Lady Spring, The Lady Of The Forest

Lady Spring, The Lady Of The Forest

Homemade skin care.

The grey hangs in the air today. But the trees are whispering in the woods. They speak of a lady in a bright leaf green dress, with flowing hair the color of daffodils riding a barn swallow. They say, she is returning. She will bring new life with her. She will banish the winter king, and cause life to begin anew. The flowers will sprout, creeping in like the early wild violets in the spring until they stand proud like dandelions raising their faces to the sky unapologetic for their brightness. I can smell her perfume in the air as she gets ever closer. The fragrance of growing things and living earth that I break in my hands. A wild herbaceous and bright fragrance wafts through the air so thickly now that you are nearly swimming in it.If I ever wrote a comic book, I think the hero would be Lady Spring, the lady of the forest. And in every book, she would be battling one of her mortal enemies. The Winter King, might be her Joker, social injustice would be her Cat Woman, and her Suicide Squad would be big industrial pollution.  Her super powers would be giving life and growth to the nature around us, and causing flowers to fly at those who offend her sense of decency. She would have an ally, the barn swallow she rides through the air. Her Scooby crew, would probably be a small group of hippies who might summon her with a drum circle when need arises. Half of them possibly a little high as hippies are prone to be, and strong, environmental crusaders fighting in places like Standing Rock to protect our natural resources. Together they would take on the mess we have made and clean it up so we could start again, offering humanity a new spring and a new opportunity to get it right this time, a rebirth and a chance to start anew.

Lady Spring skin care

Over this last week I have been trying to celebrate the rumor the trees are spreading as they dance in the wind whispering a song of she who will bring the spring time and banish the winter king. I have been working on creating some new skin care inspired by growing green things, and the power of herbs and flowers. I made all this completely all naturally. There are no chemical preservatives. So they have a shelf life of about 3 months tops. But I love it all. I have noticed, since using this collection, a foaming face cleanser in a repurposed plastic pump bottle, a facial toner in a repurposed facial toner witch hazel bottle, and a moisturizing cream in a once again repurposed container from Origins once containing their brand of moisturizer, that my crows feet are disappearing. This stuff is great for my skin that at 40 has just begun to age ever so slightly. It also battles acne as it contains tea tree, and improves my skin due to frankincense.

There are a lot of beautiful ingredients, from a tea of chamomile, rose and lavender, calendula oil, food grade essential oils of rose, lavender, frankincense, tea tree oil, and several others with a beneficial impact on skin including blue yarrow. I mixed these with honey and castile soap.

Then there is the toner, which also contains a little bit of sandalwood essential oil, and a bit of aloe, among many of the ingredients I have already listed.

The moisturizer cream, is a base I cooked up from shea butter, fractionated coconut oil, and jojoba, to which I added a little calendula oil and some of the already mentioned essential oils.

The rumor of the warm breeze was so inspiring this week I simply could not turn it off. Perhaps inspiration, would be another super power I would give to my comic book Lady Spring, if ever I had the time to write one. But as it stands, my art is not in the pictures I paint or draw. It is in the self sufficient way I live. The way I bring nature into my home and life. The crafts I make and their utility. My art, is in the planting of my gardens each year, living my handmade life. It’s in the music I love to make, and in this blog. I wouldn’t make a very good comic book writer. Still, a girl can dream of a homestead heroine she wishes she had had as a child to look up to and to learn from… We truly need a heroine like this today. One that inspires change and a regrowth of human decency and social justice, who sends the grey and the winter cold on it’s way… A girl can dream in a world that seems to be collapsing around itself, where we send whole species into extinction every week or so. Where even the healthiest food we eat now contains plastic. Whales, full of plastic get pulled from the ocean. Our water grows more and more polluted, as does our planet. Still we continue fracking… African Americans get shot in our streets by authoritarians in blue in a system routed in racism, and so many children live in poverty. We could use a Lady Spring comic book hero. Not to come in doing violence for justice’s sake, but to inspire us to do what ever we must to fix it all before we hit the turning point and our children have no future on a dead planet. I guess there is a truth in the old saying “History is written by those who kill heroes.” We are killing Lady Spring with every passing day as we destroy this planet. But who will be writing the final history when all life is gone because of us and the choices we made today?

The plastic I used for this project may not be beautiful, and likely will eventually end up in a waste dump, when it finally begins breaking down beyond reuse. At that time it will be replaced by glass. For now though, this is plastic that will not be ending up in the whales in our oceans, at least not for a while… I challenge you, to think of how you can repurpose your own plastic waste. I know this may not be pretty in package design, but to my eyes, out here on the homestead, where the food I eat comes up out of the ground, the air I breath carries the legend of Lady Spring, and the forest beckons clean and still untouched…. I know of no visual image more beautiful than repurposed plastic.

To make my Lady Spring Foaming Face Wash, you will need:
a pump bottle preferably recycled.
1 cup castile soap
1/4 tea of chamomile, lavender, and rose hips. (Boil water, pour over tea in a loose tea containing spoon. Mix in your table spoon of raw honey, allow it to sit over night. add to castile soap in the morning.)
1 table spoon honey
5 drops vitamin E
3 drops frankincense essential oil
3 drops rose essential oil
3 drops lavender essential oil
4 drops tea tree essential oil
2 drops blue yarrow
1 teaspoon of calendula oil (not essential oil, instead infused carrier oil) or just plain jojoba oil or hemp seed oil optional.

Then it is simple, once you have made your tea with honey, done your essential oils test, just mix all together in a bowl with the castile soap. That is literally it. Super easy.

Shake it before each use and remember this will not be pretty and white like store bought chemicals that are designed to clean up and recause breakouts so you will need to buy more, as they forever up the price. This stuff, is a natural color, it is natural. It goes bad within a few weeks. It is organic made from nature. it looks and behaves that way.

Essential oils, are very strongly concentrated. When I get mine, I always search for them under the heading, “food grade essential oils.” I also recommend testing them on your skin to be sure you have no allergies prior to creating and using this very natural skin care.

Few people today, truly know what it is to be clean. They feel it tingling. they think that is the feeling of clean. Or they feel it stripping the natural oils and mistake that for clean. They feel the chemicals, “working,” and think that is clean… Clean, can only happen when one uses nature to cleanse filth. Clean, is the feeling when you feel your natural skin being kissed by the wind’s whisper of the return of Lady Spring on the cheek, and not feeling it sort of from under a layer of chemicals, but instead feeling it completely. That, is the feeling of being clean.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.
If someone wants to turn Lady Spring, into a comic book character, you have my deepest blessing. As I said, the world needs a hero like her right now. So, if you want to create her, please do.
it has been fun discussing my new skin care cooked up in the kitchen.
It has been one of those weeks, where I have been a mad scientist as much as a homesteader. But that is the joy of homesteading. You wear many hats. Sometimes even the mad scientist hat.
Thank you for reading and joining me on this skin care adventure.
Amanda of Wildflower Farm