–William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

It’s not every day that a large company producing a widely-used good will choose quality over cost. But that’s exactly what Faribault Woolen Mill does, and it’s thanks to them that the American wool industry maintains a special value in an age of mass production, cheap labor and imports. That’s because the survival of an industry, it turns out, depends on those who are willing to uphold its standards. “It’s the understanding of the whole process, from the origin of the materials and the knowledge and the relationship that the business has with the community that’s essential to us giving meaning and relevance to the craft,” says Alice Bernardo, documentarian of traditional craftsmanship,

Faribault Woolen Mill Co. in its early days. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

As with any family heirloom, American made wool blankets from the Faribault Mill are a connection to the past. Operating since 1865, the mill was responsible for producing huge amounts of wool products for soldiers and travelers back in the pioneer days. When the U.S. entered World War I, Faribault provided 100,000 olive drab army blankets to the military. By 1937, they’d made a name for themselves as one of the largest and highest quality mills, with inventory at almost every major department store. Though the number of woolen mills that existed from 1886 dropped from 800 to 80 by 1920, Faribault was able to survive, a testament to their commitment and recognizable quality product.

Military men packing blankets and other important inventory. (Image Source: Flickr)

When I am at home with the dogs and we’re curling up with our after-dinner treats (whiskey for me, bones for them) for a movie, a beautiful wool blanket is exactly what completes the scene. At camp, when the woodsy air slips down to a chilling 30 degrees, nothing keeps me warmer than a genuine wool blanket originally designed for military bombers to avoid hypothermia from the freezing night temperatures. The incomparable difference between genuine wool and a polyester knit is how warm it actually keeps you.

But a hand woven blanket does more than just make life more comfortable on the couch and around the campfire. It’s something you can keep. It will carry stories. It will stay in the family, the same way an heirloom quilt does. You don’t touch a $20 polar fleece from the nearest superstore and think “somebody made this by hand” or “I’m supporting a 150-year-old company that still uses traditional craftsmanship” or even “this blanket is nice.” Instead, you get a blended fiber that carries the stink of petroleum, the wayward stitch of a cheap machine and the memory of an underpaid worker. These blankets will pill, stain and unravel while supporting cheap labor overseas, perpetuating the industry of throwaway goods.

To embrace the forthcoming winter months, the desire to revive American production and the continuation of one of the oldest manufacturing entities in the nation, Hudson Made offers a wide selection of gorgeous wool blankets from the Faribault Woolen Mill in Minnesota: cozy, woven proof that it’s possible to leave one of the most sacred, valuable and cherished American-made industries intact.

Check out our wide selection of Faribault blankets and other accessories here.

Buffalo Plaid Fringe Wool Throw - Heather Red/Black	Foot Soldier Military Wool Blanket- Navy Cream	The Stadium Set

Cass Daubenspeck is a culture and lifestyle writer based in Brooklyn. She lives for good coffee, good whiskey, and a rainy Sunday morning. She interviews people about their weekend routines at sundayroutine.com.Twitter: @missprotestalot

Some of the soap I tested, had I known the word then, was “scullery” soap, which meant it was specifically for “dirty work” in the kitchen, and usually made with some kind of mineral salt and marine ash, and no animal fats. A scullery refers to a small area off the kitchen (often in a stately mansion or on an estate) where you’d find a sink and a kettle. It was where the maid would do her cleaning and cooking. A broom and mop would also be close at hand.

Beeswax helps the bar from becoming slippery so you can really scrub. Photo Credit: Michael Gross

Part of the working class culture since the Middle Ages, scullery soap has been around as long as maid’s quarters. Its definitive origin is vague, but some of the earliest varieties were produced in areas where raw materials were natural to the land such as the Mediterranean, where ingredients included olive oil from local groves and sea salt. A master soapmaker would take up to two weeks to make each batch, heat the ingredients for days in enormous cauldrons and taste the mixture to see if it was correct. In the scullery where it typically landed, no exotic soap would ever find its way into the soapbox next to the traditional wooden plate drainer. There you’d find an ordinary household scullery bar, usually with little pieces of grit or feathers embedded in it where the maid probably used it to wash a goose or a piece of meat on its way into the kitchen. She and the other kitchen workers would also use this bar of soap to wash themselves. The modern versions of scullery soap include vegetable fats and other ingredients like salt and naturally antibacterial substances to dissolve grease and grime and disinfect hands without roughing up skin.

Dolly Johnson in the old White House Scullery, or “small kitchen,” circa 1892, looking south (source: Library of Congress)

Hudson Made has crafted its own version of the scullery soap featuring beeswax (natural antibacterial properties), coconut oil (to help soften and silken skin), and other ingredients that make it perfect for chef’s hands—ingredients traditional scullery soaps wouldn’t have had.

In the book If Walls Could Talk: A History of the Home, it’s been documented that the soap of some scullery maids was an old black variety made of ashes, linseed oil and sand, which essentially just moved grease around. The next generation of scullery soap used water and soda, which could tarnish copper pots and scratch others made of iron. There is a reason Hudson Made’s modern interpretation of scullery soap is not recommended for pot washing, but it’s not because of soda. It’s because the ingredients are designed to have a positive impact on hands and skin, and vegetable fats can tarnish the surfaces of copper and cast iron, aside from not being the proper way to clean cookware anyway, which should be worked with a natural bristle brush—not scoured with thick bar soap.

Circa 1900. “A bit of country life near Henryville, Pennsylvania — making soap.” (source: Shorpy)

Hudson Made’s scullery soap pays homage to the tradition of the homestead and works well on all of your rough spots, whether you’re plucking a chicken or a keyboard. If you choose to use it on the floors and walls as often as the arms and hands, like those old scullery maids once did, well… that’s up to you. But one thing is certain: this soap isn’t just well suited to a “girl of all work” as the old scullery soaps referred. It is a soap for anyone who possess multitudinous passion for the kitchen or a hard day’s work, and for whatever those efforts may yield.

Shop our complete collection of soap and accessories here.

Hudson Made Scullery Soap	The Beard & Shave Soap Trio	Soap Dish

Photography by Shirokh Mairzai & Michael Gross 

Cass Daubenspeck is a culture and lifestyle writer based in Brooklyn. She lives for good coffee, good whiskey, and a rainy Sunday morning. She interviews people about their weekend routines at sundayroutine.com. Twitter: @missprotestalot

We (I) tend to think of honey as the most important product from the beehive. But beeswax, that “other” gold, turns out to be just as valuable. Without it, we wouldn’t have honey at all, and the world wouldn’t be nearly as sweet.

I spoke with farmer and bee expert, Meg Paska, to find out why we can find beeswax in so many household products. In the middle of her daily chores on the farm, she explained, a little breathlessly, that beeswax firms up soft soaps to make them tougher on working hands and makes soap and other products last longer. It’s also an effective wax you can use to seal up a chipped corner on a desk or even on a cutting board and is also found in some furniture polish like Daddy Van’s.

Meg Paska inspects a beekeeping frame. Image courtesy of Meg Paska.

Meg has had a lot of experience with bees and makes her own honey and beeswax products. “I grew up in Baltimore and I had always been a gardener, that’s how I got started with bees. I started noticing that I hadn’t really seen honeybees around as much as I remembered seeing them, and I knew a bee would have to visit if I wanted my zucchini to grow better. So I took a course and decided to jump in.”

Inside the Hive

From what Meg tells me, beeswax serves as the foundation for everything that goes on inside the hive. It’s how honeycombs are made and it’s how the bee brood grows up (they live there until they’re strong enough to emerge). Beeswax is like the brick foundation for a building. It creates storage cells (for pollen). It’s basically a vault for honey. And it’s rare! A hive with a hundred pounds of honey only carries about a pound and a half of wax. Only honeybees between 10- and 12-days-old can make the wax.

“Female worker honeybees only have the ability to produce the substance for the span of about a week,” Meg says. “The wax is secreted in sheets from glands on the underside of the abdomen and molded with the bee’s mandibles to take on the hexagonal cell shape we all recognize.”

As the wax comes in contact with air, it hardens. The worker bee then chews the secreted scales, which makes them turn opaque.

Scraping to open up the honeycomb. Image credit: Sigfrid Lundberg.

“The slight difference in color from one beeswax to another usually has to do with how much that wax has been used, and the landscape. Beeswax gets its yellow color from pollen. A bee that collected pollen from a field of dandelions, for example, may create a very bright yellow wax because they will have the pollen all over them. Others will use the wax as a spot to store brood before filling the comb with honey. The type of wax that’s had a lot of use will appear to have a darker, browner patina.” It’s not a bad thing, it just tends to be a little harder and flakier, but still strong.

Surprisingly, there are no “grades” of beeswax to distinguish between higher and lower quality waxes. “I don’t know any beekeepers who grade their wax,” Meg says. “But if you wanted a higher quality wax, it’s best to purchase from a treatment-free facility, one that doesn’t use fungicides or other chemicals that would permeate the wax. A commercial beekeeper that doesn’t specify is probably a lower quality.”

There’s been talk, recently, about this “treatment” problem among beekeepers. Honeybees have been disappearing for decades, and recent speculation has been about pesticides. When honeybees bring back pollen containing pesticide, it permeates the honey and makes the bee more susceptible to parasites and death. Beekeepers are also facing colony collapse issues, where bees just don’t return to their hives as well as mite infestations. All the more reason to appreciate the artisan qualities of beeswax products.

Beeswax candles, available here from Hudson Made.

Little can compare to the warm honey-like scent of a burning beeswax candle but the process of creating wax is biologically expensive for bees. For humans, on the other hand, procuring beeswax from a hive is not very labor intensive at all. This is how it works: When you extract honey, the cappings that you slice off represent your major wax harvest for the year. You’ll probably get one or two pounds of wax for every 100 pounds of honey that you harvest. This wax can be cleaned and melted down for all kinds of uses. You basically just let gravity drain honey from the cappings, then place them in a pail of water and wash them. Then you remelt, rewash, and let it harden. There are dozens of places in the New York/Hudson Valley area offering classes on organic beekeeping where you can learn all about this. You can find out more about seasonal class offerings at the HoneybeeLives Apiary in the Hudson Valley or at Brooklyn Grange urban organic farm.

Nucs (nuclear colonies) on the rooftop apiary of Brooklyn Grange. Image courtesy of Meg Paska.

Beeswax candles never smoke or sputter and also produce a brilliant flame. It can also be found in soaps and bath products. Its protective and antibacterial properties, long-lasting qualities and delicate, natural scent make it a useful soap for the kitchen. Hudson Made is developing its own blend of beeswax scullery soap just for this purpose, which will be available this fall.

If you’re not convinced of beeswax’s value yet, take note that the U.S. imports as much beeswax as we produce, placing a continuous and increasing demand on this intriguing natural product. Whether you enjoy the warm glow of a beeswax candle in your home or a pungently preserved aged cheese sealed in beeswax, remember the work bees have done to create this resource. It might not take the sting out, but it’s a sure sign that we should let bees be.

Can’t get enough beeswax? Check out these products from Hudson Made.

Pair of Natural Beeswax Candles	Bee by Rose-Lynn Fisher	Grey Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters Beeswax Candle

Cass Daubenspeck is a culture and lifestyle writer based in Brooklyn. She lives for good coffee, good whiskey, and a rainy Sunday morning. She interviews people about their weekend routines at sundayroutine.com. Twitter: @missprotestalot