green-living « Karmology Clinic

I hate to throw away scraps of fabric that remain after pattern cutting. Not to mention it’s that time of the year when you have to store away all your winter clothes and protect them from moth (at least when you live in Greece, it’s that time…). I wouldn’t buy any chemical moth repellents, and instead of buying the natural thing, why not do-it-myself, anyway? So I decided to make homemade moth repellent sachets to store with my clothes and yarn this year. I already had a big jar of homegrown lavender and lots of thyme my parents gave me last summer. It was harvested in the wild by them at the island of Kithira.
For filling your little pillows you can use: lavender, thyme, cloves, rosemary, mint, cedar, cassia bark to name just a few. I used about one cup of lavender, one cup of thyme and 3 tablespoons of cloves. You should use “fresh” dried herbs to take the best out of their aroma and lots of clove. Clove is good, insects hate it.
Step by step guide:
1. cut small 4×8 rectangle pieces. (or your choice of size)

2. Place good side on good, sew the three sides together. Use the narrowest stitch of your machine. This way no herb powder can escape from
your pillows.

3. Turn good side out using a chopstick.

4. Take some time to just smell the herbs. (unnecessary step but a delightful one)

5. Fill your pillow at 2/3 with a small teaspoon.

6. Fold the top inside at about 1cm, pushing the herbs backwards.

7. Top stitch twice (for leakage safety) from edge to edge taking care to hold back the herbs. You don’t want herb powder inside your lovely sewing machine, don’t you. If you feel uncomfortable with this, hand stitch the pillows first and then go on with the sewing.

8. Ready.

Variations: You could make other forms, like triangles, circles, little moth-fighting monsters or stay with the form of your fabric stash. Yeah, you could do that if you haven’t spend the last three hours in front of your sewing machine finishing that pajamas set. Oh, and be sure to have lots of herbs stashed, so that you don’t run out of filling, when you’ll start getting all the good ideas…

Recycled Sari Silk Yarn and a small ph lesson

I’ve been lurking around ebay auctions with recycled sari silk yarn waiting for something different to pop up. Once in a while unique color combination skeins may appear and you know it’s time to bid. These auctions always go higher than the usual purple/red skeins but not too much. Don’t get me wrong I like the purple/red/blue/green when looked upon close enough but from a distance it seems like dirty to me. It looks nice on some projects I’ve seen but not at all of them. Not to mention the fact that the colors bleed a bit after washing the thingy and you know what happens when all these colors bleed together: mud.

First thing was to wash the whole thing cause it has this particular musty smell. With what was the big question. After my green-living crusade has started I avoid buying chemicals and detergents, so I’ve searched in (what I call for now) my “green-living bible”, Annie Berthold-Bond’s book, “Better Basics For The Home“. And there I found lots of information about silk and wool that I didn’t know. First of all, wool and silk, being animal derived fibers are acidic, which means they have a ph lower than 7 (neutral). On the other hand, cotton, linen and other plant derived fibers are alkaline (ph higher than 7). Chemistry blah, you’d say but I’ll get to the point. Detergents and most commercial soaps are alkaline, which means that by washing silk and wool with them will cause a reaction and the silk/wool will harden and gradually loose its texture. That’s the big secret behind commercial detergents for wool and silk, an acidic solution.
The green-living alternative is to use a neutral castille soap (superfatted or else not lye-heavy). The extra oil in the soap and the glycerin will supposedly help the silk keeps its soft texture. Remember commercial soaps have glycerin removed from them, so prefer homemade or natural ones. If you are not sure about the alkalinity of your soap you can add to the water a tablespoon of lemon juice or white distilled vinegar. Both are acidic and will do good to the water that will clean your wool or silk.

What I did, was to use my homemade cold process castille bar of soap. You could use liquid soap too. I rubbed the bar in tepid water until it was soapy enough and then added a tablespoon of lemon. Smelled kind of funny but the smell was gone after washing the yarn. Put the silk skeins in the water and squeeze, so that the water can enter inside the yarn. When the skeins sink in the water leave them and go check your emails for a while. 15 to 20 minutes should be fine. Empty the water and rinse with cold water 2 or 3 times. Gently open the skeins and squeeze the water out, arrange them nicely so that they don’t end up like a mesh and let them dry, away from the sun. My homemade soap was perfumed with cedar and lavender essential oils and it made the yarn smell lovely. Now I can focus in crochet and take my mind off the terrible odor it had.