American-made bedding options

My parents wanted new sheets, so, of course, I wanted them to buy the most sustainable option! So I ended up doing a ton of market research to find the best option. Here is the answer:

Native Organic

They sell sheets, bath towels, kitchen towels, and aprons. The cotton is organically grown in the US (in Texas). The fiber is milled, spun, and woven in a historical water-powered mill in Mexico (source). Their products are colored through a combination of low-impact dyes and color-grown cotton. The prices are on par with other mid-tier bed and bath products not made sustainably and not made in the US (so I hope that Native Organic makes a profit!).

My parents went with Coyuchi, not a bad choice. They are also organic and, I believe, use low-impact dyes, but their products are mostly made in India (and, surprisingly, are more expensive). The balance was swayed in Coyuchi’s favor because they have sateen sheets in white (the closest Native Organic has is “natural”).

Red Land Cotton is another good option, although I know less about it. They grow their cotton in the US (in Alabama), and make all their products in the US. Their cotton is not certified organic, but the About Us page states that they dry-farm the cotton (no irrigation!) and use sustainable practices.

On a similar note, KellyGreenOrganic and Holy Lamb Organics are cool sustainable bedding companies. They sell mattresses, pillows, sheets, blankets, other home goods, and craft materials. DIY Natural Bedding is the mecca for bedding-related craft materials. They are amazing!! Most if not all of these companies’ materials are organic and sustainably sourced, and made in the US.

Next time you need to buy bedding, support one of these amazing companies! They appreciate it 🙂

Dyeing with spinach

Using this article for reference, sibling C and I dyed some of her cotton-and-nylon socks with liquid leftover from cooking spinach. Spinach produces yellows to greens, but doesn’t stick very well (isn’t “fast”). We added some iron (from an iron supplement) to make the color more green, and to hopefully make it darker and more fade-resistant.

The finished socks in rinse water. Spoon for scale.
We got a nice pale green-gray. It is almost discernible from regular dirt.

The socks looked like something at first, but, like many naturally-dyed articles, quickly faded. Very sad 🙁 Sibling C is amassing a very pastel army of naturally-dyed socks. The one upside is that they coordinate very well.

Mission Peak

I hiked Mission Peak with some friends from the local Japanese Meetup. It was pretty windy and cold, but a lot of fun!
Lots of hills.
Lots of cows.
Not very many trees.

Lots of sky.
And a pretty good sunset too.

Coleslaw

Recipe

Green cabbage

White vinegar

Mayonnaise

Sugar

Salt and pepper

I used a quarter of a green cabbage. That’s an Old Hickory knife.
I shredded it.
My mom thought it was too coarse, so I had to chop it more.
Here’s the dressing! It is a mix of 2 Tbsp white vinegar, 1.5 Tbsp sugar, 1/4 cup mayonnaise, salt, and pepper.
Throw the dressing on the cabbage and mix it together! The coleslaw might look like it has too little dressing, but liquid will come out of the cabbage as it sits. If there really is too little dressing, add more mayonnaise.

A step forward in haircare

I only wash my hair with water (and scrubbing!), which works well with soft water. If you have hard water, though, dissolved minerals bind to sebum in your hair to form a weird sticky white residue. Super unpleasant! It makes your hair oddly stiff. The only solution I’d found in the past was to occasionally (maybe once a month) wash with normal shampoo.

But I just had a breakthrough! Some people claim that washing with cold or cool water keeps your hair nicer (for unknown reasons). Between this and the fact that cold hard water in particular should have fewer dissolved minerals, I decided to try washing my hair with cold water (but take an otherwise hot shower). I wash my hair as the water is warming up.

It works amazingly well! The cold water even reversed previous mineral buildup. My hair is silky and soft without being greasy. It’s not stiff, it’s not sticky. Even my skeptical mom says that it feels nice!

Speaking of food waste…

If you have food that’s going to go bad or that you think you won’t use, what do you do with it?

If you want to eat the food yourself:

  • Eat it before it goes bad, quick!
  • Ignore expiration dates! They are unregulated except on medication and baby food (and even then don’t mean much. 90% of medications retain nearly their entire efficacy 10 years after the expiration date. Even the military ignores expiration dates to save loads of money!). If it looks fine, smells fine, and, finally, tastes fine, then it is probably fine.
  • Freeze it. Many things can be frozen without harm to their taste or texture. This includes raw and cooked meat, purportedly hard cheeses (never tried this myself!), tomato sauce, broth, cooked beans, whole and sliced bread and other baked goods, dry goods (flour, dry beans, spices, etc if you’re worried about rancidity or loss of flavor), and more! Many veggies can be blanched and then frozen.
  • Preserve it. There are many preservation methods to try! You can can, dehydrate, salt, ferment, smoke, or pickle. For example, turn milk into kefir or yogurt. Ferment cabbage into kimchi or sauerkraut. Smoke fish. Make jam.

If you are sick and tired of a particular food:

  • Take it to work to share with colleagues! Alternatively, share with friends and neighbors. This works especially well if you’re trying to get rid of desserts and snack foods.
  • On a similar note, have a potluck.
  • Give it away! You can do this on Freecycle or Craigslist (there is an area for free things under the sale section). There is also Olio, a food-sharing app for smart phones, soon to have a web app as well. Unfortunately, it isn’t as widely-used as Freecycle and Craigslist. I believe Olio is European in origin, so it is widespread in Europe. Amazingly, people also use it in Northern California! Lucky!
  • Feed it to pets. My grandparents always fed their cats table scraps.
  • Feed it to animals you’re going to eat (e.g. pigs or chickens).
  • Feed it to wild animals. Although not good to do frequently, at least some living being gets to eat it.
  • Compost it and use the compost to grow something else!

Wasted!

There’s a new food waste documentary out! It’s called Wasted! and features Anthony Bourdain, a food show celebrity who apparently has a cult following.

The documentary is well-produced and covers familiar as well as unfamiliar ground. I’d say that the overall message is familiar, but the details and anecdotes are interesting and illuminating.

Did you know that people in Seoul, South Korea, pay by weight to throw away their food waste? And Japan has a food-waste-saving pig-feeding operation. That’s pretty neat! Japanese pork producers have been experimenting with what combinations of types of food waste (e.g. veggies and fruits, but no grain) to feed pigs to get the best flavor.

And it takes about 25 years for a head of lettuce to decompose in a landfill D: Not neat. So don’t waste food! If you’re not going to eat it, give it away or feed it to a pet. And make sure to take advantage of composting in your area! If you have a yard, start a compost pile. Maybe your city collects compost, maybe there’s a community garden near you that has a compost pile. Lots of options! Some people even keep worm bins in their apartments.

You can rent the documentary various places online. See the website for details!

More hair soap for C

Since I had J’s handy-dandy digital scale available (my parents only have a poorly-calibrated analog postal scale), I decided to make yet more soap, this time focusing on better hair soap for sibling C.

The first bar soap I made was 100% tallow, about 5% superfat (in excess of the saponification stoichiometric ratio), with some amount of sodium hydroxide. The lather is thick and creamy, but not voluminous or stable.

To attempt to fix this, the new bar of soap was made with mostly tallow (since I can get this locally, cheaply, and fairly sustainably- it’s considered a waste product of meat production), some coconut oil (supposed to make cleansing soap), and some hemp (because I had it on hand). I used sodium hydroxide again because I wanted to make bar soap (and I don’t have KOH).

Here is the full recipe, made using SoapCalc. There are other soap calculators, but SoapCalc has a whole bunch of pre-loaded oils so you can easily play around with your soap’s properties (how hard, cleansing, moisturizing, etc it is).

The soap seemed to turn out fine. It’s curing now. I used my dad’s 40-year-old pH paper (left over from his days in grad school) to make sure the saponification reaction proceeded as expected.

I like the puck shape. Bars with square edges are so uncomfortable to hold. I molded the soap in plastic take-out cups, the taper of which caused the pucks to have slightly different diameters.

Trying to make shaving soap

I made a previous batch of tallow-based bar soap (in January) that turned out fairly well. In fact, sibling C swears by it for washing her hair! Interestingly, hair washed with the soap feels very similar to hair habitually washed with only water. The soap is just okay for shaving, though, so I’ve been wanting to do a second improved batch.

The internet says to use a lot of stearic acid to make better shaving soap. Stearic acid makes stable lather, but it is a palm-oil derivative, so definitively not sustainable. However I discovered that soy wax, that is, fully-hydrogenated soy bean oil, can be used as a substitute for stearic acid. So I was planning on buying that until I discovered that… people sell everything on eBay! So I ended up buying “used” stearic acid (from someone who used to make their own lotions).

Apparently, there are tons of things that can go wrong with soap. It seems like most of them only happen when you try to do fancy things (e.g. coloring, fragrance, milk) and I haven’t done those particular things.

However, the combination of stearic acid (very high melting point), tallow (grass-fed from the farmer’ market! moderately high melting point), and sodium hydroxide (used to make hard/bar soap, as compared to potassium hydroxide, which is used to make liquid/soft soap) makes extremely hard soap. It’s super crumbly now that it is completely hardened… On the bright side, the harder the soap, the longer it lasts.

I used SoapCalc to formulate the final recipe. Don’t try to replicate this soap; I’m including the recipe for reference purposes only! You could try the same proportions of oils and use KOH instead of NaOH, that might work.