never buying shampoo again?

i finally tried it. i finally tried the hippie-frugal-elementary school science project baking soda hair wash and vinegar rinse.
and i'm never buying shampoo again.
i'm a sucker for b&b products (bath and beauty, y'all). i got all my handmade soaps from alaska- strangely enough- the ones i'm using now are from gladheart acres (the rise and shine is probably my favorite; it's citrusy enough to wake me up in the morning) and a wonderful intro to the family/company from my m.i.l. i also have their solid lotion stick and love it.
i've got my eye on some more soaps from alaska, swanmountain's rose soap looks divine, and there's a guinness soap on there that would make my hub smell like, well, delicious beer. perhaps it's a good thing he doesn't drive, no?
and i love bath salts and bombs and bubbles, having been clued into the pleasure of a leisurely bath and cup of coffee/cup of tea/glass of wine and a paperback by my gran when i was quite young.

but the one thing that's never excited me is shampoo. sure, sometimes it smells good but a person who has a bee sting allergy is generally not crazy about her hair smelling like flowers. i dislike the plastic bottles that must be stood on their heads to get the last bits out with those farty-sounding squeezes. and then there's the markup. and crazy-long lists of ingredients. and the condescending "lather, rinse, repeat if you've been soaking your head in motor oil" nonsense.
sure, some shampoo makers have tried to liven things up for me by putting jokes or trivia or faux-biographical vignettes on the bottle. i'm an inveterate reader, the type that can't keep herself from reading when there's words. eventually those words get old.
so anyway. needless to say, i'm not a huge fan of shampoo, but i do like clean hair.

enter the baking soda/vinegar thing. read about it in bust a couple of years ago when i still thought bust was der poo. it's come up again a couple of times since then and every time i've seen it, i've thought, you know, i'd try that. when i came across this blog entry i was ready. i bought a giant jug of vinegar a couple of weeks ago thinking to start cleaning with it. and for cooking. so far it works great on the bathroom sink, with some baking soda, and not so great on the mirror.
if that same elementary school project doesn't fail me, baking soda's a base, and vinegar, of course, is acidic. i know from extensive at home wild hair coloring projects and fiber work that vinegar is used to neutralize ph and smooth hair shafts back out. armed with this knowledge and baking soda paste and diluted vinegar in an old water bottle with a cinnamon stick & orange essential oil in, i washed my hair.
no lather, plenty of rinse, zero need to repeat.
the fine, straight, tending towards limp and oily hair is quite happy. it smells faintly of orange and not of salad dressing, which is good. it was cheap. cheap enough to where i can't really estimate how cheap it was. maybe two tablespoons of baking soda?
and that's good because that means i can use my pennies for delicious handmade soap.
oh yes and more yarn.
noro niji is good to me, and therefore i return to yarn garden to extend this series.

the things i love that hurt my hands

perhaps, hurt is too perjorative a word. perhaps a more neutral statement might be "things i enjoy that are rough on my hands."
i could never be a hand model, never ever, not even for a million bajillion dollars. okay, we'll if that's per year, then i could do it for a year, as i foresee that though my fiber budget may increase and i may once again someday buy lots of books, a million bajillion dollars would probably see me through the rest of my life. but it would be a tough year.
hand models, from what i've read, wear gloves all the times, never holding hands. cuticles are a professional obsession, and you know those girls who cry when they break a nail? they look like disney starlettes next to someone that pictures of whose nails put the butter on the bread and the bread on the table.
for a whole year.
i would not be able to cook. just look at these mitts, will ya? they are burnt up. perpetually. i have pink and purple things in various stages of age. these aren't major burns, just the little burns that happen when you cook, a lot and do things like touch things that are hot, or have hot things touch you. it happens. also, from all those years ago (nine?!?), i still have waitress hands. have you ever gone to a restauant and been handed a plate from a person who hands it to you bare handed, saying, careful this plate's hot? and you touch it and it is? that's waitress hands. i also put jar lids on waay too tight.
so. no cooking for a year. perhaps i could make a lot of salads? but no knives, as little cuts kind of happen too sometimes. i would have to depend on some wretched such contraption such as a shooter of salad, but someone else has to wash it. no washing of things, i'd have to avoid dishpan hands- my hands would be the poster hands for the antidishpan hands movement.
as a side note, i'm sorry, but no housewife knows dishpan hands like a restaurant dishwasher, particularly a latin-american pater familias (two of whose sons also work in the kitchen) who probably washes dishes at two restaurants. i've seen the cracked bleeding skin between the fingers and known they didn't have health insurance or paid days off.

computers are probably also really bad for the fingers. i can type quickly, thanks to having been taught in like first grade. typing was pretty much all a primary school kid could do on those gorilla green screens and they gave it us with a vengance. i pay so little attention to the mechanical movements of my fingers that i freak my husband out by staring out the window while i'm typing. for some reason people find that rather disconcerting, but i think that's hilarious because they don't know if i'm writing anything that makes sense, or if my fingers have all jumped one over and i'm writing more like domryhik yiul yjod. and quite frankly neither do i, until i look back and check. so lots of repetitive stress on the hands with little attention paid, so i should probably cut back on that.

then there's the fiber arts. let's not joke. i'm worried that sleeping every night with icy hot on my hands after i'm done working at night could cause some long-term health issues. i'm dead set on finding a non-petroleum based product- something beeswaxy perhaps?
i work a lot. when something's your passion and you make it available to the public, it becomes like an addiction. i can't watch a movie without my hands wanting to be busy, they feel twitchy and anxious. some people have "restless leg syndrome" i think the same of my hands. they don't like to stop.
i think also they want to be strong. i have a dear friend who is a jewelry designer, worker with stones and wire and silk. and thick wire. she rubbed my hands once and i was amazed, this strength coming from these slender little hands, from this physically small person/thin and bright strand of energy. i was afraid, actually at one point for my hands so subdued by hers. would my hands panic? would i cry? (the worry of the eternal 8 year old.)
point being, i want my hands to be like that. my great-grandmother's hands must have been like that, though it's so long i don't really remember the strength qualities of her hands. i remember though the flat spots on her fingertips, yet how soft the pads of her fingers were. they were compact, tending towards broadness versus length. i can wear her wedding ring, so our hands must be similar. which gives me hope.

an update on the noro niji:
i'm fighting with myself to finish this project and not just run to the yarn shop and get more. my brain is trying to devise a series of items using this yarn. the texture and color combine incredibly- though i spent most of yesterday trying to figure out just how i wanted to use it. i ended up on choosing a granny type square, which is something i've not done much of. of course i had to make my own variation, which will be available for view sometime today or tomorrow!
oh and the kureyon purse needs more felting. i forgot how stubborn that yarn can be to felt.