It’s slow going but I’m adding some colour, changing the wording of various pages and generally just tweaking things. It’s not a complete redesign, although that is in the back of my head for sometime in the near future.

There are also some new products turning up as a result - check out the Yaoh range on the Natural You page and look out for some lovely, sturdy and biodegradeable bags coming online shortly! They should be here in time for Christmas.

Now for those of you that know nothing of Blog-Tagging this is where a blog owner/author performs a task, documents it and then passes it on to a predesignated number of fellow bloggers!

So, my task today is to tell you six Interesting things about myself and then to Tag six fellow bloggers.

1. I’ve written not one book but two! More information here: http://sarahbarnard.co.uk/
2. I had to have three units of someone else’s blood in an emergency transfusion during the summer of 2007 (I’m fine now btw but can’t ever donate blood.)
3. I’m a Rooster, my son is a Dragon and my daughter is a Sheep.
4. I started writing as a dare.
5. I’ve been interviewed on BBC Radio Derby - talking about my lovely soap nuts.
6. I’m a serial blogger - Apart from this one I have a blog on my writing site and a number of private blogs for different purposes.

Then the second part of the Tag on the ZeroWaste blog is to find the Sixth folder in my pictures files on here and tell you about it. Well, I’ve just laughed out loud! The sixth folder is my file of images for the Ethics Trading site and the sixth image is this one:

OK, last part - tag six fellow bloggers.

1. The lovely Jo of Gem Heaven.
2. Linda of SonesUK
3. Baby Armadillo
4. My political friend Witchy - At the foot of her stairs.
5. Nikki at NinnyNoodleNoo.
6. And last, but by no means least - Mairi from Pogglers.
7. Yeah, I know, 7 is cheating… Kris from Eco Knits - Tag, you’re it!

Off you go folks…..

I’ll be building it all up over time and so you’ll need to keep popping back to check what’s new.

It’s all natural skin care and the first lot should be arriving during the next week or so and I’ll let you all know as soon as I get it added to the site.

I’ve been doing some search engine optimisation work and looking at rage rankings as well as search positioning for certain key words.

So, I’ve been tweaking the Ethics Trading website, blogging like crazy and posting in a few different places - all in an effort to raise my profile, for soap nuts in particular. Then I sit back and wait for a day or so as the various search engines, and Google in particular, process the new content and reassess it all.

In some areas it all seems to be working. But interestingly, google treats http://www.ethicstrading.com as a different website from http://ethicstrading.com (did you spot the difference?) Yes, those little www’s make such a difference. With them my page rank is 3 and without them it’s 4. (4 is better - the rank goes from 0 - unranked, to 10 and even the google home page doesn’t get a 10!)

However, I’m still not sure how page rank links to search results, as I’ve dropped to page 2 for “soap nuts”. I need to do more work on that.

Proper wool is tricky to wash safely without felting, shrinking or matting it nastily and ruining that perfect, soft and squishy scarf/hat/whatever you made for your best friend for Christmas.

Now Kris at Eco Knits sells lovely natural yarns and some are hand spun, hand dyed and generally fairly exclusive and very nice indeed. There are wood and bamboo needles, notions and other knitting type things to drool over but I’m considering that lovely yarn. When you’ve bought some, made something with it then you want that something to stay as gorgeous as the day it was finished don’t you? But things get mucky and need cleaning now and then, and that yarn was cool or hand wash only, and as the yarn was hand dyed then maybe the colour could fade?

Considering that soap nuts are the most natural and gentle cleaning agent I know of, it stands to reason thay they’ll do the job for you.  I do know that soap nuts preserve colour better than modern powders that have a harsher action and they definitely don’t leave any residue in the fibres of whatever you’re washing.  They release saponin from 30 degrees, so a cool machine wash will be fine, or you can use the bag and shells, or some soap nut solution, in a hand wash too.

Try to recycle some of the Trick or Treat stuff from later won’t you….

It’s a challenge raised by the My Zero Waster’s too - Do you really need those bin liners?  Isn’t it just another bit of plastic sealing away the pile of stuff we pile into landfill? We each throw away far too much as it is - Mr & Mrs Green, and Little Miss Green, have reduced their average weekly landfil contribution to under 100g, so it’s possible, it’s doable and it’s not that hard really. It’s all about rethinking from the start.

For example - When you buy sausages - where do you get them from? Prepacked in plastic from the big supermarket? Is there an alternative packed in recyclable material of some sort? Could you buy them loose?  Could you get them from a local butcher instead? Would he put them into a container that you provide instead of a plastic bag?

What about that squash that you get for the kids? It comes in a plastic bottle right? Do you reuse the bottle? I do, I use an old bottle to make up squash to keep in the fridge, and another to keep a bottle of chilled water in the fridge, after that they get cut into mini cloches if it’s the right time of year and only then do the bits go into the recycling centre. But I could change squash brand and use a glass bottle instead…..

So, going back to the bin…. If what goes into it is rinsed and dried and not sticky or slimy, then do you really need that bin bag?

Although I love every product I sell, I’m bored with saying the same old things over and over again.  You can only sing the praises of the wonderful soap nut for so long….

So, I’m going to bring in some politics, some environmental challenges and some every day living and useful stuff - trying to spice up the blog a bit for you.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see - recipes, knitting patterns, eco ideas, challenges, or maybe the occasional competition too.

Lily’s magic is diminished and she can no longer trigger the portals so no-one can get to Sam, who is in trouble, again.  Someone else has control of the magic and challenges Sam’s claim to rule, resulting in civil war and a corruption of the magic that binds and sustains that realm.

Meanwhile, one of the children is using magic and no-one has realised……

Copies in hardback or large paperback can be bought either through my Lulu storefront or the Sarah Barnard main site, but I can only sign those bought through me unless I’m going to see you! It’s working it’s way through to Amazon slowly, but hasn’t quite made it yet. So, not available through your local bookshop yet but it will be by Christmas.

There are always a heap of competitions over there so it’s worth a regular look to see if there’s anything you fancy trying for.  Also well worth a browse are the forums which are friendly and full of information as well as a wide variety of people and ideas.

Go take a look.