A weird combination of topics, right?

As for salads, I have them almost every day for lunch.  I tend to make enough for 5 days in a row and then move on to a different type.  I tend to rotate between a Chef salad with an Italian dressing, a Spinach salad, and a Caesar salad.  I will occasionally add a different salad, but usually it is these three rotated.  But especially since I do not have any home grown especially yummy ingredients, it is getting a little old.  So I decided to bust into my Sunset Salad book from 1962.

So far I have made a Spinach and Egg Salad,

a Green Salad with Cucumber and Buttermilk Dressing,

and an Egg and Olive Lettuce Salad.

This has been fun to mix it up a bit.  And I am using no cheese and more of our own eggs, so I think that is a plus.

As far as candles go, I need more.  I was hoping to use new tallow from our cattle, but that is not happening.  So I decided to reuse the previously melted candle tallow that is now more than a year old.  It actually seems OK.  Plus my father bought me a candle mold kit for Christmas which contains some tools to make the process easier.  It has a wire loop to help string the wick and some tools to help hold the wick center in the mold.

Here are the candles I made with the tallow.  The green ones turned out better than the blue ones as I found the tools to help me.

Plus I remelted a spent candle from a metal tin to make a candle using my new molds.

So now I have candles again and am happy.

On the elk front, here are videos from our Boles from yesterday morning.

Pretty cool, huh?

P. S.  In completely other news, I am rethinking what to do with my handspun mioget katmoget yarn.  I saw a woman walking near the Skagit County courthouse the other day with a cardigan made of cream colored yarn (like mine) but with colorful yarn at the bottom, the edge of the sleeve and the edge of the hood.  It was quite beautiful.  So I started thinking that if I used a contrast yarn I could still make a cardigan with this yarn.  So I started looking around.  I couldn’t find a pattern that looked like this woman’s sweater, but I found a couple of Icelandic sweaters that are intriguing.  I have always been interested in making a yoked Icelandic sweater so this might be my chance.  But now I have to decide which one I want to pursue and could use some advice.  The two I am looking are Björt by Simone Kereit and Frost by Védís Jónsdóttir.  I like the hood of the second sweater but like the lines of the first sweater better.  I thought I could repeat the end of the sleeve pattern on the bottom of that sweater to create more length.  Please let me know what you think.