Art and Entertainment Sites

Making soap can be a fun hobby. You also have the pride and satisfaction of making your own soap, controlling exactly what’s in it and wowing your friends and family with your hand made soap creations.

The melt and pour process is an easy way to make your own soap. Melt and pour soap comes in ready made blocks of uncolored and unscented soap. Basically, you melt the blocks, add your own color, fragrance, fun additives (optional) and pour it into molds. Once it’s set, it’s ready to use!

Here are ten top tips for melt and pour soap making:

1. Use a good recipe. Even though it’s easy to make soap this way, you still need a recipe to ensure the color, fragrance and optional additives are in the right amounts.

2. Make sure you wear the appropriate safety equipment. I like to wear protective clothing, shoes, gloves and safety goggles. Melted soap is very hot! You don’t want to get burned if you accidentally splash yourself.

As a symbol of longevity, amber may have been the first gemlike material used for personal adornment. Beads and pendants of this intriguing substance, the production of fossilized tree sap, have been found in prehistoric burials from as early as 15,000 years before Christ. Amber comes in different colors and is often opaque due to impurities that maxed naturally with the ancient sap. By the Bronze Age, amber was in such demand that it was traded with tin and copper along the major trade routes in the Middle East. The earliest written references to amber are in Homer’s Odyssey, from about 700 BC. The Greek word for amber was lektron, from which we get our word electricity, where amber was said to be the “solidified tears of the Helipads mourning the death of their brother”.

Since wisdom is the art of coping with suffering, it starts with a willingness to tackle it head-on:

a) Such is the harshness of our condition that we suffer, sometimes greatly or worse, insuperably.

b) Such is the richness of our nature that we can learn to live happily, or at least serenely, within the limits of this condition. This entails us either pursuing goals that are not only desirable or honorable, but also attainable, or resigning ourselves to the inevitable.

Admittedly, a great many suffer whose suffering is all the more problematic as their wisdom is still largely in the making. I remember my own past as a young unhappy and suicidal man who composed dark poems. My negative attitude compounded my difficult situation, and I lacked the awareness of my ability to improve both. Today, I feel deeply connected with those who live in the limbo of gloom. Even if my words only reach one of them, they will not have been written in vain.
I have recently come across some dark poetry, reminiscent of mine in my young days. The author – Melyssa G. Sprott – is a young talented woman whose youth has been poisoned by abuse and other hardships. Her suffering and her talent have inspired me to feature some of her work and respond to it. Note that my responding to it in a positive manner testifies to my being help-minded, but note also that my responses are written in a spirit of humbleness. I don’t claim to provide a remedy; I just try my best to give some useful insights.

* * *

The following excerpts are from one of Melyssa’s collection of poems, entitled “Descent into the Dark.” They reveal her aching soul with the moving simplicity of a woman crying for her overwhelming grief.

1.

When I was six,
my father had me convinced
I wasn’t worth the air I breathed,
the food I’d cost,
or other things I’d need.
When I was six,
my father didn’t want children
or want the wife he kept,
so we were forced to suffer
for my father’s regrets.

When most people think of love poems, they think of serious and soulful expressions of passion. Long sonnets by Shakespeare or romantic poems by Browning and Lord Byron are the norm for love poetry. However, funny love poems can be good for a laugh. They may not be romantic, but they do give your friends something to enjoy.

Some of the best funny love poems are limericks. Limericks started in Ireland and follow a standard form of five lines and a rhyme scheme of aabba. Here are a few limericks written by anonymous authors:

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time
When asked “Why a third?”
He replied, “One’s absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime.”

There was a young fellow named Hammer
Whose had an unfortunate stammer
“The b-bane of my life”
Said he, “Is m-m-my wife
D-d-d-d-d-d-damn ‘er!”