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Craft Your Own Plantain-Infused Oil!
Infusing oils is such a great skill to learn. Infused oils can be used in so many ways. You can use infused oils in beauty products, cooking, aromatherapy, and for medicinal purposes. Plantain-infused oil is one of the newest ones in my arsenal. What is a plantain you ask? I know most people immediately think of the banana-looking type of plantain when I start talking about this. But what I am referring to is commonly known to most people as a weed that grows throughout the world. This post contains affiliate links. This will not cost you anything but helps us to offset the cost of running the blog. We…
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Canned Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling
I don’t know about you but my family LOVES strawberry rhubarb pie and crumble. We usually have a lot of it during spring and summertime and then when rhubarb season is over all the fun stops. A few years ago I learned about canned strawberry rhubarb pie filling. Since then I started making these delicious summer homemade pies all year long. When you can the pie filling all you have to do to make your dessert is dump it in a crust or crumble and bake! Super fast and easy! I also freeze strawberries and rhubarb if I don’t have enough time to can the pie filling. Make sure to…
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Pasty Recipe from Upper Michigan
My husband’s family has some roots in Upper Michigan (check out our thimbleberry jam recipe if you don’t believe me 😆 ) so I knew it was in my future to try to make a pasty. Pasties are like a Yooper delicacy that became popular in the 1800s. If you’re not familiar with a pasty (pronounced pass-tee), it is like a big meat and potato hot pocket! They became popular with the copper miners because they’re cheap and easy to make. The miners could stick them in their pockets and they’d be safe until lunch. My husband’s grandma made these for her family and we just came across the recipe…
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Benefits of Tallow in All Natural Soaps & Skincare
If you’re like me you were a little weirded out when you first learned about tallow. You want me to put what on my hands and face? 😆 When I started learning about all the benefits of it, I quickly got used to the idea and started really appreciating the knowledge. If you don’t know, tallow is rendered and purified beef fat. Yup, you read that right! When you render beef fat (specifically suet, found around the kidneys) you are ridding it of impurities and water and you’re left with a nutrient-dense oil that will nourish your skin whether it is mixed with lye and made into soap, used as…
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Switch to Soaps with Natural Ingredients
Several years ago I started learning more about healthy living. This can mean a lot of different things depending on who you are. For me, it started with eating a little better to lose weight after having a baby (my first baby, who is 9 now 😭). As I was learning to look at labels I realized that there are so many unnecessary ingredients in foods. Even simple things that seem like they should only have 1 or 2 ingredients had 5-10. For me, this is where my natural product journey all began. My interest in healthier products grew from foods to cleaning products, and then to products that went…
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Why does Lye (sodium hydroxide) need to be in soap?
Why does Lye (sodium hydroxide) need to be in soap? This is a huge question I asked myself when I started looking into a more natural way of making soap. I read all the ingredients in the soaps and other products we were putting on our skin. I began to wonder what all the chemicals were for and how they were affecting us. What I found is we don’t need all those crazy chemicals to create a soap that is amazing. But we do need Lye. You can not make a natural soap without it. Lye – also known as sodium hydroxide and/or potassium hydroxide is a strong alkaline material.…
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My Scheduled C-Section Story-Thanks to My Breech Baby
This post contains affiliate links. This will not cost you anything but helps us to offset the cost of running the blog. We only share products we are using and are items we would recommend to a friend. Thank you for your support! Click ‘HERE’ for more info. First of all, I went into this pregnancy NOT wanting to have a C-Section, but Hannah had other plans. I was taking a Bradley Method Birthing class so that I could have an all-natural drug-free birth experience. If you’re interested in that kind of birth experience I highly recommend the book Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way. You can also find a live class to…
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Review of GroVia All in One Newborn Cloth Diapers
We’ve been using the Newborn All-In-One Grovia Cloth Diapers for 6 weeks now and we love them! My daughter was born at 8lbs 14oz but by the time we got home she had lost almost a whole pound (yeah, we had a slight weight issue), so she wore them as a 7lb 14oz baby and is about 9lbs and is still wearing them. According to the Grovia website, newborn cloth diapers are great for newborns between 5 and 12 pounds. I chose the GroVia brand of cloth diapers because the company is committed to high-quality, healthy, and environmentally friendly products. They also have some organic cotton options that I am…
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How to Make a Chocolate Rock Cycle
The rock cycle is something we study in the Montessori curriculum pretty much every year, especially in the lower elementary years because if you’re 6-9 year old is anything like mine (or any of my students) they are all pretty much obsessed with geology! I have personally always had a hard time with the rock cycle (I know, kind of embarrassing for a teacher to admit), I just could never remember which rocks would form into which other rocks and how they would change. This fun chocolate rock cycle project not only made my daughter and other homeschoolers happy, but it really helped me understand the whole process a little…
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How to Make Cran-Raspberry Jam using Cranberry Juice
I searched and searched to find a Cran-Raspberry Jam recipe that didn’t use whole cranberries to start. Is it such a crazy idea to not want chunks of cranberry in my jam? Or maybe I couldn’t find any cranberries (which was the case when I was making Christmas Jam just after Thanksgiving this year). Or perhaps I had already purchased the cranberry juice without first finding a recipe, whoops! Anyway, I am happy to share this recipe with you in case you find yourself in a similar situation! This post contains affiliate links. Using them will not cost you anything but will help us offset the cost of running the…