curly girl method an experiment

 For the last half a year I've seen a lot of curly hair things on the internet specifically the Curly girl method. I figured some more defined curls would look good on me so I decided to try it out and document my results.

As a starting point my hair is wavy and loosely curled when wet after some tests I concluded that it's also lowporosity and has thick strands. 

So what is the CGM I'm lazy so rather than reading a lot of different blogs I asked chatgpt to do it for me. Basically it's things you can do to get more curls and to have them survive for longer. Reading through it I did things several things that I already do although for different purposes. 

1 prewash detangle your hair with a wide tooth comb 

This is something I already do and don't feel the need to change. Though my main reason for detangling my hair before showering has more to do with limiting the amount of hair stuck in the drain.

2 washing use a shampoo without sulfates or silicones

So, there is several ingredients that weighs down your hair I used the  curlsbot to check the ingredients before my experiment. 

3 same with conditioner

I don't usually use conditioner, I've never really seen much difference weather I use it or not. But for this I'll get one and try.

4 apply gel while wet 

This is to not loose the curls while the hair dries. Reddit recommended I use aloevera gel for this. I have a vague idea that its skincare properties will translate to hair, maybe? My sister on the other hand who has also gone into the CGM rabbit hole recommended something called Ecogel.

5 air dry 

Again I already do this mostly cause I'm lazy 

7 refresh mist with water and scrunch waves into place 

This is things to do the next day. 

8 other

There is a few other things one can do like sleeping on a silk pillow case or with the hair in pony tail on top of head. I tried the second one but it was very uncomfortable and I value my sleep more than my hair so we shan't be doing this.

9 time

So chat gpt said nothing about this but some googling turned up that it might take some time to show results. 

The experiment

My plan is to try these things out one at a time to see what will make a difference starting with shampoo and conditioner. I'm going to try each for a month and see what difference it made.

For this I have 3 different shampoos. 

Garnier solid shampoo, with forbidden ingredients. 

By Viera curl shampoo, This should be specific for curly hair and has only approved ingredients.

Friendly lavender and teatree bar, this is not specifically for curls but it doesn't have any of the forbidden ingredients (after an update to the curlsbot it now has some but it's too late to change) and I already had some. 

The fact that two of them are shampoo bars might be a problem but I prefer them and haven't found anything that suggests it would make a difference.

To this I'll add conditioner TRESemme flawless waves and Aussie three minute miracle. 

Month 1

First out was the friendly bar and the Aussie conditioner.

The results was distinctly mid. My hair is wavy but not more or less then it always is. It is more greasy though unpleasantly so though it isn't really visible.

Month 2

Garnier time and still doing the Aussie conditioned.

Testing them I get some unexpected results the Friendly one leaves my hair greasy and full of build up. The Garnier doesn't something about the shampoo makes the conditioner stick so my hair so really soft. It is a little dry so I added a few drops of hair oil to the ends. 

It doesn't make it curly but it's nice and I considered getting more of it only to realize that it is apparently out of stock everywhere. 

Month 3

Curly girl time with the By Wiera and TRESemme. 

This is sort of in the middle a bit greasy but not much and again no change in the curls. The By Wiera is wierdly gelatinous but it's fine.

Results 

At the end of every test month I took a picture of my hair. This is my hair washed with shampoo and conditioner, air dried and nothing else. Looking at them now month two does have nicer curls but not to an extent that I cant say it's because of the length. In general this is not at all what the results should be according to CGM.

With results like these I think I'm going to give up on this use up my leftover shampoo and then try to get a hold of something like the garnier bar. 

As for the gels the eco gel that my sister recommended worked well and the aloe vera did nothing.

Painting jars for cat food

For various reasons I keep some of my cat food in two tubs and because I open them several times a day they mostly stay on the counter. Which this is a problem since it's just two old peanut butter tubs that I have written their names on and it's just not very pretty. Actually it's quite ugly and makes the counter looking cluttered. So something had to be done. The easiest option would be to move them into a cabinet, I have more space than I know what to do with but I know that it would only work for a few hours until I was going to to feed them again and then they would be right back where they started. So if I cant move them the next option is to at least make them nicer. I first looked into buy some aesthetic jars and though I did find some, there were none that I really liked. I also had the idea that they should be different (so I can tell them apart) but still matching and it was proving bit difficult. In the end I decided to make my own. 

I have a pair of pickle jars that are of a decent size and figured they should be fairly easy to paint.

Test one 

I decided to begin with a small scale test, mostly to check if acrylic paint even sticks to glass. I didn't put that much thought into the pattern and just free handed a night sky. It went on quite well specifically the black paint went on smooth and satisfying. Though some colors did need a second coat I'm quite satisfied with the visual result. As for the durability I have some concerns.

Even the next day it's...not sticky but something. Also I can scrape it of with my finger nails (I tried this on the bottom where it's uneven). I'll give it a week or two and see if it gets better. If not I'm considering covering it in lacquer. I do need to buy some anyway to fix a chair. 

Update one, a few days later

The lacquer did not work. Rather it dissolves the paint to the point that the brush I'm painting on the lacquer with rubs it of. 

Update two, There's been a slight delay to this. A bag if rice I opened was made of some kind of flimsy plastic that rips if you even looks at it. So now all of my previously empty jars are now filled with rice. It's not a major problem and does give me more time to consider the design and test things.

Test two

Can I paint metal lids with acrylic paint. A fair number of mason jars regularly pass through my kitchen but since most have ugly branded lids I don't keep that many. One of the jars I was considering using have lid like that and I would like to change it. 

All in all it worked fine. I have trouble coming up with a design so I just made it blue. With one coat I can still make out the label but a second coat did the trick. Though it's still uneven.

Test one part two

There is of course paint made for glass but they tend to be a bit transparent which I don't want since the whole plan is to hide the cat food.

 At this time I remember that there is a decent chance that my cats will realize there is food in the jars, knock them over and break them. I'm not willing to risk them eating food mixed with shards of glass and so I will find some other storage for my cat food and for now I'll leave this project. I'm considering getting some pretty metal tea containers. 

search consol redirect issues

 For a while I have been trying to get this blog indexed on google. For those unfamiliar with it indexing is necessary for it to be searchable. This has been an exercise in frustration so far nothing is working and I don't know why.

A tip I got was to check which post got indexed and which didn't. Unfortunately all mine got labeled as having redirect issues so that doesn't help. 

First step was obviously to check the redirect. According to the checker https://wheregoes.com/ there is no problem. This makes sense since neither bing nor yahoo has any issue.  

So the problem is something with all my posts but only for google. 

I am at the point where I'm open to trying anything. So this post is a test if having all small caps in the headline will make any difference. It shouldn't but Blogger makes it's links from the head line so who knows.

Also with neither pictures or outgoing links it is a very barebones post.

Update: So this didn't work, on to test number two trying to input some code I found.

If anyone has had similar issues and managed to solve them I would very much appreciate a comment about what you did. 

Or if you have other issues and just want to went a bit that's fine too.

Update 2: also didn't work. Today I'm trying two different things. Number one double the link to this post. Number two removing the sitemap from google search console. This might seem counter-intuitive the whole point of a site map is to help with indexing. But bare with me. I have older discontinued blog. while I tried to get this one indexed I fixed somethings on that too. Checking in on it I saw that basically all the posts has gotten indexed. But here's the thing the blogs are pretty much identical when it comes to content the most obvious difference is that I never bothered to do a sitemap for it. Also the sitemap I uploaded didn't really work with google. It doesn't keep track of the new posts. I should say I'm only removing it from google search consol not from the blog itself, I also have it on bing and there it works fine.

Update 3: Still no change so I'm going to try and removing the site map all together. I may have been too hasty singing the praises of Bing since it has apparently only indexed 12 of my 30 pages and doesn't seem to be checking the sitemap.

Update 4: Success finally...sort of...maybe. What happened was that the latest post, the one I uploaded after update 3 was not tagged with redirect errors but rather with the "Crawled not currently indexed". I choose to see this as a hopeful sign though it's still not indexed and I now have to figure out how to fix this issue so far the definition from google seems to be "there's nothing wrong and we'll maybe get around to it or not"

Update 5: I may have spoken too soon. The posts I uploaded have all gotten redirect errors and even the one I thought was working had too. New plan is this. I have an older blog that I'm no longer using. Annoyingly it gets indexed. So what I'm going to do is simply to copy it. All the settings all the layout and themes and hopefully this will do something.

Making A Lamp shade

I have a project to fix my ceiling lamp as a part of that I wanted flower shaped lamp shades. But getting ones that fit and that I like is hard. So I figured I could make some and as usual checked Pinterest for inspiration finding this tutorial (I then followed basically none of this but still). 

My ceiling lamp needs some things before I can do the lampshades. But I have another lamp that also needs a shade and I've been looking for one of glass but haven't found one. So as a test I made on for this lamp instead.

I'd planned on using tissue paper like I think is in the video but at the store they were out of the white one and I ended up buying thin crepe paper instead. It's thicker and more structured so it holds it's shape and was probably a better choice.

I only bought white paper rather than colored partially because there wasn't any of the shade I wanted and if I did I'd have to buy four rolls which was way more paper than I actually needed. 

Tools and materials

There wasn't much materials needed for this. 

Crepe paper

Metal wire

Wire cutters 

Acrylic paint 

Paint brush

Lamp (I'd suggest thrift stores, lamps meant to have shades usually have them when bought new. Otherwise this or this might work.) 

Pencil

Scissors 

Glue

something to protect your work surface the painting got a bit messy.

Mostly these are things I had at home so all together this was a very cheap div. Eagle eyed readers might notice that some of these things aren't on the picture. There is a very good reason for this. Which is that I'd forgotten them until I needed them and didn't feel like taking a new picture.

What I did

I started with drawing out the petals using the first one as a stencil. It's important to make sure they are long enough to cover the light bulb, mine is thin so I make five of them have them overlapping. Realizing as I did it that this type of paper is terrible for drawing on. The lines barely show up and if I press too hard it tears.

Cutting out the petals makes it obvious that crepe paper also isn't good for cutting either it's soft and almost sticks to the scissors. But soon enough I had five large and five small petals.

Before I started painting them I tested the paint on a small scrap. I want the light to shine through and I worried the paint would be to thick. It wasn't so I went full steam ahead and painted them. 

I thinned out the paint with water to make sure light can still come through though this wasn't really needed.

An advantage of painting them compared to buying colored paper is that I could make a gradient on the petals. First painting the whole petal yellow then the base orange. The tiny petals I painted green. All of them I painted on both sides. 

Crepe paper isn't really good to paint and one broke while painting. I made a new one but was more careful going forward, limiting the amount of paint on the brush.

Leaving them to dry I turned to the attachment. The lamp is meant to have a shade and so there is already parts to fit it onto the lamp which made my life so much easier. All I needed to do was to cut a piece of wire and shape it to the attachment point. Taking it of and anchor the ends so it didn't unravel. I now had a wire circle.

At this point the petals was mostly dry and I attached them to the Wire. Folding the lowest edge of the petals and gluing it to the ring. The petals on the outside the fold on the inside so the ring it encased in the paper. I started with the large petals shaping them a bit as it did gluing them on with quite a bit of overlap. Then gluing the small petals on the outside, folding them out because it looked a bit thin and unbalanced.

I'd estimated I'd need five petals but only needed four so I took the best ones.

And then its just putting it all together. Screwing on the shade and lamp pieces. 

Results

I think it turned out quite decent though it looks a bit like a cucumber flower. There are some spots that could have used some more paint. The lamp  is in the art nouveau style so it probably had a shade not to dissimilar to this originally. The bulb is not an LED and does get hot, so it is a bit of a fire hazard. But I'll be careful not to leave it unattended. Regardless it works and now I know what to do for the ceiling lamp.

Making my own moisturizer

Today I made some moisturizer. It's mostly based on the recipe for cold cream from the 1779 book Toilet de Flora. This is not the first time I try old recipes and it certainly won't be the last. The measurements has been reworked from the original Drachms to grams. 

This isn't really a experiment since i have done it before. but that time I Had accidentally miss read it and had 1 ounce of water instead of 1,5. It still worked but the result was a bit oily so I'm hoping it works better this time. But also I'm not too worried about getting things a little wrong.

Ingredients

56g Sunflower seed oil

2g   Coconut oil

2g   Jojoba oil

A few drops Tea Tree oil

4g   Beeswax pellets

42g Rosewater or Water

Sodium benzoate

Tools

Jars (enough for 100 ml)

Scales

Pipette

Stone mortar and wood pestle

Bowl preferably metal

Double boiler (metal bowl and pot)

What to do

Measure out the beeswax, coconut, jojoba and sunflower seed oils in the boil and melt it over a pot of water. Stir until the beeswax is all incorporated. The sunflower seed oil can be subbed out for other oils like almond or olive but I happened to have sunflower so that's what I used.

While the oils are melting measure out the Rosewater (or ordinary water) in a glass or bowl. 

Pour the oils in the mortar and stir slowly until the mixture grows thick and opaque. Then comes the slow bit, use the pipette to drop in the rosewater little by little. Stirring it in until the drops are no longer visible before dropping in more. Make sure to have something to watch or listen to during this because it takes about an hour and requires some patience. 

I took a pause to prepare the jars, boiling them, drying them off and writing labels for them. Of course once I'd written and taped them on did I remember that I have a label making machine that I could have used. But by then it was too late and I wasn't going to redo it all just to have them look neater. 

It wouldn't be me if I didn't try a little experiment. Last time I did this I used sodium benzoate to keep it from growing mold and that worked fine. But I have read that Tea tree oil have antifungal and antibacterial properties and wanted to try that instead (Link to the article).  So I labeled half the jars Tea tree and poured in a few (1-3) drops and labeled the rest for sodium benzoate and put 0.1ml of that in them. 

Then all that was left was just to divide the cream in the jars and stir so the tea tree oil or sodium benzoate don't just sit on the bottom. 

Results

All in all it took about an hour and half and I now have five jars or 100 ml of moisturizer. Hopefully the tea tree oil will work but in any case I plan to keep them in the fridge just to be one the safe side.

It smells rather pleasantly of honey and rose. It also feels rather smooth and less oily than last time. So I call that a success.

Update 1 it's working fine however Tea tree oil has a fairly strong scent and it completely drowns out the much milder honey and rose. I don't mind it but it is a particular smell and not one that's for everyone.

Update 2 After three months it hasn't started growing any mold so apparently the tea tree oil is working.

Baking with protein powder try 1

Because of reasons I bought a packet of protein powder and now I'm trying to find different ways to incorporate it into food. this is my first try of making cookies with it.

 A bit of a caveat before I begin.

1 this is not a finished recipe it's me documenting my experiment. 

2 this is not meant to help anyone lose weight just increase the amount of protein in their diet. It's cookies they contain way to much sugar to ever be considered healthy

I did this experiment using a unflavored pea protein powder. I have no idea if it's the best or even good but it was on sale which is good enough for a first attempt. 

To start with I used this chocolate chip cookie recipe as a base.

4 dl Flour

6 dl Oatmeal

150g Butter (room temperature)

1 dl Muscovado sugar (very dark brown sugar)

1 dl Sugar

2 tsp baking powder

3 tbsp light syrup

110g Milk and dark chocolate

1/2- 1 dl water or until it is possible to roll it our without it crumbling too much

How many cookies depends on the size I made them roughly Oreo sized and got 60.

Preheat the oven to 200 (Celsius) and mix all the ingredients. Roll out out the dough approximately 1 cm thick and cut out with cookie cutters. Place the cookies on parchment paper, they can be placed fairly close. Lower the temperature to 175 and place in oven for 10-15. Leave them to cool before eating.

What I did

I was interested in weather replacing the flour or oats with protein powder would yield the best results.

So I mixed all the ingredients except flour, oats, baking soda and the water. Baking soda because it should be mixed with flour to avoid clumps and water because I anticipated having to change the amount to get the right consistency. That done I set it to the side

I had decided to do four test batches so I found four (in hindsight too small) bowls and filled all with 1/4 the rest of the ingredients with alteration according to each batch.

control                       Batch 1                       Batch 2                      Batch 3

1 flour                        1 protein powder        1 protein powder       1 protein powder

1,5 oats                     1,5 oats                      0,5 dl flour                 1 flour

0,5 tsp baking soda   0,5 tsp baking soda   1 dl oats                     0,5 oats

                                                                     0,5 tsp baking soda   0,5 tsp baking soda

Then I mixed in 1/4 of the butter sugar mix in each batch before following the recipe as usual. Rolling the dough out, using cookie cutters, placing on parchment paper and baking in the oven.

Per batch they are approximately 30g of protein or 2 g/cookie for my size.

Top left control, Top right batch 1,
 Bottom left batch 2 and bottom right is batch 3.

Lessons 

1. Don't start experimenting at 8 pm after along day at work. It's not really relevant to this experiment just more general life advice.
2. Pea protein has a distinct taste and with a neutral dough that becomes more noticeable. Picking a cookie with a solid flavor like ginger, cardamom or chocolate would be better than the chocolate chip I used. This might not have been a problem with a different kind of protein powder.
3. The pea protein gave a more crumbly feel to the cookies and none of them melt together like the control did. An increase in the amount of butter might help.
4. Batch number 1 was most best liked among my test subjects with batch 2 a close second. 

Next time solid flavor and more butter using batch 1 for my protein ratio.