My little one is asleep on the couch after a big day and late night yesterday, a morning play date, picking up Nori from school, shopping, and stopping by a local farm for….beeswax!

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Isn’t she precious?!

 

So I’m taking this moment, before dusk, and the bewitching hour to let you know about my exciting buy today!  Yup, I said beeswax!  Five pure unadulterated, chemical and fragrance free, pounds of wax straight from a local farmer’s hives (by way of a solar melting oven and loose straining net) to my still-new-to-me granite countertops!

 

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Can you see the bee skeletons?  I think it adds to the charm.

 

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My family has been buying honey from this farmer for years.  And I last bought beeswax from who knows where on Amazon for my homemade lotion.  After spending hours looking for organic beeswax on Amazon, Ebay, Etsy and other sites the other night, I hopped on over to Craigslist just too just see if maybe there was some formerly enthusiastic lotion or candle entrepreneur nearby who’d closed up shop and was selling off product on the cheap.

 

And I found this farmer’s ad!  It never occurred to me to buy my beeswax straight from the source!   After pouring over online reviews, homestead blogging sites, and YouTube videos and reading up on the difference between white and yellow beeswax and the extraction and bleaching processes…I wanted to be really sure to get a chemical-free wax for my next batch of lotions.

 

(I’m so excited about this lotion by the way.  It’s something I’ve personally love and really believe in.  And it makes me feel crazy-good to provide it for people.  Whenever I share it, or the Wellness Mama site where I got the recipe, people come back to me and say they loved it and need more.  It’s just that good and I wish I’d known how to make my own products a loooong time ago.)

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But I’m finding that even sellers who advertise “organic”, “all-natural” or “unbleached”, etc. beeswax or shea butter (both of which I use in my lotion), have reviews that claim otherwise…and even then you never really know where it comes from or how it’s been handled, processed, or stored.

 

And when I’m letting something be absorbed into skin, I just want it to be awesome.

 

I also like supporting local business.  And…pulling into the long shady driveway of a local farm that’s been selling honey for decades, with both girls asleep in the back seat, and finally meeting the elderly farmer (all of the honey is sold on the “honor system” so I’ve only ever caught glimpses him and his wife) who walks out of his carport with a plastic grocery sack of wax chips.

 

It all feels pretty authentic.  Right down to the handshake and open-air exchange of cash.  And for about half the price…and no shipping charges to boot 🙂

 

Unlike the wax pastilles that I’ve bought before that are colorless and odorless (see the bag next to the stove in the photo above), this wax looks like a deep cloudy yellow from the 1970’s and smells like earth and honey.  I love it!

 

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So, this weekend, between my painting projects, the man coming back to work on the house (this week we’re replacing the lattice that I already painted once upon a time), garage sale shopping, and taking care of Muffin, I’ll be melting and straining some fragrant wax and working up the ingredients for lotion my Kitchen Lab.

 

Ya know, in my “free time.”  🙂

 

-RM