More window than I wanted

I did a sabbatical project/experiment with colored glass pebbles, but to get all the colors that I wanted, I ended up buying a lot more pebbles than I needed.

I had the idea of finding an old window, and gluing the extra pebbles to the glass.  Some time later, I did find a free-by-the-side-of-the-road window, but it was rather large and heavy...five feet long and double-paned.  I hauled it home anyway, and thought about it for a while.

Then I looked at it again, and realized that the glass was framed with wood, covered with metal on the outside face, and that I could drill through the wood at one end, and drop pebbles down between the panes.

So I drilled a hole, carefully aiming between the panes, and enlarged and shaped it with a keyhole saw and small files.  The hole was close to the corner of the interior cavity, which was helpful for shaking out the sawdust that fell down inside the window.

Then some children helped me put the pebbles in.  I put the window on enough of a slant for the pebbles to slide down to the bottom, but not anywhere near vertical...I didn't want a falling pebble to break the window glass.

I also didn't fill up the entire space between the panes...between one-quarter and one-third full was as much weight as I felt comfortable putting between the panes.

Then there was the question of where to display it when it was done...it was far too heavy to hang easily, and I didn't want it falling down anywhere.  (In the previous year, I had already cleaned up broken glass from a large picture frame and a clock.) I finally leaned it against the bedroom wall, horizontally, until I could find a better home for it.

In the end, I donated it to a charity rummage sale, and someone bought it--whether only for the pebbles or for the piece as a whole, I can't say.

A rug of sorts

I had been thinking for a while about where and how to get a rug for the family room.  The main considerations were that it had to be colorful, without an overly busy design, and non-scratchy. I decided that I wanted to make a rug, and I worked out a color scheme--based on some of our wedding pictures that were taken at the beach--and a general design.  I even started pricing materials.

Then my husband came home with at least two yards' worth of Ikea decorating fabric (heavy cotton).  The design, from a few years ago, is modernist with Alpine motifs; I call it the "drowning goats" fabric because there are two swimming goats in the design, and I am not fond of goats.

I noticed that the fabric colors were almost exactly the same as the colors I had chosen for the rug.  So I started using it as a rug.  Later on, before its first washing, I stitched around the edges with a zigzag stitch, to keep it from fraying.

Since it is cotton, and I am terrible at stain removal, it has picked up some dirt that didn't wash out.  But I like it anyway, for the color that it adds to the room.

A pregnancy project: Making things stay put

Making room for a new baby mostly means making time for a new baby...with an emptier schedule, fewer commitments, and simpler housekeeping.   I did some work on the last point, to fix some things that seemed to never stay where I had put them.

One rocker had a seat cushion that ended up on the floor at least six times a day.  I used scrap pieces of denim to make ties for it, which I sewed onto the cushion by hand.  That was several months ago, and I haven't had to put it back even once.

Our bath towels were frequently sliding off their pegs. So I crocheted a loop onto a corner of each towel, using sturdy cotton yarn. The yarn has been in our stash for years, but the colors coordinated well with the bathroom colors. Now the towels stay put. I should note, though, that the pegs for the towels used by the younger children are horizontal, and they can easily get their towels down without ripping the loops off; in other situations, that might be a problem.

I have a crate that we are using for a piano bench, with a seat pad made of several layers of fabric, tied together quilt-fashion. This seat pad was also frequently found on the floor.  I used linen yarn to tie it directly to the crate, through the hand-hole. Now it sometimes is flipped down, but it is easy to flip back.

One of the children's winter coats did not have a loop inside the collar for hanging it up; I made one out of a scrap of bias tape, and sewed it in.

Sabbatical 3: Lessons learned

Having just completed my third one-year sabbatical, there were a couple of things about it that surprised me.

The first is how much of this sabbatical I spent just catching up on maintenance and unfinished projects. When you take a break from "getting ahead", there is time to do those sorts of things.

The second is that even though our income was the same as the previous year, we had a number of financial challenges over the year that left us needing to make do and do without, much more than usual. Last sabbatical, I put some money toward a special crafting project--a homemade fiddle from a kit.  This time, I did another special sabbatical project (which I will post about later), but for the most part I crafted and created using only materials that I already had, or ones that showed up unbidden on my doorstep.  I made lots and lots and lots of things, but I never ran out of supplies.

For part of the year, I set my never-ending to-do list aside, and just did what needed to be done, or what I wanted to do.  Other times, I went back to making lists, and went full speed ahead on Getting Things Done. I have a new baby coming very soon, and there was a lot that needed to be done beforehand.

Spiritually, I have spent a lot of time reading George MacDonald novels, and I have been learning a lot from him. (He has been a significant influence on C. S. Lewis and other Christian writers).

I also put some effort into making wish lists this time...sometimes I get so used to using what I have and doing without, that I forget to think about what I would actually like to get. What is remarkable, looking back, is how many of those things that I listed actually showed up, one way or another.  Some things I was able to buy, some things I was able to make or improvise, other things I realized that I didn't really want after all, and a number of things were handed down to me, unasked-for. It sounds like The Secret's "law of attraction" at work, but I don't believe in that; I believe in a God who loving and gracious. George said, in one of his books, that no desire is too small to set before God, who will purify it.

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The book I wrote after my second sabbatical year, The Serendipitous Sabbatical:  Rest in Unexpected Places, can still be found here.