Green Up Gift Basket

 "Make a gift basket of green products for a friend or to give away as a housewarming gift."

I cringe at the idea of "gifting" someone cleaning products.  Family lore of my own youthful mother exchanging looks with my father as she politely watched her soon-to-be mother-in-law effuse as she dragged her husband's gift of a vacuum cleaner out from under the Christmas tree...  My careerist hippy Mom wanted to be clear she had a different sort of marriage dynamic in mind.  Years later, Dad would drag teenage me into Williams Sonoma to pick out some gag housewares Christmas gift for Mom, a salad spinner, perhaps?  All the while, he happily subsidized (and obligingly hid from) the weekly cleaning service that relieved his sweetie of that housekeeping burden.  Is that why they are still happily married?  

But gifting misgivings aside, an opportunity arose to make more headway on this Green Up merit badge series.  As part of executing her estate, my husband's family had sold his grandmother's house.  I hope the new owners won't resent a bucket full of eco-friendly supplies as a housewarming gift.  Here are the contents, if a similar opportunity presents itself to you.  Anything worth including that I forgot?    

Contents:

Home Depot 5 gallon bucket - can never have too many!

Rolls of Who Gives a Crap TP and PT - FSC certified, B corp, 50% profits donated, 100% recycled product with cute snarky labels.  

Repurposed glass vinegar bottle + sprayer nozzle of white vinegar surface cleaner - Birtwhistle's label-removing prescription of veg oil, baking soda, and a cloth worked great to remove the original ACV label.

100 gram swing top jars of citric acid and baking soda - with instructions for converting the citric acid into a toilet bowl cleaner/descaler

How to Keep House While Drowning book - I loved this at first read through, but it is more of a mindset adjustment book than one I wanted to keep for reference in my personal library

Microfiber dish sponge alternative that is machine washable

White cotton washcloth (these are slowly taking over my rag drawer as the default cleaning cloth)

Dawn power wash - this gets rave reviews for efficacy on Reddit, but I had a still shrink-wrapped bottle under my sink I hadn't yet found a use for

Homemade lavender + sage soy candle in a mason jar - because I'm still on a candle making kick and they say sage is good for purifying energy

7 clothes pins chained together as a sort of floral pick to hold the congratulations card

Candlemaking Intermediate

 "Make two different mold candles.  Use a different wax, scent, or color for each candle.  Let us know how each turns out!"  

What an educational mess!  Pictured are 6 molded candles (plus 5 over poured tea lights).  None pinterest-worthy.  

Batch 1:  Kai the dog memorial

This one probably turned out the best.  Hubby had given me a silicon fox candle mold for some holiday which I had never gotten around to using.  Emboldened by the beginner badge literature about how to add a wick after allowing the wax harden, without needing to poke a wick hole in a brand new silicon mold, I thought I would give it a try.  This candle was to commemorate my OG packmate who we said goodbye to last month.  I used my tried and true soy wax from Candle Science which has clear instructions on boiling point.  I weighed out extra wax because I wasn't entirely sure how big of a candle the mold made.  I added a CS lavender ember fragrance, but no color.  I prepped a silicon release spray in the mold.  The excess I poured into some flower silicone molds we had used for diy bath bombs.  I had tried spraying with edible silver and gold glitter just to see.  What I was most curious about with this project was how easily the wax would release from the silicone molds and how smoothly a hole could be drilled/awled/needled and a wick threaded through.  Sadly, I returned from an errand run to discover hubby had "helped" me with those steps in absentia.  

Batch 2:  Xaden dragon

Lots of wildcards in this batch.  MIL gifted me leftover candles from SIL's wedding.  They had no documentation of what they were, so I assumed it was paraffin.  Paraffin allegedly takes color better than soy and I had never tried coloring a candle so I gave these a crack.  My vision for these was inspired by an Etsy dealer who creates candles scented to match descriptions of characters in books.  I hadn't seen an entry for the protagonists in Yarros's YA romance series.  The male lead is shadowy and smells like leather, citrus, and mint.  So I poured a black candle with said scents (leather, mint mojito, garden mint, dragonsblood).  The good news about a black candle with recycled wax was that impurities like burned wick aren't noticeable.  The bad news about no-name paraffin is that it bubbles more, shrink-settles into divots more, and seemed to more quickly crack when trying to wick post-process (or maybe that was my light touch vs. hubby's).  The dragon mold shrunk so much, I ended up topping it up with more violet wax from batch 3.  Prior to seeing the shrink, I threw some in 4 tea lights which is my go-to approach for non-wastefully dealing with excess wax.  The dragon popped out of the mold easily and cleanly without lubricant, but the purple and the black segments never fused together and came apart when driving a nail through it to add a wick.  I'll need to test how good this smell combination is at it burns as well, when they were cooling, it smelled like very little leather and mostly orange notes.  Not exactly sexy.      

Batch 3:  Violet pillars (same eve as Batch 2)

On to the female protagonist, the bookish "Violet."  Still using the recycled paraffin, warily.  I used floral violet, ozone, and library scents with a dash of dragonsblood.  I was interested in this reusable putty several books said they used to keep wax from seeping out of candle molds with seams.  Hubby had 3D printed some such molds I had used for a batch of citronella candles for a past project.  I haven't found a great way to thoroughly clean these 3D plastic molds without warping them, so their finish came out chalky, but serviceable.  I found the putty was strong enough to hold the molds together without needing the plastic bands, which makes things even simpler.  I also didn't have the challenge of shattering the paraffin wax by wicking them after they were poured.  The silicon pillar hubby had ordered came out the cleanest and most vibrant purple, however, it didn't have a hole for the wick and the tip of it shattered when I tried to add one.  The smell on these is pretty neutral.  After I had mixed them, I wished I'd added something a bit grittier, like the leather smell.  I wonder if their smell improves or overwhelms if you burn black and purple scents together?  Perhaps we'll find out because I don't feel like any of these besides the fox are polished enough to be a good gift and I want to keep the fox.  

So there you have it.  I'm thinking the upcycled paraffin works best in containers you can pre-wick.  Colors are kinda fun, particularly if masking the upcycled material or following some sort of story-scent conceit, but not something I'd go out of my way to get good at.  That putty is magical, as are having a lot of tea light containers on hand.  But if you're working with paraffin, I might have poured into one of those melts containers without a wick so I could pop it back into the melting pot and top the molds off with the same color and fragrance I had started with when they sink.  I need to figure out better strategies for cleaning wax off plastic molds.  It is a good idea to take notes (mine were 3x5 index cards) on your candle recipe and weigh the final products of your molds so you can recreate or refine it without as much guesswork and waste.  

[3/25 updates]  I have burned several Xaden tea lights and concluded that soy wax holds and throws fragrance better than unknown extraction paraffin and that I had entirely too much mint mojito and not enough leather going to achieve a ruggedly "sexy" throw.    

"Gift a candle to a friend and be sure to let them know that it was handmade by you. "

There are two activities many of these sisterhood merit badges call for that I find I am dragging my feet to complete.  

One is the challenge of gifting things.  What is my hang up?

#1 hubris.  This Twitter-X post craft-shaming sums up my fears:  

"wish i had the confidence of the woman trying to sell this cheese grater as an earring rack on etsy" 

I don't think my sloppy first/second/third/nth draft of something is polished enough to justify saleable and it follows giftable status.  Gifting someone something I made seems a bit arrogant unless they are explicitly asking for the item.  

#2 minimalism.  I have been on the receiving end of so many inconvenient but "character building" gifts.  They are sad in that they emphasize how little the person knows you that you are secretly thinking it would have been better to forego the gift-giving ritual entirely but the Emily Post acolyte in you still feels obliged to hand letter a diplomatically worded thank you note.  The gift card to an alcohol store when hubby and I are celebrating our sobriety streak, the Costco charcuterie board when trying to eat less/more regeneratively harvested meat, the plastic melting toy found at the swap meet that was recalled by its manufacturer several years before my husband and I were born.  At the extreme, there are a few acquaintances where it feels like the gifting gesture isn't an extension of "knowing" or "caring" and more of a transactional dynamic of wanting to bank goodwill and curry a sense of reciprocity when what works better for our family is respect for boundaries and a bit of distance.  The gifts feel manipulative if such a paradox makes sense.  Plus, every day the small human chaos machine walks in the door with a backpack pinata full of glitter-encrusted doo-dads of the moment that we didn't want, don't need, and now need to find a place to store for a culturally acceptable interval before dumping in the landfill or "donating" where in all likelihood many will meet the same demise.  I don't want my handicraft to be a burden on someone else, make them feel a sense of reciprocal obligation, or force them to wince through scribbling or muttering a polite rather than heartfelt thank you back to me.  Perhaps I am overthinking this?    

But as I grapple with my personal hang ups on handmade gifts (handmade Christmas badge, here I come!), I did manage to find a work-around for candles:  think of them as zhuzh or garnish on a more thoughtful gift bundle.  In this case, in reflecting on our coffee chat, I knew my buddy was looking for a good title for the kid's book club she runs, her parents were deliberating on back surgery, and her daughter had missed our space-themed girl scout gathering.  Plus I was looking to practice Spanish and she has been a supportive sounding board so I scribbled her a note en espanol with an invitation to keep/borrow the items as she preferred.  Crown this bundle with a candle, drop it off at her preschool and call it a day!  

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I scored a library hold on an audiobook of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as part of the Farm Kitchen #1 Know Your Food badge.  I expected this to be an Appalachian endurance version of the "Apocalypse Grow Challenge" attempted for a month out of San Diego in 2021 or of UK's Huw Richard's lab notes published in Self Sufficiency Garden.  In fact, these might have been inspired by Kingsolver, who published 17 years prior.  My Goodreads reviews reminded me I had read this 10 years after publication (2017).  While I wouldn't say this is a reference caliber book you will want to reread frequently, I still was able to pick up a few additional hints on my second read.  My overall impression with the content was that it has aged remarkably well, there aren't any glaringly fanatical sections to leave me shaking my head and thinking "wrong side of history with that one."      

Audiobook was the ideal format because it allows you work through your own household chores while listening to Kingsolver's family's ethical deliberations about their own household chores and food culture in their own voices, interspersed with delightful farm noises at chapter breaks.  Audiobook also helped highlight that this book has 3 authors, each reading their segments in their own voices (Kingsolver, her husband "science sidebars," and elder daughter "recipes and teen perspective").  This version was an interview with the author afterwards.  In it, she had helpful perspective on the writing process.  For instance, when writing pure fiction (which she has gone on to earn Pulitzer prizes for), she equates to a west coast desert garden.  You can create what you want from scratch and water intensely to get it to flourish.  To write a narrative around a non-fiction science project such as this undertaking, you  have to employ the east coast approach of weeding without mercy until you have just the plants you want growing in your plot.  

She also shared that her family weren't newbies undertaking this project-- they had both grown up on farms (even if they acquainted with artichokes relatively late in life), they had been contemplating this project for 6-7 years prior to beginning it and had a publisher signed on for the deal.  This helped curb my sense of overwhelm that they were able to accomplish so much in their first year.  I was so impressed at their discipline in recording their harvest and the equivalent cost in local produce.  The few things we do grow are successful mostly because they are so compelling (strawberries, blueberries, peas, apples), we snack on them in the yard.  There is no taking them in, weighing them, and calculating what their going value at a farmer's market would be first.  

While she was so disciplined in her book-keeping, I respected that they were not purists across all domains and freely admited to buying coffee, wheat, and emergency rations.  Their family stayed the same weight at the end of the project when a more strictly adherent colleague reported losing 15 pounds on a hyper local diet.  

While I'm not quite ready to bite off this big of an Eat Local project for myself, it did inspire me to add a few extra projects to my hopper:  

*Visit localharvest.org and determine if there are other local farmer's markets to explore.  Yes, there are 3 within 2-6 mile radius -- Orange Sat 9-1, Irvine district Tues 9-1, and (our regular) old town Tustin Wed 9-1.  My goals are to visit all three and to take some notes on the distance sellers are traveling to get there.  Kingsolver suggests "local" might be as far as 250 miles away in desert areas but more like 100 miles away in the central valley.  

*Prioritize products with fewer ingredients.  It hadn't occurred to me that if a processed food has several different ingredients, those would have needed to be shipped to the factory, accumulating food miles, before then being shipped to the store as a convenience food.  

*Think about how much water you are shipping.  Steven makes a compelling argument that shipping a dried produce item is more sustainable than shipping it in whole form with all the water weight it contains.  

*Check out some of Kingsolver's fiction (specifically Demon Copperhead and Poisonwood Bible).  It looks like she did eventually get back around to co-authoring with her family to write a book with her daughter about Coyotes that I could possibly read with my daughter... 

*Do my own research on still-open questions: 

-Are standards for "organic" in internationally differently enforced than in the US?  Which country has more rigorous standards?  (food miles aside)

-What milestone would we choose for a local food challenge?  (she used asparagus, Jefferson had an "earliest pea" wager going in Monticello, what is the SoCal equivalent?)

-What are the SoCal "most egregious" imports to avoid or focus on eating only in season?  Bananas were much-maligned in Appalachia, but we have stands growing around our house that produce more than we know what to do with.  Perhaps some of the fruits that require extensive chill hours?  

Candlemaking - Beginners

I already have a big cache of candle making stuff.  Then MIL gifted me a bunch of my SIL's leftover wedding candles and the cache could no longer fit in my desk storage drawers and began to flood my crafting area floor space.  This sparked putting a hold on nearly every candle making book available through inter-library loan for ideas on how to use this material.  Besides, it is day 2 of the month I think of as "Maker's March" so now is as good a time as any to get cracking on the Mary Jane's Farm sisterhood badge in the Make it Easy section #11 Candlemaking.  

Research the different types of wax used in making candles.  Are certain waxes better than others, depending on the type of candle made? 

Bees wax:  since it is strong, slow-burning, with a bright flame, it is a great candidate for free-standing candles like dipped pioneer taper candles (advanced badge), or their smaller relatives like birthday or menorah candles.  You can also buy beeswax sheets that can be rolled up to make your own pillar candle without needing to melt the wax or pour it in a mold.  Since it comes with its own pleasant scent and color(s), it wasn't often listed as a good candidate for colored/fragranced candles.  The fact that it doesn't shrink (much) combined with a more sticky texture can make it hard to remove from molds.  Some people favor beeswax because it is a renewable resource, while others avoid it because it is not vegan.  It is a relatively expensive material and some references warn that it may be sold as a percentage of beeswax and back filled with another, potentially less natural wax like paraffin.  Beeswax Alchemy advises to seek out beeswax specifically for candle making where an effort has been made to clarify the wax to remove honey which can impact its color and how the candle burns.  You might also see bee keepers wax which has more residual honey; brood wax which has been stained a darker color due to more solids from heavy use in the hive; and white wax which has been chemically refined in a factory to remove its yellowish tint for painting projects.  

Paraffin:  is a product of the petroleum industry and therefore not renewable.  It has several redeeming qualities such as affordability, ability to take color and scent, and the ease with which it releases from molds.  It is formulated with a variety of different melting points (30-71*C) which allows flexibility in which type of candle to make with it.  But it isn't perfect, it burns faster, is softer than beeswax and can shrink in volume when curing.  You or manufacturers can add ingredients like stearin or vybar to improve burn time, hardness, easier release from molds, increase scent throw, and dye vibrancy though.  Sadly for me, I am guessing my donated material is this versatile paraffin but am unsure what its melting point, whether it was treated with any of these enhancing chemicals which could effect how it interacts with my molds and who knows what suggested blend rates are for color and fragrance.  But at least it is starting out unscented and white!      

Vegetable waxes:  i.e. soy.  Offer a renewable, cleaner, slower burning, less shrinking alternative to paraffin.  In contrast to beeswax, soy wax more affordable and vegan.  The drawbacks of soy are that it requires more dye, throws less scent, and is less strong than paraffin.  Other veggie waxes include rapeseed, coconut, and palm wax.  My original candle making kit included a large bag of soy pellets which I will probably use for the first projects in the intermediate section.  

In contemplating this project, the format of the wax strikes me as important as its ingredients.  Pellets are very easy to melt, but I will need some tools to break the solid block of the gifted candles into small enough fragments.

Research the different ways to scent a candle.  What are the pros and cons of each method?

Fragrance: is synthetic chemicals.  The advantages are that they are relatively inexpensive and can emulate complex scent concepts (i.e. a perfume, rain, coffee shop, cut grass, etc.) that are difficult to reproduce with single ingredients.  The disadvantages are that they may contain phthalates if not explicitly labeled otherwise.  One UK title suggests checking that they are manufactured in accordance with IFRA standards as a health precaution.  

Essential oil: large quantities of plant material are concentrated into an oil.  These can have powerful aromatherapeutic properties, such as lavender for relaxation and sleep or mint for focus.  Their disadvantages in addition to offering only a single ingredient plant scent profile are their cost due to the quantity of material needed and that they give less scent than fragrance.  

Powdered herbs? was suggested by one title as another fragrance approach for molded candles, particularly for spice-type of scents.  However, another source discouraged this approach as too dangerous because the material if not ground fine enough might cause uncontrolled flames. 

Au naturel: beeswax comes with its own scent without need for additional fragrance.  

Research the different ways to color a candle.  What are the pros and cons of each method?

Commercial dyes: were unanimously recommended for coloring candles.  These dyes can come in disks, melts, powders and liquids.  One source recommended solid formats (i.e. chips) over liquids due to less impact on the candle's burn performance, but none of the titles presented a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons of different commercial dye formulations.  In your workflow, you add the dye to the melted wax right before adding fragrance and pouring.   

Crayons?! two sources explicitly cautioned against using crayons to color candles.  Their reasoning was that crayon colorant didn't suspend evenly within the wax and would sink toward the bottom when you stopped stirring.  They also believed that some of the settled sediment could be drawn up the wick and cause the candle to sputter excessively.  I am a mom of a creative 6 year old, with a large portion of my under bed storage real estate devoted to broken crayon bits, so this was not quite enough of a caution to scare me off crayon candle crafts entirely.    

Post-curing painting, etc.: several projects within the books suggested using the finished candle as a canvas on which you could paint details with a brush or textured sponge, possibly even dipping the candle in marbled paint for effect.  Another project suggested affixing gold leaf to your pillar candle.  Others suggested you could dip a neutral colored candle in colorful wax(es) to add additional interest.  You could also carve through the color-dipped exterior of a commercial candle to reveal the contrast of its white base.  

Au naturel: beeswax comes in its own soft yellow to dark brown color without the assistance of dyes.  

Book summaries: 

Candle making Basics - for visual and kinesthetic learners, this is the best book to start with and treat like a textbook.  It reads like the Ikea manual.  A chapter is devoted to each of 4 styles of candles.  If you had worked through those 4 chapters, tackling any of the inspiration sections of the other books would be straight-forward.  Actually you could probably get away with doing only 3 of 4 chapters (container, molded, and dipped) because the rolled beeswax pillar is kind of a novelty.   Each chapter has its own supplies list, which is great because some specialized equipment may not be worth the investment if you never plan to make that type of candle.  Even if they aren't artfully styled, there are tons of photos of each step in the process and instances in which things went wrong and how to troubleshoot.  If I were picky, I wish there had been a little more discussion of substitutions/improvisations, i.e. if you don't want to devote a double boiler to wax crafts, could you Macgyver one with nesting a smaller container in a pot of boiling water?  But overall, this is a solid resource.  

Complete Candlemaker - this was the earliest published title in the round up (1997) and was lacking a lot of detail about contemporary types of wax and tools.  It had the most jaw-dropping photos of candles and was meticulous in attributing them to different candle-making businesses, but I found myself more inclined to whip out a credit card and go shopping than empowered or informed enough to approach making something that elaborate myself.  But if you can't find Candle Making Basics, this covers a lot of the same territory.    

A Modern Guide to Making Candles - if I kept one book for reference, it would be this one for its concise but comprehensive candle making 101 section.  The authors have arrived at a similar approach to me (soy wax, focus on scent vs. color or shapes).  If I had any criticisms, it would be that the resources were all UK-based and the seasonal ideas chapters could have been more condensed and less of a coffee table inspo aesthetic.  Don't let their Amazon preview fool you, I think they put in a weird Proustian candles and memory digression in the front so that you couldn't pull the meat of their 101 chapter without paying for it, it gets much more practical and less airy fairy after that.      

Handmade Candles & Smudge Sticks - if you are looking for a project idea book, this is the best.  Nearly every idea would trend on Pinterest and I wanted to try more than half.  That said, the how-to section is pretty bare-bones.  It seems like smudge sticks should have been its own book but that they didn't have quite enough material to justify that.    

Beeswax Alchemy - this was by far the most popular and highly rated book on Amazon/Goodreads of this roundup.  That said, it would only make sense if you are dead set on using beeswax and the candle formats that it is best suited to (plus all the other diy uses for beeswax).  I would rather learn on the less expensive materials and more varied shapes and styles of candles as a beginner.    

Rajiv's Pioneer Village Candle Youtube - I love Rajiv, but trying to keep a high cadence on my stationary bike for 60 minutes while watching him leisurely dip beeswax tapers and sing to himself took an Herculean effort.  That said, I will definitely be revisiting this for the "pioneer candle" project at the advanced level of this badge.