED (bleeding profusely from the head and dripping blood onto the floor) begins to fall over.
KID #3: "I don't feel well."

And scene!

I also can't say that my first aid administration went perfectly, because how do you situate a kid when her head is bleeding so needs to be elevated, but she's also losing consciousness so her feet need to be elevated? Do you just prop her up like a little pretzel with her butt on the ground and her head and feet jacked up? Keeping her conscious felt pretty important so my co-leader and I put her feet up high and her head just on a pillow, but I'll clearly have to ask more scenario-specific questions at my next re-certification.

 But the good news is that the injury was actually just a side quest, and nobody actually got injured during either the cold-process soapmaking (during which the kids wore long sleeves, gloves, and face shields) or the poured container candlemaking (which, tbh, was pretty chaotic, so I think we just got lucky).

We did get a chance to press flowers in the microwave, but our first aid practicum used the time previously intended for decoupaging our flowers, so we'll save that for another meeting.

But until then, I was left with SO MANY flowers that I'd already pressed to give the kids plenty to work with, and since I'm uninterested in figuring out how to safely keep pressed flowers in my already overburdened craft supplies storage, later that week I snookered my own kids into helping me decoupage them, in the process further refining my almost perfect technique.

And now that technique IS perfect!!!

My old method for making pressed flower bookmarks came from this tutorial, which came from a magazine article, which came from a vintage Boy Scout manual. All of them called for decoupaging the flowers first onto waxed paper, and then using the method of your choice to adhere the waxed paper to a more structured paper.

My incredible innovation is just to... ditch the waxed paper. Decoupage the pressed flowers directly to the material of your choice, saving yourself a step and, I think, improving the overall look of the finished product. I also changed out the glue to one that dries stiffer, which I think makes the work sturdier and requires fewer top coats.

To test out this innovation, the kids and I made SOOOO many greeting cards! Will has a ton of thank-you notes to write and we're out of nice cards, so this was a good chance to replenish our stash.

To decoupage your own pressed flower greeting cards, you will need the following:

• pressed flowers. I do have a new and improved microwave pressed flowers tutorial coming up, but until then, my original microwave pressed flowers tutorial does work well. 
• backing material of your choice, ideally one with structure. I used this hemp watercolor paper and this Strathmore watercolor paper, and of the two I preferred the hemp paper. I really liked how the off-white color and visible fibers add to the overall look.
• single ply of the cheapest disposable tissues you can find. If your tissues are multi-ply, separate them into the individual sheets. 
• clear school glue. I used Elmer's clear school glue leftover from Syd's slime-making phase. 
• paintbrush. A stiff paintbrush works better than a soft one. 
• matte medium. I use this Liquitex matte medium. It's weirdly expensive, so I think you could play around with cheaper sealants, too.

1. Cut and fold paper to make greeting cards.

Will and I did this with a guillotine paper cutter, but you could do it by hand. If you've got 8"x12" pages, you can make two 4"x6" cards from each page. We made some that hinged at the top, and some that hinged on the side, mostly because we weren't paying attention to what we were doing.

2. Arrange pressed flowers on the greeting card front.

Queen Anne's Lace

This part is really fun! It was definitely assisted by the huge stash of flowers I'd already collected and pressed. Seriously, I took trips to the local parks to take little snippy-snips of the wildflowers growing there, waded around vacant lots next to strip malls, and sacrificed many of the lovelies from my garden.

Rose of Sharon

But having such a large selection of flowers to choose from made that completely worth it!

3. Use clear school glue to paint a single ply of tissue paper over the entire card front.

Gently set the tissue over the card front. Use your non-dominant hand to gently hold the tissue and the flowers in place, and with your dominant hand dip the paintbrush into clear school glue, allowing a generous coat of glue to remain on the brush.

Start with the center of one flower, and gently paint glue onto the tissue paper covering it. The glue will seep through the tissue paper onto the flower, rendering the tissue paper translucent:

Use the stiffness of the brush to coax the tissue paper into all the little nooks and creases of the pressed flower, aiming for maximum adhesion of the tissue paper to the flower and card. 

Rose of Sharon and fern

The tissue paper will make lots of wrinkles when you glue it to the card, which is fine. What you don't want are air pockets between the flowers and tissue paper, because those will stay visible in the final product.

Queen Anne's Lace

Work your way across the surface until the entire card front is covered. Leave the excess tissue paper in place until the whole thing is dry, which should take about a day.

Rose of Sharon

4. Trim the tissue paper and add embellishments.

Trim the excess tissue paper from the greeting card fronts. If possible, it is highly desirable to have the assistance of both a teenager and a cat for this step:

You can do anything that you want regarding embellishments, but I entertained myself by finding fun phrases and conversations from this vintage Spanish textbook that I found in a Little Free Library once upon a time:

Although some is random--

--some, I think, is quite apt!

Dab a little more clear school glue onto the back of each embellishment to place it, then use the pad of your finger to thickly coat the entire greeting card front in matte medium.

Chamomile

Let dry. 

You can add additional coats of matte medium, which I did for a couple of cards but ultimately decided that it's unnecessary, especially because matte medium is so expensive!

And here are some of our finished cards!

It's that Queen Anne's Lace from Step 2!

Chamomile from Step 4

Fern

Rose of Sharon from Step 2

I still need to make matching envelopes for these cards, but then they'll be ready for thank-yous!

The Goal is No Girls Injured: Prepping To Lead the Girl Scout Retired Girl Scout Folk Arts IP

 

I DO know what I'm doing. I didn't volunteer willy-nilly to teach seven teenagers how to pour lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups without a firm base of knowledge.

But dang, there's nothing to make you question your skill set when doing a risky project than volunteering to do that project with seven teenagers! 

There are a couple of reasons why I'm engaging in SO much prep work before I lead this Girl Scout retired Folk Arts IPP that my Girl Scout troop planned. 

1) Left to my own manic devices, I'm not as safe as I ought to be. I run Dremel cut-off wheels centimeters from my radial artery, remove the tips of fingers with craft knives, and I definitely pour both lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups bare-armed, bare-legged, and barefoot. 

2) Left to my own manic devices, I also veer from the script more often than not and muscle through several iterations of a project to get the desired result. Candle that I poured tunneling? Eh, melt it down, pour it again, and try a different wick. Soap didn't cure properly? Shovel it all in the crockpot to hot-process. 

That's fine for me, because I've got nothing but time and an endless capacity for frustration. But I want these teenagers' projects to work, and work well. They are going to learn the GLORIES of soapmaking, by God, and the ECSTASY that is a properly-wicked, burning-just-to-the-edges-but-no-farther tea cup candle!

So that was my weekend project!

First up, I had Matt (who tested negative for COVID after six days in isolation, so I set him free, which I *think* is okay to do? I guess I'll know when I take my own COVID rapid test in a couple of days!) make his very first batch of cold-process soap, with no information at his disposal other than my verbal instruction. This was great, because I could make note of the tricky parts of the process and the places where I'll need to give specific warnings to the kids (for Pete's sake, don't stick your head OVER the solution of lye and water!!! Why would you even do that?!? It's literally steaming, and I just told you that it's giving off toxic fumes!!!), and I could time about how long the recipe takes to trace. Twenty-five minutes, which is a bit of a yikes, but the kids are all great chit-chatters so I think it will be okay.

Making this batch ahead of time was also good because I can unmold it in front of the kids and show them how to tell if it's cured enough to cut, since they'll be doing that part at home.

On to the flower pressing! I toyed with the idea of having the kids make mini flower presses to carry in their backpacks, something that I, personally, would love the snot out of, but I dunno. Kids' attention spans aren't real long these days, so I kind of doubt that they'd all take to the six-week wait for their pressed flowers. Instead, I hit up the ReStore, found 12 unglazed ceramic tiles for three dollars, and decided to teach the kids how to press flowers in the microwave and send each of them (except for my own kids, who can share) away with their own set of tiles for microwave flower pressing at home. Even a modern teenager has enough attention span to spend one minute microwaving flowers!

And then we can make pretty things with them!

My kids and I loved making these pressed flower bookmarks, and I think my Girl Scout troop would, as well, but a multi-day, multi-step process isn't going to work. These are teenagers--they're going to dump whatever they come home from their Girl Scout troop meeting with on the floor of their bedrooms and not look at it again for three months. If I'm super lucky, they'll be willing to do maybe one more step after that, but definitely not fourteen more steps, some of which require yet more wait time.

So I figured out how to simplify the process!

The grated cheese is not related to the microwave flower pressing...

I'll have to write new tutorials for both the flower pressing and the pressed flower bookmarks, because I feel like I streamlined the process for each of them by quite a bit:

And now I'll have some samples to show the kids!

They will still need to seal them 24 hours after our meeting, but I think I can get away with pouring a tablespoon or so of matte medium into wee zip baggies for them to take home. That should keep the matte medium fresh enough to still be painted on when the bookmarks are discovered on bedroom floors in three months.

The poured candles in teacups was the trickiest project to figure out for kids. Kids will be bringing teacups in different sizes and shapes, and I want them to be able to pour candles that will burn correctly for whatever container they bring.

I got a tip from a candlemaking book once upon a time that the best way to test wick sizing in a non-standard container is to pour the candle into the container without a wick, let it cure, then drill a hole to insert a wick. If the size doesn't work, pull the wick out, re-drill the hole if necessary, and try another wick!

I'm glad that I tried this, because this wick that I tested is a hard nope:

I tried a larger wick size, got another hard nope, and finally decided that I'd never be able to burn a candle the width of a teacup with straight beeswax, so I poured a new candle with a beeswax and coconut oil combination:

Better, but ultimately still a nope! Grr!

Syd had the idea to just multi-wick it, which... success!

The above photo is from about half an hour into the candle's first burn. At an hour's burn time it had reached its maximum melt and made it almost completely to the edges of the cup all around. Normally, you'd want a container candle to burn all the way to the edge, but with the way that a teacup narrows to the bottom, I think this wick size and placement is perfect. I don't want the candle to burn too hot towards the bottom.

Add in a lecture on the biology of honeybees and the chemistry of triglyceride hydrolysis, and that's this Folk Arts meeting all prepped!

Now let's just hope that COVID rapid test comes out the way I want...