herbalista

St John's wort, in French millepertuis.

It's time to harvest it to make some red oil. You chop the leaves and flowers, fill a jar with them, pour olive oil and leave the jar alone in a sunny spot for one month at least, the oil will turn red. After one month or so, you filter it and bottle it ( you can add a few drops of lavender oil). It can be used for burns, rash, sunburns...

Cinnamon... really a magical spice... since I gave up diet coke ( and all kinds of chemical sodas) I've been craving for cinnamon... I sprinkle it on my morning muesli, in my soy latte, on diced apples... yesterday I was a bit worried it might not be very good for me so I did some research and found out that it's quite the opposite... cinnamon is GOOD for you...

Note : don't use the St John's wort oil if you go out in the sun... use it after... it's photosensible...

as it is..

June update of the "monster"...

Wishing you a Happy Summer!

meet Lucky

She lives with my best friend now... she needed "someone" to watch over her!

Oh I also want to share a great find with you... this BOOK... I knew it was going to be very interesting ... it's more than that... it's a must have! I received it today... I know what I'm going to read tonight ...

Did you know you can make insecticide with garlic, onion and soap? I made some today... my chinese cabbages needed it! You can find all sort of natural insecticides HERE...

And another thing, that's it, I broke up with aspartam! ... I read some things about it... this stuff is pure poison... no wonder, it was created by monsanto... no more diet coke for me... go green tea and lemon!

sunday eye candy

amber
top left amber beads from Iran ( probably not real amber but some kind of resin)
bottom left Chiapas amber, young amber... it's around 25 millions years old ( Baltic amber is around 40 millions years old) and more brittle than Baltic amber.
bottom left, raw Baltic amber.
Long before its origin was known a lot of legends were told about amber... Some people believed amber was formed from the tears of weeping birds...

naTuRaLiSta

this is too funny!

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diamonds aren't this girl's best friends!

Julia

This brooch belonged to Julia too... She was born in 1893 and passed away in 1978. This brooch is probably 100 years old..
In my right ear, I wear her gold earring... I used to have her wedding band... it slipped from my finger years and years ago... maybe one day someone will dig it up...

light switch

amber, coral, white and blue moonstone, rose quartz, turquoise on a silver chain that used to adorn the neck of Julia my great grandmother.

geese!

the new lawnmowers...and fertilizers because... well you get the picture...

ossuary

silk, iron, bovine bone, fox bone, deer antler, upcycled ivory, copper, brass
The iron spring was also made some 5 years ago...

sunday eye candy

Turquoise or the "Turkish" stone. The color blue is associated with the sky, the air, with the holy. Once again it's a stone considered to protect against evil. It is used in many places around the world. In Tibet, they like to mix it with amber, coral and gold while in the South West of the US, it's mixed with silver and coral or shell.

The turquoise on this necklace is fake, it's polymer clay. The blue ceramic bead on the left was made by my friend Suzanne, on the right of the faux turquoise is a bead Sherry sent a while back. The copper pendant was made some 5 years ago, yes it's been sitting in my drawer for that long ( the same goes for some of the beads in the first picture and for the coral of last week... I'm a hoarder...).

Curiosities

The voodoo doll on the right was made by a very talented young man who happens to be one of my students... yes I'm a lucky teacher ! ;)
On the left in a tiny glass case (made by Sherry) is an egg I found in Tennessee. On the right, near the bottom, there's the tusk Lucie gave me...

excessus e vitae

old silver spoon, vertebra, faux polymer teeth, bone beads

The colors of life