Her Beasts

Embroidery & Soap Making

Basil was eager to get started on his work with the beauty products, but still needed time to think about how to go about it. Thus, Basil decided to watch Iris as she taught Caspian about embroidery. It would be good for Basil to know about these things as well since he often helped with the sewing.

Iris took one of the many dresses Caspian had been hard at work making over the last few days and gathered up some long dried grass. Iris wrapped the grass around the fish bone needle and began to carefully embroider flowers and vines along the bottom of the dress.

The greenish yellow grass stood out among the brown boar hide and was easily visible. However, the oversized needle and short lengths of grass made the whole process more complicated than it was in the modern world. The flowers ended up as much larger and only had an outline rather than being filled in due to the limitations Iris had to work with.

Still, Caspian and Basil were quite impressed with the end results and were eager to learn how to do so themselves. In order to avoid ruining otherwise perfectly suitable clothes, they first practiced on a spare scrap of beast hide.

When they got the hang of it, Iris taught them a few other designs using a mixture of sinew and long grass along the way. Most of the embroidery ideas were nature based with vines, tree branches, flowers, berries, and leaves being most common. Some of the dresses were embroidered along the sleeves or bottom only while others were covered in flowers.

When all of the premade dresses were finished being embroidered, the sun had already set. The three had easily lost track of time, but Ember had not. He had already fetched back some prey and Basil immediately went off to prepare some soup.

Iris yawned, feeling tired, and promised to teach Basil about beauty products the next day while Caspian worked on sewing some more of the basic dress designs. The day after, Iris would be sure to teach Caspian about how to make flowers and ribbons from cloth to decorate the dresses.

The next morning, Basil eagerly handed Iris some jerky as he pulled her out of bed, eager to work together to make new things. Iris rubbed the sleep from her eyes, not quite used to being in such a rush first thing in the morning. Caspian was already up and sewing while Ember had gone out to tend to the fields so Iris supposed it must not be too early in the day.

Iris headed to the kitchen with Basil and asked him about some herbs good for inflammation and sun burns that could be applied to the skin. Some things like aloe, Iris was familiar with, but others were foreign. Still, Iris trusted Basil as he was considering an expert in the field of medicine.

After pulling out all the herbs, Iris had Basil crush them into a powder with the mortar and pestle. From what Iris knew of lotions, they were made with animal fats, oils, milk, and / or honey back in ancient Egypt. Iris figured if such things were combined with herbs good for the skin then it should make a suitable option.

Luckily, Iris had plenty of animal fat since she always made her mates keep it so she could put it in a stone container for safe keeping. Milk was out of the question, but the herbal mixture was already wet enough from the aloe.

As Basil had yet to have a chance to go out and collect honey, this option was impossible. However, Basil had been working on a powdered sugar previously so Iris turned to him and asked

"Did you ever finish that sugar you were working on previously?"

Basil nodded enthusiastically as he responded

"Yep! However, the results were a bit unexpected. Unlike the sugarcane you mentioned previously, it was difficult to get enough liquid from the sweet roots and boiling it down ended up with relatively little left as most of the liquid was likely water based.