So during those moments for the past few weeks I’ve been collecting articles about user experience design and user interface design and storing them in a notebook in my very favorite app of all time, Evernote. By tagging them in their own notebook I’m slowly accumulating an indexed encyclopedia of UX and UI design knowledge that I can use for my own reference, edification, and skill growth. I also post these articles to Twitter and Facebook as I find them (I’m trying to consciously add value to my social networking these days rather than just posting about what I had for lunch — it was a pulled-pork sandwich, though, if you must know), and after a couple of people told me they’ve really been digging these articles, I decided I should share my Evernote notebook publicly for the benefit of other people who might like to see this information collected.

So yesterday I fired up the Evernote app and tried to share my “UI and UX Articles” notebook with the world, and I ran into a really frustrating UX and UI issue that stuck in my craw hard enough to have me thinking about it most of the afternoon. And that led to me thinking about how I would have solved the issue, which led to sketching, and ultimately to me thinking that this is a good opportunity for me to give myself a UX/UI homework assignment: redesign Evernote’s notebook sharing. (See the note at the end of this article in which I attempt to justify my belief that I’m not being a snarky UI designer.)

Let’s start by taking a look at the goal, the current user experience in achieving that goal, and the desired user experience with possible solutions to achieve it, at least from my own perspective. If any other UI/UX people are out there reading this, certainly feel free to grade my homework and let me know if you think I’m entirely off-base.

The goal: The user wants to share a notebook, either publicly or with specified people.

The current user experience: Sharing can only be done via the web app, and the UI for sharing is inconsistent, confusing, and leads the user to a dead-end unrelated path.

The desired user experience: Sharing should be easy to do, take a minimal amount of clicks, and be easy to find.

The Current User Experience

From the get-go I’m presented with a small usability annoyance: why can I only share notebooks via the web and not the Evernote application itself? As a developer I’m willing to give Evernote the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume that there’s a technical limitation right now that makes it non-trivial to share notebooks via any platform other than the web app. As a user, though, I’ve heard — through my experience in using Evernote — that notebooks are shareable, so I’m baffled as to why there’s no “Share” option when I right-click on a notebook. That’s the action that coincides with my mental model of how sharing would work, a mental model based on years of using apps that work this way.

The inability to share notebooks via the flagship Evernote application is even more baffling given the data presented in Evernote’s own press event that says 50% of their users use the Windows desktop client compared to only 13% for the web app. But again, there may be technical issues at work here that are beyond my ken.

So with that said, we go to the Evernote web app and sign in, and we’re presented with the UI you see in Figure 1.

The Evernote web interface.

The top left list is a list of my notebooks, and beneath that is a widget that says, “Sharing.” Since I want to share a notebook, this is the first thing I click.

Clicking the Sharing widget gives you this dialog.

What I see here is a header, a paragraph, and a link. I see the words “click Sharing Setup”, but my eyes don’t see a link with the words “Sharing Setup”. I see something about linking notebooks, but since this is the box about Sharing and this is the only link I see, I assume this is going to take me to the right place, so I click it. This is where I end up when I click.

This is the page you end up on if you click the obvious link you're given in the Sharing widget.

At this point I’m pretty confused. I want to share a notebook and I clicked “sharing” and then clicked the one link I saw, but now I’m reading something about linking shared notebooks to my account. I’m not interested in linking other people’s notebooks into my account — I clicked something about sharing, and this assumes I’m dealing with a notebook that’s already shared somehow. There’s nothing about how to share a notebook on this page, so I click Back to see if maybe I clicked on the wrong link. When I get the previous page I click “Sharing” again to see if I missed anything…but no, I get the same box that tells me to click “Sharing Setup”. Except I don’t see any link that says “Sharing Setup.”

Oh, wait! After spending several minutes and at least one click into the “linking” page to see if maybe I missed something there that would take me to sharing, I finally see it: the header is a link. I’m supposed to click the header that says “Sharing Setup.” When I mouse over it I see that it highlights. Aha.

This touches on one of my biggest pet peeves about interface design: not maintaining separation and consistency between headers, body copy, and links.

There are two problems I see with the way this box is designed. The first is that the paragraph header itself is used as the link, but there’s no indication that it’s clickable. In the very same space I see underlined text — this is a web convention that we all know well: bold and/or underlined texts are links, and headers are almost never links. Secondly, the header text is not in an active voice; there’s no indication to the user that this is an actionable item. If I’m going to break the first convention and use a header as a link, then the only way the user is really going to know that it’s a link and thus goes somewhere is to indicate that with language that indicates motion or transition. A better phrasing of this header would have been something like, “Go To Sharing Setup.” But even with this fix we’re still violating consistency rules, and we’re also doing something else that’s one of my pet peeves: using the language “click here” to tell a user where to click. That’s very previous-century web design; links should always be self-evident in today’s web design and should never need a paragraph next to it explaining that you should click it.

At this point you’ve probably read the paragraph included in this box and said to yourself, “didn’t you read what it said? It said ‘click sharing setup.’ It’s your own fault you didn’t follow directions.” And in a sense you’d be right. But here’s the thing: UI design is all about patterns and consistency, and when users work with web apps we scan for familiar UI patterns. We really don’t read. It would be nice if we did but we’re using an application, not reading fiction; we want to work fast and we assume that things we’re familiar with will act in ways that are familiar even if we don’t read the text surrounding them. It’s a fact of technological life.

I didn’t have any linked notebooks at the time that I originally went looking for the sharing functionality, but I eventually linked the shared Evernote Support notebook — the notebook housing the confusing note about how to import notebooks into your account — and the resulting functionality of the Sharing widget became even more baffling.

The Sharing widget if you have notebooks you've imported into your account.

Why would the Sharing widget look almost perfectly identical to the Notebooks widget right above it, but not list my linked notebooks exactly like my own notebooks? Every other widget in this column is expandable; why this one is not and shows a popup with little information is baffling. But at least the “Sharing Setup” link looks a little more like a link now.

The worst part about all of this? I’ve gone through this process before and it was just as confusing then as it is now. I had shared out my Wedding Planner notebook a couple of months ago, but because the process was so convoluted and took me down so many non-obvious paths there was no way I could remember how to go through all of that again, so I was just as confused the next time I went to share a notebook.

The User Experience Redesigned

The first thing I did was do some brief, small sketches of ways the left-hand area could be redesigned to be clearer. There’s nothing revolutionary here. Evernote already designed the app this way — they just left it in the upper “Notebooks” area and didn’t carry it through to the Sharing functionality. (You’ll have to forgive the poor quality — these are cellphone snaps instead of scans I’m afraid.)

Sketch 1: a possible redesign of the Notebook and Sharing widgets.

The first thing I did was change the Sharing widget to a Linked Notebooks widget and change the Notebooks label to read Your Notebooks. By doing this we immediately separate out the two kinds of notebooks we can have in Evernote: our own, and those that other people own that we’ve imported into our account. The new Linked Notebooks widget deals only with linking, which turns out to be kind of different from sharing — sharing is the process of making your own notebooks readable by other people, and linking is the process of importing other people’s notebooks into your account. These two different functionalities shouldn’t be housed under the single title of Sharing.

The actual sharing functionality can now be moved into something more logical. Do you see the “Edit” box at the bottom of the Your Notebooks widget? It seems pretty logical that sharing is a setting we can edit, and if we pull down the Edit box we’ll see things we can do with our notebooks that also seem logically grouped with the ability to set a notebook’s sharing properties.

The Edit dropdown box.

You might think at first that the “Properties…” option would be the group to hold any share settings. But on clicking “Properties…” we’re presented with a tiny dialog that only contains two options: setting the name of the selected notebook and setting this to your default notebook. But the main “Edit” dialog already has an option to rename the selected notebook, so why are we doubling up this option in a popup that only contains two options?

The Properties option gives you this small dialog.

Why not replace the “Properties…” option with a “Set as default notebook” option and add “Sharing…” as an option below that? The “Sharing” option would then take you to the existing page we’ve been trying to get to all along in this exercise.

The page we've been trying to reach all along.

We can take this user experience redesign a step further, though. Why require the user to click a notebook and then make a second click on the Edit box at the very bottom of that list, followed by a third click for the option they want? We can see that each Notebook widget allows you to maximize and minimize it, so why not carry that same functionality through and give each notebook an expandable list of options? Horizontal spacing is not an issue since the width of the left column of the Evernote web app is dynamically resizable.

Sketch 3: Rolling the options into the notebook list.

Sketch 2: A dropdown box containing each notebook's options.

This dropdown would eliminate another curious part of the sharing experience design. When we click “Sharing Setup” we’re presented with this page:

The interim sharing page.

You must click the button to edit a notebook’s sharing properties to get to the page we’ve been trying to reach. If the sharing option were integrated as previously described, clicking on “Sharing…” would take the user directly to the sharing options for the individual notebook instead of an interim page that doesn’t seem to do much but require an extraneous click.

This would also eliminate one more small design issue with this page: differentiating the two currently similar “Edit” buttons on the page. One is for notebooks and is contained within the Notebooks widget, and the other is in a row of buttons at the top of the notebook contents itself on the right.

When I was looking for notebook options I saw two “Edit” buttons on the page and didn’t immediately associate the row on the top with the notebook contents — for a second or two I thought that row of buttons pertained to the master notebook I was in because the names of the buttons were fairly generic (“New”, “Edit”, “Delete” instead of “New Note”, “Edit Note”, and “Delete Note”). Then I realized why that was the case, apart from the text labels themselves: there isn’t enough visual spacing to help our eyes associate the buttons with their appropriate content, which is the notes below them. Attaching the options for each Notebook tightly to the notebook title itself would clear up this ambiguity. Pushing the spacing and detaching the notebook contents into its own visual container with the buttons would also help.

Separating the containers for Notebooks and Notebook Contents and adding space could help eliminate ambiguity between the Note actions and Notebook actions.

If we followed these steps, the act of sharing a notebook publicly, which is a pretty cool feature of Evernote, could be done in just a couple of easy-to-find clicks, and the options for each notebook would not only be more quickly accessible but more tightly integrated, making them easier to find. The concepts of linking and sharing would be cleanly separated and easily identified.

A Note On Hubris

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s pretty gauche to just start dictating to some other designer or company how they should do things. Trust me, I’ve been on that end of the stick — as a game developer you have gamers constantly telling you how you should have done things in your last game with all the confidence of someone who knows your job way better than you do. I can’t tell you how many armchair game UI designers are out there — I’ve met too many to count. It’s impossible not to sound like you’re breezing in, slapping a design solution down on the table with a sarcastic “you’re welcome,” and then pushing up your fake horn-rimmed glasses while taking out your iPhone 4 and pretending you just got a call from Steve Jobs asking if you wanted to grab some tapas. (Note to self: get some fake horn-rimmed glasses. Also, befriend Steve Jobs.)

I’m not trying to tell Evernote how to design. Okay, I suppose I am. But I’m probably not telling them anything they don’t already know — UI and UX is complicated stuff, and things slip through the cracks or sometimes get designed in ways that were intuitive once but feel broken later, and this is probably all stuff that’s already on their list. And of course those who live in glass houses and all that. Really, I’m just looking at this as a homework assignment for myself — as a devoted fan of Evernote, I see a usability problem that makes my usually wonderful experience less than wonderful, and since I’m a UI designer/developer, why shouldn’t I put my money where my mouth is and use this as a learning tool in how to design what I think would be a better experience?

So…you’re welcome. Now excuse me, I’ve got to take this call.

“Yo, Steve, what is up, my man? Hell yeah I know a kickin’ tapas place…”

I kind of went batt crazy (har har) this week and did some more batts, even though I have some still waiting to spin. But when the urge strikes you gotta go with it. This time, though, I thought I’d detail the process a bit more. Maybe it’s just for my own benefit when I look back and want to see how I did these, or maybe someone reading this is interested in seeing this process detailed.

The plan. I had a plan for these batts, which I’m calling “Gun Metal Benz.” You’ll see the finished product in a bit. The plan was that I wanted to blend Benz’s black fleece with merino/silk that I’d dyed Gun Metal Blue, thinking that the black of Benz’s natural color would make the dye really pop as it has in past blends I’ve done with his fleece. So I started with some washed locks and carded them up into batts.

Benz's soft fleece, carded into two batts.

There’s a little bit of his white in there that I couldn’t quite separate. Well, “couldn’t” meaning “was too lazy to.” It wasn’t really going to matter with how I wanted to blend it. Once I had the alpaca carded I began combining it on the drum carder with the merino/silk roving that I’d already dyed.

Some of Benz and some merino/silk on the drum carder.

I kept layering the alpaca with the merino/silk until I filled the carder. After removing it, I split the batt down the middle, then split those pieces in half, and then pulled each piece into a thin mini-batt. I ran it through the drum carder one more time to blend it further, and this is the resulting batt, laid flat.

The blended-twice batt.

It looks a bit more purple in this picture than it actually is, which is kind of cool — the dye color is an interesting blend of purply-blues and grays, which you can see here in the finished picture.

The finished batt -- Gun Metal Benz.

My plan was to spin this for myself rather than sell it, as I wanted to knit the Gaenor shawl with it from the very start. I produced two batts, each around 1.5 ounces, and still have enough to at least make a third or even a fourth batt. I’m still trying to decide, though, if I want to spin this into lofty, soft singles or ply it. I’m leaning toward singles just because they’re sort of my new favorite thing to experiment with.

In the wedding shawl department I’m making progress.

The Luna Moth wedding shawl. Slowly but surely.

It doesn’t look like much right now but I’m making progress, the pattern is progressing beautifully. Like all lace I really can’t wait to block it to see the full effect. I’d say I’m a little under halfway done with it. I should be further along as the wedding is in only three weeks (!!!), but I admit I was lazy about working on it the last two weeks. Still, I’m confident I can finish it as I have some time this weekend to really devote to it. Although the repeats are getting longer I’m currently averaging about one repeat per sit-down session, and I have four more repeats to go plus the border. I’ve knit complex items like this in a shorter time span so I’m not too worried. Although I’ll probably blog about this the week of my wedding and you’ll be a witness to me freaking out if it’s not done. But honestly, if it’s not done it’s not done — it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I just thought a pretty blue silk shawl that I knit myself out of yarn I got when he proposed to me would be lovely and perfect to go over my bare shoulders in case it’s cool out. It’s certainly not a requirement. But I can imagine how lovely it’ll be in pictures. I just have to make sure that when I block it I get the last of the dye out that’s currently staining my fingers when I knit it.

And in the “This Is Cheating” department since technically it’s not something made by me yet, I wanted to show off the spinning fiber I got today from a local spinner. I have her shop feed and check it regularly and when this stunning colorway came up in a favorite fiber blend — Merino/Tencel — I couldn’t pass it up. This picture doesn’t really do it justice.

A Merino/Tencel blend by Woolgatherings. What stunning colors!

I sometimes feel guilty spinning fibers, batts, or rovings that (a) weren’t processed from raw fiber by me and (b) don’t have any of my own alpacas’ fiber in it. Do any of you fellow animal-owning spinners feel the same way? I feel like I’m somehow cheating on my alpacas by spinning other people’s batts, or somehow being lazy or uncreative by buying fiber that someone else has dyed and processed. I’m aware of how utterly ridiculous that is, of course. I mean, look at that dye job — that’s worth supporting. And seeing work like that inspires me, so how can I pass it up? And occasionally it’s good to branch out and play with other fibers so you can remember how great it feels to come back to your own and not take them for granted. Don’t you think?

So that’s it this week. But that’s not all the Fiber Friday you can possibly eat, is it? Because there’s way, way more than just this over at WonderWhyGal’s wonderful blog. So eat up!

Cinnamon Chocolate Mint batts.

I hadn’t intended to make these, but while doing some cleaning this weekend while I had some spare time I put away a bag of Cinnamon’s fleece in the fiber studio. When I opened the plastic box I use to store his fiber, I saw that I had a big paper bag filled with some of the combing waste I had saved from blending his fleece with some Merino wool. I looked up at my peg board and saw the green and chocolate Merino roving I had dyed that had been sitting there a while. I didn’t have a specific project in mind for these rovings; they were the leftovers of a previous project. I looked at the bag, and then I looked at the rovings. And then I took a few minutes to sit down with my drum carder. What came out were these batts, and I’m loving the color. I’m calling it Cinnamon Chocolate Mint and I can’t wait to spin them up.

I only got a total of 3.2 ounces so I need to decide exactly how I want to spin this to maximize the yarn I get. Any thoughts on that, spinners? For now they’re just sitting there looking pretty while I decide. Usually I know exactly how I want to spin the fibers I prepare but I guess because this was so spur of the moment I’m kind of blanking on the next step.

That’s it for this week, so it’s another short Fiber Friday post. But don’t let that stop you from getting even more Friday Fiber fill over at Wonder Why Gal’s Fiber Friday.

For the most part the phone has been easy enough to use — “easy enough” meaning that the UI had issues, and it may take a mistake or two to get a setting right but eventually I figured it out. While looking for answers to questions I had online I saw more than one post that mentioned that Blackberries are well known for their steep learning curve but that the reward for having surmounted it was mastery of a lot of advanced options and a highly configurable device.

Well, that learning curve really decided to come back and bite me the other day: I had what was possible the worst user experience with a device I’ve ever had. I’ll tell you the story, and then I’ll tell you what questions it raised in my mind about the psychology of user interfaces and experiences.

The Contacts list on my phone has been gathering duplicate contacts for a while now. I have the phone set to sync with Gmail, and it’s been causing duplicate contacts to show up in both places. To compound the issue the Facebook app on the Blackberry asked to sync my Contacts with my Facebook contacts, and doing so caused a bunch of contacts to be merged that shouldn’t have been merged — two different people’s information suddenly began crossing over into each other’s Contacts entry. So now I had no idea if I had the right phone number for any of my contacts.

I tried changing the contacts in Gmail or on the phone but since it’s set to sync with Google sync that simply did nothing. So I looked online and the first thing I saw was that many people had problems with Facebook’s contacts issue. The solution to this problem was posted several times in different forums: I needed to go deep into the advanced settings for the phone and delete the CiCAL service book for Facebook from the list.

Now, if you know what a service book is I’m going to bet money that you work for Blackberry. My ordeal didn’t stop here, but this was the first warning sign: a consumer should never have to see something so jargon-y like “CiCAL service book” in their entire history of using the phone to solve what should be very easy problems to solve like duplicate contacts.

So I deleted the service book — whatever a service book is — but I still had duplicate contacts. I found more forum answers that said I had to install the Blackberry Desktop Manager to delete my contacts and resync with my Gmail contacts. So I downloaded it, tried to install it, and it hung on the last 20% of installation. I tried again; same result, only this time I kept getting popups that said the software couldn’t install because another installation was already in progress, and when I tried to stop these processes and start fresh I discovered that the software was still listed as being installed under my Programs list and that I had to edit registry entries to remove it. And I discovered that many other users had the same result.

Frustrated with the desktop software I decided to go with a more brute force route that I saw in another forum post — and I should mention here that forum posts were the only source of information on these problems that I could find — and that was to just wipe the phone. There’s an option to save third party data so I figured I’d take the chance and see if it worked. And it did remove all of my contacts…except that after setting up my email accounts again on my phone, it refused to let me send email.

I was set up properly with my email accounts but if I tried to send an email it insisted I wasn’t registered on the network and that I had to set up my email. When it took me to the settings page I could clearly see that my email information was there and accurate. So I checked some more forums. There were two answers I tried: one was to go deep into the advanced settings (again) and go into the Host Routing Tables menu (?!), find the entry in the long list that was bold, and then choose to Authenticate it.

Really, Blackberry? This is something you expect users to be able to logically find somehow? Oh, and that didn’t work. Neither did the battery pull that was also recommended.

The next answer had to do with service books again — forum posts said that my service books simply needed to be resent (again, whatever “service books” are). I was to log into the BIS web site for my cellphone provider — because each provider has a different BIS, or Blackberry Internet Service site — and select the “Resend Service Books” option.

I had never been given a log in to that web site and hadn’t had to use it, so I tried to set up an account and was told by the site that I was not allowed to use this service. By now I’d had it and decided to call Verizon support. I explained my frustration to the lady and she was surprised that the web site hadn’t given me an account, so she set one up for me. And she had my service books resent, and within minutes my email was working on my phone.

By the end of all of this I was nearly ready to smash my Blackberry against a wall and vow never to buy them again, and I’m still pretty sure about the latter part. There was no reason at all for the hoops I had to jump through, nor for the incredible amount of jargon I encountered along the way. I’m a very tech-savvy person and I’m not afraid of jargon, but there’s simply no reason why I should have ever had to see that kind of meaningless jargon for the simple case of duplicate contact fixes.

Yet I’ve seen people talk about the Blackberry as being “challenging” but having a hugely devoted fan base. Why? It’s pretty clear that Apple and maybe Droid are destroying them in the mobile phone department. The features I’m using on my Blackberry are no more complex than the features I’m using on my iPad and iPod Touch, yet the Blackberry UI is horribly unapproachable and the entire user experience doesn’t come close to Apple or Droid. Could Blackberry users have simply invested too much into the process of learning about the phone they chose that, like Stockholm Syndrome, they had to believe they’d been rewarded with some kind of mythical level of advancement or else all that time and effort would otherwise have been wasted?

I’m curious how much Blackberry is learning, if at all, from their competitors, and I’m really curious if there’s a psychology of UI that talks about these issues. Can a UI or user experience ever be too simplistic? Is there any value in providing a “more challenging” UI like Blackberry does? Where is the sweet spot on the UI/UX development spectrum that sits between “so complex that it’s frustrating” and “simple enough for anyone to use but deep enough for advanced users to feel they get more value”?

I’ve always had terrible skin. As a kid I had acne and as an adult I have the common problem of rosacea — a mild condition that entails some patchy redness and broken blood vessels that can be hard to cover up with makeup and are usually made worse by most skin products. It was always hard to find products that didn’t further irritate my skin and hard to find makeup that helped cover it up without looking like I was trying to imitate Tammy Faye Bakker. I tried any product on the shelf that made promises of clearing the skin, reducing redness, and evening skin tone. And then when those didn’t work I stepped up the game and tried products from some of the bigger dedicated companies like Mary Kay.

A lot of these products didn’t do much of anything or make any noticeable difference. Some worked for the most part. None of them produced any miracles, but then I wasn’t expecting any. The main problem was not that they didn’t work but that they were so expensive. A single bottle or jar of most skin products that promise to improve skin condition like mine can cost upwards of fifteen dollars or more, and they’re small enough to go through quickly, and I was too queasy to do the math on how much that was costing me.

Then I got the book Natural Beauty at Home. Like the skin products I was using I wasn’t expecting any miracles. I figured a lot of the stuff wouldn’t work. So I tried some recipes, mostly basic stuff like lip balms. I liked them so I thumbed through the other recipes specifically for skin care to see if any of these would be easier on both my skin and wallet. Once I got going it was like a whole other world opened up where I was no longer shelling out scary amounts of money for skin care products and makeup, and only spending a few minutes making things that were cheaper and far more effective.

So here’s a list of what I’ve been doing, and a few resources to help you get started if you want to try it yourself. I probably won’t detail the specific recipes here for a couple of reasons: one, I’ve tweaked each recipe according to my own needs and wants and so specific recipes may not be right for you; two, these are constantly evolving.

The Supplies

I use one site to get all of my supplies: MakingCosmetics.com. I’m not affiliated with them, they just seem like they have everything you could need, from supplies to actual free recipes. And for me they’re local in Renton, Washington.

Browsing the site, you’re going to see a lot of ingredients. A lot that probably sound like strange chemicals you’ve never heard of — that was my experience. But most of what I’ve been making uses some super basic stuff that isn’t harmful at all. And that’s the beauty of making your own skin care products: you get to control what’s in it. If a recipe has something in it that makes you wary, do some more research and find a substitute.

Coconut Cloud Cold Cream

This recipe is actually straight from the Natural Beauty at Home book, and if you’re thinking of trying out your own DiY skin creams I highly recommend you try this one. It’s easy and it’s a great introduction to making creams with some ingredients that might be new to you. This was the first recipe I tried from the book and I’m so happy I did: it’s the perfect makeup remover, not only for my regular makeup but for my heavy stage makeup for bellydance performances.

The recipe called for stearic acid, something I’d never heard of until I read the recipe. Stearic acid is a natural fatty acid derived from palm leaves (it can also come from animal sources, I think, so if you want to go vegan you may need to do some research). The supply site I used has it in a pretty large amount for just a few dollars.

I won’t list the recipe here since it’s in the book and that’s likely to violate copyright. The recipe takes about five minutes to actually make and involves a couple of Pyrex measuring glasses that I already had and a simple water bath in a pot on the stove. In one measuring glass the recipe called for me to put distilled water and baking soda; in the measuring glass that sat in the water bath on the stove I added some stearic acid (a pretty small amount considering how much comes in the bag!) and some coconut oil. Then you combine the heated water phase (that is, the water and baking soda) with the oil phase (the stuff on the stove) and what happens next reminds you of being in chemistry class: the whole thing foams up as you stir it, with the final result being a silky smooth, coconut-fragranced cream. As it cools to room temperature it’ll stiffen up to the perfect consistency.

I was amazed at how easy it was to make. And cheap! It took all of five minutes and I made about two months-worth of cold cream for less than a dollar. I use it as a makeup remover primarily but it also works as a heavy-duty skin cream and a great after-shower moisturizer.

Basic Face Moisturizer

The cold cream I made is a great makeup remover but it’s a bit too heavy for me to use as a daily face moisturizer, so I decided to try making my own. I began with a recipe from the book but it had some properties that didn’t work well for my face — it was a bit too heavy and didn’t soak in as much as I wanted. So I did some research and approached this as scientifically as I could: I made some notes, changed an ingredient, made some more notes and trials, and kept repeating. After about six trials I got the recipe that really worked for me: a non-greasy moisturizer that absorbs really well into my skin and wears great under makeup.

For this recipe I had to make a foray into another ingredient that I wasn’t familiar with: cetyl alcohol. This is another fairly common ingredient that’s naturally-derived and like stearic acid was available pretty cheap in a large quantity. The recipe is a bit different than the cold cream but the process is the same: the water phase includes water, baking soda, and some aloe vera gel, and the oil phase involves stearic acid, cetyl alcohol, some sweet almond oil (my favorite go-to skin care oil), and a little bit of peppermint for scent. Again, like the cold cream it only took a few minutes to heat and mix the ingredients. I pour the final result into some small jars that I get from the same supplier and let it cool, and the moisturizer lasts me for at least two to three months.

Perhaps in a Part Four for this series I’ll detail all six trials. Assuming people are interested in that.

A Note On Preservatives

At this point I need to make a note about preservatives. Many of the recipes you’ll see on the web will tell you a preservative is vital for cleanliness. And I’ll agree with that. But I’ve also learned through trial and error that storing my final products well and making smaller batches that I use more quickly eliminates much of the need for using preservatives.

If you want to use them and want to stay as natural as possible you’ll want to research them. Parabens, for instance, are a frequent preservative but there are studies showing that these may be carcinogenic. If you do some research there are some good preservatives available that aren’t harsh and some are naturally derived.

Next Time In Part 3: Face Cleanser and Mineral Makeup

In Part 3 I’ll detail how I’ve made The Best Damn Face Cleanser Ever from ingredients you probably already have in your pantry, and a mineral makeup that’s so easy and cheap to make and so perfect for your skin tone that you’ll wonder why you ever bothered with buying bottles of foundation.

We’ve been busily planning the wedding, and it’s surprising just how much time that can take up. In the meantime, though, I began the Luna Moth shawl and I’m really enjoying how it’s working up so far. This is my Something Blue and my Something New for the wedding. The yarn is gorgeous and so delicately soft that I’m almost afraid of it — it’s a singles and I rarely knit with singles to begin with, and it’s 100% silk to boot. But hey, it’s gorgeous so far, don’t you think? I can’t wait to finish it. The only negative with this yarn is that the dye isn’t fully set and leaves some blue on my hands, which means I’ve got some soaking to do when this is done lest it leave that blue on my dress.

Luna Moth shawl, in progress.

And that’s it for this week. I ain’t got time to write, I’ve got a shawl to knit!

We got a visit from that neighbor last weekend. We were dismayed to learn from him that Tiger Mountain Alpacas had to sell their animals, which for him meant that his pasture was empty and had been for nearly a year now and the grasses and weeds were getting out of control. He stopped by to ask if we were interested in putting our boys on it — free grass for us, free pasture mowing for him.

After some questions and a quick walk up the road to check out the pasture we decided it was a great idea. Our summer here in the northwest has been terrible for growing anything so our pasture is growing pretty slowly. We figured this was a great way to extend our pasture’s viability a little bit and maybe allow us to give our boys just a little less hay this year. We’ll only be doing it through July and August — after that the bears start hanging around our neighbor’s area for berries and get a little unpredictable, he says.

We figured we’d start with bringing them up for just a day, which we did last weekend, then start bringing them up Saturday morning and leaving them until Sunday evening, and maybe bringing them up before work in the morning and going to get them at dinner during the week. He lives a five minute walk away but it’s somehow far more remote than our place — his pasture has some lovely views of some of this side of Tiger Mountain. I’m a bit too nervous to leave them up there for several days at a time just yet. While we know that our boys are farm animals and serve a purpose they’re also quasi-pets, and not seeing them out in their pasture is still just a little bit unnerving for me.

But that said, we haltered them up and took them up for their first day last weekend. What’s great about this is that it’s giving us a chance to halter them two or three times a week right now, and we’re using that time to also get them used to us trimming their toenails. We feel like old pros now at catching them and haltering them all. Cinnamon still gives us a hard time when doing his toenails and we still find it nearly impossible to get all his feet in one session. But we’re working on it.

Matt and I led the boys out of their pasture gate and headed up our gravel road toward our neighbor. The boys were immediately intrigued by this. Silverton and Benz were walking slightly ahead of us, looking around at everything, and at nearly every driveway or cleared brush area they wanted to visit and check it out. We walked by one neighbor washing her car who burst out in laughter at the sight of two people walking three alpacas. “I just love those alpacas!” She shouted. The boys were too interested in where we were going to stop, though.

We got to the pasture and set them up, and as we walked away from the gate they clustered together and stared at us hilariously from the tall grass. Cinnamon looked at us as if to say, Don’t exile me! I promise to be good next time!

We came back that night after they had about a full day on the pasture. Herding them toward the gate was no problem — they almost seemed anxious to leave. Even while walking home they seemed to trot ahead of us as if they knew that’s where we were going.

We repeated the process today, only tonight they’ll stay up there overnight and we’ll go get them tomorrow evening. This time as we walked they were a little calmer and as soon as they got into the pasture they started eating, so maybe they feel a little more comfortable this time. It was already hot out so we even gave them a belly bath to help start their day, and they immediately settled into cool dirt piles that they or the previous alpacas had started.

So I’m sure they’re fine. Between the pasture owner and his neighbor they have four dogs to scare off anything lurking around there. But it sure is weird and a little uncomfortable not to see them out of my kitchen windows. Part of why weekends are so awesome is that I get to see my alpacas doing alpaca things all day. Matt assures me that we can always take a walk up there after dinner and say hello, just to check in on them. I might do that.

Wedding planning is my go-to excuse these days — I’ve spent most of my free time researching and researching and researching some more, and for some reason I felt like I just really needed a short spinning and knitting break, you know? And it doesn’t help that I’ve stalled on that lovely shawl I’m making with my Bamboo Benz handspun; I was sure I had enough yardage but ended up coming up very short, and with it being a lacy triangular shawl pattern (Marmalade on Ravelry) I now have to figure out the right place to rip back to if I want to finish it correctly. I don’t care about it being small — I actually kind of want it small so that it’s more of a neck shawl — but I do care about finishing it right. But now that I’m actually looking at the pattern after pulling it up to link here, I think I’m feeling a little more stress than I need to about it. It looks like I really can just rip back to the end of the last repeat and do the finishing chart. I’ve been knitting for twenty years now so this really shouldn’t be that scary. And it’s not, it’s just that it’s disheartening to know that after twenty years of knitting you can still make egregious errors like severely underestimating your yardage or not planning your chart repeats correctly. Or not putting a lifeline in to easily rip back to. You know, like you said you were going to do when you started this project knowing that you would likely run out of yarn. That sound you hear is that of my palm meeting my forehead.

At any rate, I’ll probably set it aside in order to work on The Wedding Shawl because I have — yikes! — only about two months now to do it. Honestly that should be plenty of time but placing deadlines on my knitting, for whatever reason, suddenly adds this foreboding shadow of dread and it makes me procrastinate even more about starting them or getting them done. I’ve actually enjoyed knitting the Marmalade pattern so much that I toyed with the idea of using that as the wedding shawl pattern as well, but I have 1000 yards of silk for the wedding shawl and the Marmalade pattern only uses about half of that. It seems like a waste of lovely yarn not to use all of it for a shawl, although I suppose I could simply make it larger or add repeats. So the pattern I’ve been considering is Luna Moth, which is a little bigger and slightly more complex, I think. I don’t know. I really can’t decide. What do you think?

I hadn’t spun a damn thing in weeks until Wednesday when I was stuck at home sick with a nasty cold. I swear that this is, no joke, at least the third or fourth time I’ve been sick this year and I don’t know why. I’ve detailed in other posts on this site the trials and tribulations I’ve had with my thyroid-related autoimmune disorder, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, and I sometimes wonder if my immune system is just too damn busy attacking my thyroid that it lets every virus that feels like it just waltz through the door without giving them a second glance. It’s the only explanation I can think of because by all measurements I’m actually quite healthy, healthier than I’ve been…well, ever, really. I just get sick a lot. But really, when I’m not sick I’m quite healthy!

But I digress.

I had enough energy on Wednesday to spend about an hour of it spinning, so I worked on the Blue-Faced Leicester batts that I bought from Teresa Levite Studio. I decided to spin them into some thin low-twist singles and finished up about half of the batch that I bought.

I'm calling this batch Grape Soda & Bubblegum.

It’s been forever, it seems, that I’ve spun batts or roving that I didn’t create myself so I felt weirdly detached from the yarn I was making. I wasn’t that excited about it on the bobbin the way I am with other yarns I’ve spun, especially those I’ve created the batts or roving for, but after taking it off and skeining it I think I appreciate it more. It’s got a lot of texture and color and it’s super soft. I’m calling it “Grape Soda & Bubblegum” and I ended up with about 228 yards of it. I’ve got another two batts to spin up, which I may have time to do this weekend. It was good to take a small break from spinning for a few weeks but I’m anxious to get back at it. I want to finish up this yarn and then get to a couple of other yarn designs I’ve had my mind wrapped around doing for a while now.

I’m envious of all those ladies I see on Twitter having fun with Tour de Fleece, something I just don’t have time for right now. But you go, ladies. And you can read all about them if you check out all the other Fiber Friday posts at WonderWhyGal’s blog.

The clothes part I’ve always handled by knitting and sewing a lot of my own clothes. I actually don’t like sewing that much and hardly do it anymore, but as a teenager I got really good at taking patterns and making them fit me. And of course knitting my own sweaters and accessories is something I’ve obviously kept up with.

So how about the whole skin care and makeup thing? Well, several years ago I got the urge to give that one a try and started making some of my own basic cosmetics — things like lip balm or bath oils, nothing too outrageously difficult. I was still spending a ton of money on expensive moisturizers, makeup, and hair products, though, and a few years ago I picked up a book called Natural Beauty at Home and my whole outlook on what I was capable of making myself completely changed. I started making my own cold cream to remove makeup. I not only succeeded in making a great product that was just as good, if not better, than what I was paying for at home, it turned out to be way cheaper and only took a few minutes to make. So I ventured even further — I looked up recipes and tried moisturizers, face cleansers, and mineral foundation. When those seemed to get really close to what I wanted I started researching and adapting my recipes, doing multiple trials, and eventually refining them to produce exactly what I wanted — all on the cheap, both in money and time.

This weekend I decided to branch out and try to make my own eyeshadows for the first time. I thought I’d document the process a little bit and show you what I did. In Part 2 I’ll talk about the other products I’ve been making for a few years now — moisturizer, cold cream, and mineral foundation.

I started out with some supplies from MakingCosmetics.com. I’m not affiliated with them, I’ve just found that they seem to have everything I need to make everything that I make (and bonus, they’re local, too!). They have tons of recipes on the site as well, from the basic to recipes that are so complex you’d think you should be in a lab to make them. I’d been wanting to try eyeshadows for a while but hadn’t needed to buy any supplies until lately, when I could justify throwing in some of their mica powders. But I ran out of mineral base to make my mineral foundation with (the bag I bought for about ten dollars lasted me over a year!) so I ordered the smallest and cheapest containers of four mica powders: pearl white, bordeaux red, blackstar red, and bronze. I thought that any combination of these would probably result in a color that I’d wear. I also included some magnesium stearate as a binding agent — I looked up several recipes and saw that this was a key ingredient to helping it bind together and stay on.

I have a mortal and pestle that I use to combine my mineral makeup ingredients, so I set everything up and got started.

Whenever I tend to make something I’m really bad at keeping a log of what I did so that I can reproduce it later. So this time I made sure to be diligent about that and took copious notes. I decided to make three colors for a typical three-color set of eyeshadow: a lid color, a crease color, and a highlight color. I started with the highlight first as I knew it would be the easiest.

I put a half a teaspoon of mineral base into my mortar and decided to start with quarter teaspoon quantities of mica until I got the desired result. It really didn’t take much — a quarter teaspoon for the highlight color, which is pretty much an off-white already, was all it took. The next step was to add the magnesium stearate. Here I was going to have to wing it a little — the recipe from the web site had far more ingredients than I was including, so instead of using the actual amount I went by its recommendation of the magnesium stearate being 5% of the total weight. That amounted to just a tiny amount, less than an eighth of a teaspoon, so I added what seemed like just a tiny bit and ground it into the mortar. Once they were combined I tried some of the eyeshadow on the back of my hand as a test. Score! It seemed like just the right color. I also actually put some on my eyes and it seemed perfect.

(Now, having said that I have to sort of go back and partially take back what I said: now that I’ve actually used it in conjunction with the other colors I’ve made it’s definitely a little too white, so next time I’ll be adding a tiny bit of bronze mica to it to tone that down. In the meantime, I just pick up a little bit of the brown color I also made that’s next to it when I apply it.)

I’d gotten two types of containers for my eyeshadow; one was the standard square palette and one was made up of individual containers with a sifter for more of a loose powder. I decided to try putting this into the palette container and press it as much as possible. It seemed to work, although it’s definitely far looser than most pressed powders, so I need to do some more investigation into a good binding agent as I think I’d prefer to have pressed eyeshadows rather than loose, but we’ll see.

I moved on to the next color, which was the lid color. I wanted a nice, neutral brown, nothing too dark. I did the same steps: I started with a half a teaspoon of the mineral base and added some of the bronze mica. I kept having to add it, quarter teaspoon by quarter teaspoon, to get it darker and it just didn’t seem to be getting dark enough — tests against the back of my hand showed that would just blend right into my skin. So I added a touch of the blackstar red, a very deep, purple red. That was just what it needed to darken it up. Now that it was a bit red, though, I needed to brown it a bit, so I added a bit of my beige blend mineral powder that I use for my foundation. Perfect! I added what seemed like the right amount of magnesium stearate and put this one in the palette next to the highlight color. Since I had so much of it from adding and adding bronze I also put some into one of the loose containers so that I could try both and see what I liked.

I repeated this process with the last color I had planned, a crease color. I wanted this one to be a darker color that had elements of reddish-purple in it but was still predominantly brown. After much blending and testing on the hand I came up with a color that was made up of roughly one part bronze, two parts blackstar red, and two and a half parts bordeaux red. So it’s actually more purple in the pot but surprisingly has a less-than-purple shade when applied.

I didn’t feel like stopping there since I still had a couple of additional containers for color. So I decided to just see what I could come up with through some experiments. I decided to make a more pinkish-bronze color, something that could be used for either a blush or an eyeshadow, and then I decided to try and make a very light brownish/peach color. Both seemed to be pretty successful colors. I put the pinkish blush-like color in its own sifter pot, and put the peach color into the last slot of the palette box.

So of course I put the colors on my eyes as the very final test. And I love them! The shades are perfect. Yesterday I tried the first three colors I made, and today I tried the peachy color as a lid color and the more brown color as a crease color. Both combinations of colors are great and I’m very happy with them. I can definitely learn something, however, about improving their consistency and glide. Because they’re almost a loose powder it can be easy to put too much on so I have to go very, very lightly with these. They also don’t glide quite as much as a store-bought eyeshadow would. I suspect that I can add some things to improve these, though. I wore my eyeshadow for at least eight hours yesterday and it actually creased less than any of my store-bought ones, so there’s already some satisfaction there.

I’m excited about these because it opens the door to really being creative with color and trying my hand at some stage makeup for bellydance. And it’s really inexpensive! I used hardly any of the mica powders and they only cost $2.50 for a teaspoon container. I also only used about a half a teaspoon of mineral base for each eyeshadow out of a 1.8 ounce bag that costs ten dollars. So in essence these eyeshadows only cost pennies to make.

Next time in Part 2 I’ll cover my process for refining and creating the best moisturizer I’ve ever used.

1. Alpacas are far easier to take care of than we thought.

At some point in my ten-plus years of spinning I knew I’d want to own the animals that provided my fiber. It was a pipe dream – I never imagined I’d live on enough land to do it, it just didn’t seem in the cards for me. But I read up on it for years anyway, joining the AlpacaTalk list years ago and simply lurking and absorbing everything I could, and reading as many books as I could find on small farm animal ownership. I used to think I wanted to own sheep, but once I began spinning alpaca and learned that they were easier to care for than sheep I switched my focus…even though I was sure I’d never get the chance to actually own any.

Then Matt found the house we live in now, a place with a pasture and barn already in place because the previous owners had had horses. He asked how many alpacas I thought we could raise on that pasture. I tried to bite my tongue because I didn’t want to jinx anything.

Once we moved in we started talking about eventually getting alpacas. You know, when we were ready to be farmers. And as we talked and thought and talked and thought the grass in the unused pasture grew and grew and grew. It grew to the point where a mere lawnmower to keep it down wasn’t going to work, and renting equipment to mow it was really pricey. We figured we’d better step up our plans, so I researched harder. And the grass grew taller. Eventually it was clear that the only way we were going to beat back that grass was by having animals to eat it.

Finally we knew we had to just jump in and do it. At a certain point with farm animals, I’ve learned, you can only learn so much by reading – the rest you’ve just got to learn by actually doing. So after meeting the Stanwycks and getting some basic supplies – water buckets, mineral feed, some hay, some wound powder for emergencies, and some toenail trimmers – we bought our three boys and brought them home.

We were shocked at how little care they actually needed. I had just finished contract work and was in between jobs, and I kept trying to find things to do out there in the pasture. But the reality was that the alpacas just really didn’t need us. We did, however, socialize with them whenever it was appropriate so that they’d get used to us – feeding them their minerals by hand and giving them belly baths in the July heat. But since we only have three boys we only need to clean the pasture twice a week, and even toenail trimming isn’t an all-day affair.

I think alpacas might just be easier to take care of than cats.

2. Alpacas will let you know when you’re doing it wrong.

I can’t tell you how many times I practiced haltering and handling the alpacas while being terrified that I was doing it wrong. I was scared I’d put the halter on them in ways that constricted their breathing, or that I’d put it on too tight and it would be painful.

I’ve since learned that the alpacas are really, really good at letting you know when you did it wrong. Benz is our barometer: he’s so calm and easy to handle that when he’s bucking after I put his halter on I know for sure I did it wrong. But as soon as the halters are on properly their whole demeanor changes drastically – they’re calm, composed, and, like dogs, seem to know that you’re in charge right now. And they’re okay with that.

We’ve learned to listen to the alpacas when they’re trying to tell us that the halters are on wrong instead of assuming that they’re just being obstinate.

3. Alpacas have way more personality then we thought.

It’s amazing just how different each one can be. Our three boys have radically different personalities and it’s been hilarious and fun watching those personalities interact as they’ve bonded into their own little herd. Like your standard pet they have moods and things they do that you eventually learn to interpret. Silverton is the herd leader but Cinnamon likes to think he is. Silverton is shy and likes to hang back to see if everything’s safe while Cinnamon will pretty much charge into an area and just own it, looking at you like you’re the interloper. And Benz is incredibly sweet and likes to walk up and just look at you calmly with his big, black-rimmed eyes.

4. Alpacas are a lot smarter than we thought.

I’ve always tended to equate all farm animal intelligence with that of a cow, but that’s definitely not true with alpacas. I feel like Wiley E. Coyote when trying to trick the alpacas into the barn for toenail trimming. Somehow our body language tips off Silverton every time.

5. Judging hay and pasture quality is hard.

We’re still learning about hay quality and how to tell good hay from bad, and we’re definitely still learning how to tell when the boys are getting enough forage in the pasture versus needing more hay. It seems in the last month that they’ve insisted on eating only hay rather than foraging, which is surprising to us because when we look out there we see what we think is perfectly fine pasture grass and plenty of blackberries. So we’re still trying to figure out if maybe there’s less out there for them than we think and maybe the pasture grass still just hasn’t hit its summer stride yet.

6. Alpacas are far more entertaining than we thought.

Benz falling over onto Silverton in the middle of the pasture when laying down; Silverton getting blackberries stuck to his butt and running around in circles wagging his little tail trying to get it off; all three of them wigging out in the sunshine and just pronking for the sheer joy of it; Cinnamon sneezing a big loogey right onto Matt during mineral feeding time and then looking at him like, well, where else was I supposed to sneeze?

There have been so many times this year when we’ve just stood at the windows and watched them be alpacas and derived so much joy from it. We certainly never expected it to be this entertaining.

And then, of course, there’s the whole reason we got them in the first place: the fiber. It’s been so much more rewarding than I though it would be to have the fiber from the source and be able to experiment, and to be able to look at a finished yarn, or something made from it, and know that I truly did the process from the ground up.

We’re planning on many more years of enjoyment, yarn, and learning from these guys.