A little pinch of this, a little splurge of that

Hope everyone's enjoyed a nice weekend, despite losing that hour today. Although it's still Sunday, I had a pretty nice weekend (despite having to go in to work for a few hours).

On Saturday, I signed up for a class at Herban Wellness in lip balm and lotion making. The shop smelled so nice upon entering and there were about 10 of us or so present for the class. The owner of the shop gave us handouts and demonstrated how to make several products at home. I've made lip balm for holiday gifts a few years back, but I wanted to take the class to see what other recipes/options were out there.

I came back with some more herbs like chamomile, chickweed, gotu kola, plantain, cocoa butter, rosehip oil and blue tansy essential oil. With some of these ingredients I want to make a salve. They also blend their own herbal teas and I came back with a Rejuvenation tea (very yummy) and another one called skin support tea. I was talking to some of the other gals in class who took the shop owner's other classes and they said the mask recipes she gives out for the facial mask class is very good and has made their skin feel much better, so I might give that one a shot next time. It's so much fun making your own body care products. You know exactly what's going in them. We got to take home two samples. One was the small tin of peppermint lip balm and a container of the yummiest smelling hand lotion. It literally smelled like lemon cake and smelled so good we were all wanting to lick it off a spoon like batter, lol. We used vanilla extract and cardamom, vetiver and blue tansy essential oils.

After having filed my taxes, I got a correction notice recently advising that I'm getting a little more back than initially expected, so I decided treat myself with a few luxurious yarn purchases (I know, I already broke my no yarn buying I stated earlier this year, I suck, hehehe). Thanks to our helpful fellow enabling knitters, one gal advised that there was a bugga (as in The Sanguine Gryphon Bugga!) update one morning and I stalked the site and managed to grab two skeins. It really is some soft stuff! The colorway above is called Bronze Moth. I love the color. I also got a green colorway of Hologram Moth in Skinny Bugga.

And the biggest prezzie I treated myself to was due to a totally random discovery. While reading various threads on Ravelry one afternoon, I fell upon this Tea Leaves Cardigan pattern. I was totally smitten with the pattern and the yarn it was knit with, until I saw another colorway of this lovely, lovely Madelinetosh yarn in the colorway Terrarium. It's a mostly brownish green colorway with bits of light robin's egg blue thrown in (photo above). The yarn is so dreamy soft and I'm totally in love with this yarn... can you be in love with yarn? LOL I can't wait to cast on for this cardigan!

I'll end my blog post today with a little gift from Bear. A cute little sheep he found for me last night at the grocery store. He'll be keeping guard of all my yarn. I need to find him a name...