What midlife is for

Five or six years ago, I started learning continental-style knitting, where the yarn is held in the hand that holds the needle that is being knitted from. It only works for the knit stitch, not for purl (don't ask me what they do on the Continent for purling), but it is much more efficient than the way that is usually taught (which I also taught myself at that time, having had up until then a let-go-of-the-needle-and-move-the-whole-hand-around technique; effective but very slow).

I am now working on a lap blanket, all in garter stitch (knit stitch only), and it is a good project for practicing my continental knitting. Now I have acquired some muscle memory in making the stitch. I've also been working on moving more efficiently from one stitch and the next, and from one row to the next.

With those skills, I can now knit more than twice as fast as I could just a few years ago, and probably more like three times the speed that I was knitting at ten years ago. It is very exciting to see my blanket being completed so quickly. And when I estimate the dwindling number of years that I have left to knit in, I think I'm going to need that ability.

The night before the night before Christmas

I've been sick almost all month, and have had few opportunities to do my Christmas shopping. My favorite thrift store closed earlier this year, so I've had to find other places to shop. Still, I did manage to get it done, with some help from God putting the right things in the right places at the right times, and enabling me to spot them. Mostly I'm giving books this year; either new or used.

Of course I have a couple of last-minute crafting projects going...one is a quilt project and the other a quick embroidery project. I don't recommend making a quilt at the last minute; I am hurting today after tying the whole thing yesterday.  (Both the top and the bottom are sheets; I didn't piece the top together.)

I also did a quick chocolate-pudding-mix-in-a-jar gift, based on the recipe here.

Big progress on the fabric stash

I spent most of yesterday reorganizing my fabric stash and sewing-projects-in-progress. It had gotten into a horrible muddle, and I was getting very little sewing done.

I brought it all--some of it was in the basement--up to our school room, threw it into a huge pile, and slowly sorted it out.

Some pieces I didn't want or need, so I cut them up for use as disposable kitchen wipes, and stuffed them into quart jars.  Now I have four jars full of them.

I realized, as I was cutting the fabrics, that I was, in a way, "canning" them. Some people can food, but I can bits of fabric.

With the price of paper towels being over $2 per roll these days, it is not such a bad idea.  A quart of fabric wipes will last us a week, or two, or three.  Big spills we wipe up with washable towels; these wipes are for cleaning greasy pans and smaller and messier drips.

I started doing this with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Our health insurance cost is going up another nine percent next year, so I will keep on doing so. Kimberley-Clark really should get their lobbyists to work on this; there's a whole generation here growing up without paper towels.

The down side of doing so much fabric cutting is the dust that is created; tiny bits of fiber all over.

Another benefit of the sorting is that I found several mending projects that only needed a few minutes each; a series of quick wins. I also found several items that just needed to go into our to-donate box.

With those things taken care of, now my fabrics and projects fit into the space that I have to store them in.

Interesting

One of the children discovered--by accident--that a combination of urine, heat, and time will soften wood glue (carpenters' glue)...enough to get the glue almost halfway back to how it was when it came out of the bottle. This may come in handy someday.

Perspective gained

With the national debt at over $62,000 per capita (not including interest), it seems obvious to me that we are in for one flavor of austerity or another in the future. Well, then...let's get back to the basics:

Water.

Food.

Clothing.

Shelter.

I've noticed something interesting in Proverbs 31:  the idealized "Proverbs 31 woman" does a lot of work with textiles, and clearly has built up a lot of skill in the fiber arts.

I think there are a couple of reasons for that.  The first is that the basics of sewing, weaving, knitting, crochet, embroidery, and so on can be done with very little investment in tools, and a moderate investment in materials. It just takes a lot of time to learn the skills, and to practice and use them.  Whereas growing food requires land and seeds, and possibly animals.  Knowledge and skill are also required, but living things do want to live and grow, which is a big help.

Water and shelter are more stable things--either you have a source of water, or you don't, and if you've built your house well, it will probably stand for years.

In recent years, the price of basic clothing has come very far down.  All you have to do is ignore the fact that much of it is made of plastic, and assembled by basically slave labor.  And then it's hauled across the world in big ships running on fossil fuels.

When the debt party ends, that's the end of it...one way or another. So I see some wisdom in learning how to create my own textiles, even though economically it doesn't make any sense at the moment.

More sewing

More mending.  Trying to finish up an embroidery project that I've been working on for almost twelve years.  Trying to figure out the next step in a sewing project that's been stalled for a month.  Testing a baby clothes hanger to see if it'll work to support a wall hanging.

Plus I got an idea for a quilt:  a quilt made of squares based on the color schemes that I've been thinking about for years for the rooms of my someday-maybe "forever house".  I have some smaller pieces of fabric that I've been wanting to use in a project.

Finally, some sewing

I was able to get some sewing done after getting the garden harvest stored:

1.  Mending:  Several items of family clothing received minor or moderate repairs.

2.  Clothing:  I finally got around to sewing one of the skirts I had planned to make for my "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing sprint in the spring. After it was sewn, I overdyed it, and the color turned out well.
Notable for this project was that the fabric shower curtain I was using for fabric wasn't quite large enough to cut all of the skirt pieces out whole, so I had to do some careful piecing and pattern matching to get all the fabric I needed. It adds a subtle but interesting custom detail to the finished skirt. (I did a flat seam by overlapping the pieces by an inch, and then sewing two lines of zigzag stitches down the overlapped part. The exposed raw edge has frayed down to the stitching, making a short fringe.)

3.  Curtains:  I was given several yards of cotton upholstery-weight velvet, and curtains seemed like the best place to use it; I have been thinking about how to bootstrap my way into a somewhat more mature style of decorating. I sewed up a set of curtains from the fabric, put them up, and then realized that the stiffness of the material made them almost impossible to open. And when they were closed, they were overwhelming the room. I took them down, and cut half of them in half lengthwise, stabilizing the cut edges with a quick zigzag stitch. Then I put them back up, and made some quick curtain ties from selvedge edges that were left over.  Now they make a style statement, but not too much of one.

4.  High chair cover:  Months ago, I threw out the cover to the high chair; I had gotten tired of it, and it had seen more than a decade of use anyway. I finally began putting together some bits and pieces of someone's abandoned wall hanging project from the 90's, and have a basic cover sewn together now. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go in finishing it nicely.

Pumpkins!

We were given a number of pumpkins, not all the same variety, and I have been finding different ways to use them.

Some, of course, became jack-o-lanterns.

Some I turned into "Cream of Fresh Vegetable Soup".  The recipe I use is in an old Soups and Stews Betty Crocker cookbook, but an identical version is online here (in a harder-to-read form, no handy chart).  Note:  when it says to only put part of the recipe in the blender at a time, it is NOT kidding:  when you blend hot liquids, the cool air that gets blended in expands rapidly...and sends the liquid upward in a big, hot SPLOOSH!!!

I baked two pumpkin pies, which didn't last long in our house.

I also froze something like fourteen quarts of mashed pumpkin.

And I still have four pumpkins left, plus there are two oblong pumpkins that may be squash hybrids, which my husband wants to cook up himself.

I found that the easiest way to deal with pumpkins en masse was to cut them in half from top to bottom, scoop out the seeds and strings, and bake them cut side down on cookie sheets, about 1.5 hours at 350 degrees. My cookie sheets are longer ones (they hold 15 cookies, not 12), so I was able to get two halves on each cookie sheet, and two sheets in the oven at a time.

Then, after the pumpkin is good and baked, scoop the flesh out of the skins, and mash it up.

I did puree some pumpkin that I peeled, cut into one-inch chunks, and cooked by simmering in water; I found that I needed to add a little extra water to the chunks for our blender to handle them.  (See the above note on SPLOOSH!!!, which applies here as well, if the pumpkin chunks are hot.)

I found that the easiest way to salvage the seeds for toasting was to put the pumpkin innards into a large bowl of water, pick out the strings first (instead of the seeds), and then get the seeds.

Cutting up the pumpkins was the hardest part; part of the time I used a dull hatchet, but it takes some very firm whacks, and my aim is not always the best, and there were bits of pumpkin flying all over the kitchen.  Otherwise, I used a long, serrated knife to halve the pumpkins.

Handkerchief box from greeting card

I've been gradually finding boxes and other containers for the things that I keep on my closet shelves.  I noticed recently that I didn't yet have a container for my small stack of handkerchiefs.

So I started keeping my eye out for one, as I went around the house, but all the containers in that size were already in use.

Then, I was about to throw away a greeting card, and I thought I might save part of the picture on it for a later collage project...or I could use it to cover a small box...or I could just make a small box out of the card itself...and that could be my handkerchief box.

I did a little careful cutting, folding, and stapling, and ended up with not exactly a box, but an adequate enclosure for handkerchiefs, with a partial bottom, and with the part of the picture that I liked the best being on one of the sides.

Toilet seat touch-ups

I wrote before about repainting the toilet seat. It looked much better, but under the extreme conditions in our household, the paint began to be worn through after three weeks.  That's the disadvantage of paint:  low durability.

The advantage of paint, however, is that it is easy to renew, especially if you have more paint of the exact same color (and it is not too old).  I was able to respray only the areas of the seat that needed it, with much less trouble than it took to repaint it the first time.

MDF is not wood

It is only a very thick paperboard (think cereal box material).  It will self-destruct if it gets wet, so it must be very well protected against water, either by being kept in consistently dry areas of the house, or by being completely encased in a thick, durable, and waterproof coating.

Harvest time

 I started thinking about some fall wardrobe things, but I quickly came to realize that my time is better spent right now working on preserving our garden produce.

My husband is the family gardener, and despite very limited gardening time this year, he has gotten good yields of beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and onions.  Earlier in the summer, we had broccoli and cabbage, also.

With the first frost of the year coming, he got in as much as he could, and I've been working on it cleaning and storing it.

We have a chest freezer now, so I have been freezing some things.  We also have a canner, but I don't yet feel free enough from urgent interruptions to devote my attention to a canning session.

We were given permission to pick apples in someone's yard, and got close to three bushels from that. I don't know the apple variety, but they do not keep well at all, so I made applesauce and juice from them all, the next day. I figured out a workflow where I peeled apples with the crank apple peeler/corer/slicer, put the peeled slices in the applesauce pot, and ran the end slices (which the peeler misses) through our juicer.

Someone also gave us a pumpkin, and several acorn squash.

The children have helped here and there, without arm-twisting.  They've picked and shelled beans, picked peppers, and helped core apples.

A solution for a leaning drying rack

Folding drying racks are very useful, but they always seem to start leaning over, after just a little use.

My husband came up with a simple fix, though:  get a stick that is about as tall as the drying rack, and tie it (upright and a bit off-center), to the rack's diagonal pieces, to support the end of the drying rack.

I will add a picture when I can, but right now my drying rack is in use!

I think if you make the ties for the stick just a little loose, you'll be able to slide the stick out and fold the rack.

Where to hang the dish towel

I was reading an interior design book a while back, and noticed that many of the kitchens had an awkwardly-placed dish towel in the picture.  About two-thirds of the visible dish towels were hanging on oven door handles--which could be a considerable distance away from the sink and dishwasher, given the layouts of these oversized, high-end kitchens--and the rest were hanging on the edges of the sinks.

It was a surprise to see such ad hoc solutions to such a basic need, in such thoroughly-designed kitchens.

In my own kitchen, there are false drawer fronts in front of the sink, and I can hang a towel on a drawer handle.

What I don't have, but do need, is a place somewhere to hang wet and dirty towels to dry before they go downstairs to the laundry room.

Recently...

...we had a big spell of Life Happens at our house.

Still, I got a few notable things done:

Sewed a laundry bag from an old sheet; double layers of fabric for strength, and French seams just because I could.

Shelled our garden's bean crop. I did two sittings of shelling, and then my oldest children came in and powered through the rest.

Sewed together the pages for my next handmade notebook; very awkward process without a sewing frame. I'm working on the cover now, using the boards from an old and unreadable book.

Makeup for my wall and ceiling

My bedroom ceiling is white, and the walls are ivory. In many places around the edge of the ceiling, you can see where the person who painted the walls touched the ceiling with the paint roller, leaving a splotch.

These splotches have annoyed me ever since we moved in, especially the ones that I can see clearly from the bed.

Finally I took our last piece of white chalk, climbed up on a chair, and chalked over the worst of the splotches, blending the chalk into the paint gently with a finger--just like blending makeup.

From below, this makes the splotches much less noticeable, and hopefully they are now well below my usual threshold of noticing things.

Some people are actually allergic to chalk, so this is not for everyone. I expect that I will need to renew the chalk occasionally, as it gradually falls off the ceiling.

Washing a wool rug at home

While I did try taking my big wool rug outdoors last winter to clean it with snow, the time had come for a more thorough cleaning.

(The rug is 8 feet by 10 feet, flat woven, and not worth taking to be cleaned professionally.)

First I vacuumed the rug, and did some spot cleaning by hand.

Then I took a tarp out in the backyard, hosed it down, mopped it, and rinsed it off again. I put in on a slight slope, for drainage.

I spread the rug out over the tarp, hosed it down until it was quite wet, and then mopped it with a laundry detergent made for woolens, diluted in water, trying to scrub the detergent down into the fibers firmly and evenly.

I went over the rug again for another scrub, and then gave it a thorough hosing.  At this point there was visibly dirty water draining off at the lower edge. Then I flipped the rug over, hosed the back side thoroughly, flipped it again, and hosed the top one last time.

The hard part of washing a large wool rug isn't in washing it, but in drying it more or less flat. To dry it, I let it sit for a while on the slope, then I brought it down to the basement, and draped it carefully over a futon frame (minus the mattress!) and some other furniture--with the dehumidifier running.  After a day, I flipped it over, and let it dry for a couple days more.

Back on the floor, it looks a bit wrinkled, but it is settling in, and certainly looks a lot cleaner than it did, although there are still some spots that could use special attention.

A surprise

Tucked in with the handed-down stash of quilting fabric that I received recently were some odds and ends of sewing needles and notions, including a number of safety pins.

My grandmother gave me a little box of safety pins before I went off to college, and I still have most of them. They came in very handy at times.

But I was surprised, when I started using these new safety pins, how much flimsier they were than the older ones. I estimate that they are about half as strong as the older ones, in terms of the pull that they will withstand before bending and springing open.  Maybe even less than that.

Isn't it wonderful how modern technology has brought us so many ways to make things not only much cheaper, but much less useful as well.  /sarcasm

The joy of pounding nails

It's been a long time since I built anything using nails instead of screws. (Screws are much quieter, especially if you have a hand-powered drill, which matters when you are living in an apartment.)

But today I pounded together a scrap wood toy bin for the garage, and I was really surprised how quickly it went together--less than ten minutes. Mostly because I didn't need to drill pilot holes.

Getting better at buttonholes

I just finished a project that had buttonholes, and I have to say, I am much getting better at sewing them (manually, not using my sewing machine's buttonhole attachment--that's a whole 'nother learning curve).

It took me making twenty so-so buttonholes over a couple of years to get to this point. I did always want to just sit down and practice making them, but instead I practiced by actually making clothing.

Out of chaos

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.  -- George MacDonald

That is from Leaves of Gold, a book of quotations, one of those books from years back that was intended to be edifying Sabbath reading.

I picked it up from our church library's downsizing, mostly for its embossed cover. It was clear that it had not been read much.

I did try reading it, and found that it was thoroughly unreadable...the quotations are sorted by topic, and to lurch from one author's thought on a topic to another author's entirely different thought on the same topic is extremely unpleasant.

So I consigned it to the collage pile that I keep for my weekly art journaling.

One of the things I have been thinking about recently is how we shape our world by what we choose and what we reject. I keep being amazed by how, in my art journaling, I sort through some random printed material, cutting out a thing here and a thing there, and then paste them together along with a few words and some drawing or painting, and usually it all comes together quite coherently.

I've found it helpful to go back to some of my journaling pages a few months later, and write a "moral" for each one on the back...it's kind of a higher order of finding meaning in them.

If I were mendacious, I would come up with a fortune-telling scheme "based on the science of quantum entanglement", and how many apparently unrelated things are actually connected.

Anyway, in my last art journaling session, I opened the book at random, and found the George MacDonald quotation. It fits in with some other things I have been thinking about. I also found a picture from a grocery store magazine that tied several completely different ideas that I've been thinking about together very neatly.

In the same way, my daily Bible reading is usually at random, and I look for verses that speak to me. It's not a method that works for Christian fortune-telling, but it does at least reveal some of what is going on in me, and often seems to reveal (through the Holy Spirit) things God is saying here and now to me.

Hearts

In the quilting fabric I was given were a number of fabric hearts, ready for applique.  The hearts were in our dining room colors, red and green, and there were as many of them as we have children.

I had an empty spot on the dining room wall, where I had taken down some things I was getting tired of.

So I stuck the hearts up there (just with tape), and I'm fairly happy with it.

Raw materials!

Family members handed down to me a bag or two of some quilter's old fabric and thread stash...dating from the early '90s, by the look of the fabric patterns.

Some of the fabric I simply cut up and put in the kitchen wipes jar.

The rest I sorted out and started thinking about using.

One piece was just about enough for a blouse, minus the sleeves, but there was also a coordinating piece of fabric that was just big enough for the sleeves.

With the homemade blouse pattern that I have, it now takes me roughly three hours of working time to sew a blouse.  (Or, in real time, about three days.)  I finished sewing it yesterday, and I'm wearing it now.

The collar is a little goofy (as usual), and it's a bit too long, but otherwise it turned out well.

There are two smaller pieces of fabric in the stash that I started putting together into a hat.

Also there are three or four smaller pieces that I think would work well for a baby garment.

I'm going to have to look at the other larger pieces again, to see what other possibilities there might be.

On laundry

Up until we moved into this house, which has a high-efficiency washer, I had been using homemade laundry soap for most of our laundry.

The exception was cloth diapers, for which I used laundry detergent.  The reason being, that I was told that laundry soaps (including commercial ones) would leave a slight residue of soap scum on the diapers, which can build up over time and affect absorbency. 

When we moved here, I looked into whether the homemade soap would work well in a high-efficiency machine, and the answer was, "No, it will gum up the machine over time." So I switched, out of Christian love for our landlord, and we dealt with the higher cost of laundry detergent over homemade laundry soap.

Some months ago, Backwoods Home Magazine ran a short article about homemade laundry soaps being terrible because they leave soap scum on the fabrics.  I have the bad scientific habit of always running little thought experiments on claims that are made to me, and always looking for how my knowledge might be extended and increased.

So, in reading this article, my reaction was, "Yes, but...", where the But was that many of the clothes and linens that I had washed for years with laundry soap were still going strong, and hadn't worn out.

The soap scum residue seems to be actually protecting the fibers. We still have sheets and towels from the beginning of our marriage that haven't worn out yet. The towels are certainly dingy (we're not bothering to replace them until we get through the worst of our small-children-in-the-house years), and not very absorbent, but they have not worn out. The few I have gotten rid of, over the years, were the ones that were too badly stained. 

And the same thing for clothing...some of the clothes I was recently making replacements for were ten years old, and were worn regularly (weekly, more or less) that whole time.

There was also an account I read of a family dumped off in a remote Russian village, a few years before World War II, where the mother introduced the practice of washing laundry with soap to the villagers (who had been in the habit of never washing their clothing at all)...she told them it would make their clothing last longer. 

Surely removing dirt and bacteria will make clothing last much longer, but now I've begun to think that the soap had something to do with it, too.

I actually have a control set in my own house for evaluating the claim that soap extends textile durability:  the cloth diapers, which I have all along washed with detergents.

A load of cloth diapers will certainly produce more dryer lint than our regular laundry does, but there are some other factors that contribute to that also:  the flannel fabric tends to shed, the diapers get double-washed each time, and they need a longer drying cycle than the rest of the laundry does.

The working life of a cloth diaper around here is roughly two to three years, being used two or three times per week. That comes out to a roughly 25% shorter lifespan for a cotton fabric, I'm guessing, from washing with detergent versus soap.

In the present era of incredibly cheap textiles, that's not necessarily a big deal, but in a world where textiles are labor-intensive and hard to come by, that would be a significant saving of human effort.

As for the "ick" factor of having old soap scum buildup on my fabrics, my personal opinion is that it isn't going to jump off and hurt me. Other people's opinions may vary.

The other big difference between modern laundry and laundry in the old days is the water temperature used...the HE washer here (Read the Manual) admits that its Hot water setting is, for the sake of energy efficiency, not very hot at all.  In the 19th century, they used to give much of the laundry a good simmer in near-boiling water.  That probably removed an excess of soap scum, I'm guessing, while not completely stripping the fibers.

Washboards, by the way, work mostly by setting up and pushing little waves of water pressure through the fabric, not by the friction of the fabric rubbing against the board.

Everything

"Boy, God thinks of everything!"...this is something that I have said more than once recently, as I was finding that everything I needed was right there at hand.

I suppose I can't be too surprised that the Creator of everything from quasars to quarks sometimes delights in working out seemingly minor details for His children.

The cost of driving a used car

Doing some math with six years of receipts for our used Mazda MPV....

To preface the numbers, we bought this car used, a few thousand miles past the warranty expiration, and we quickly learned that Mazda's engineers had gotten rather good at engineering parts to just barely survive the warranty period.

Total repair costs (not including oil changes and the like), divided by months of ownership:  $212 per month.  It needed a repair once every three months, on average, although actually there were more in the first few years than in the last few.

One of those repairs, though, was a transmission rebuild.  Taking that out, repair costs per month would have been $172 per month.

Purchase price minus the sale price when we sold it, divided by months of ownership, equals $90/month. Purchase price alone, $119 per month. (We paid all this up front, in cash.)


This why I allot $200/month for car repairs in our budget, and try to keep enough savings on hand to cover a major repair (or most of the price of a new used car).

Summer hat

I had a plan to crochet a summer hat out of cotton string, and then scrunch some paint into it to stiffen it.

But Walmart didn't have enough cotton string, when I went.

What they did have was about 400 feet of hemp string (in the crafts section) for $5, so I went with that.

I started at the brim, made a long chain, and worked upward, with a single crochet (**American terminology**) stitch to start with for the first two rows--for firmness--then switching to half double stitch, which is a bit faster to crochet for the area covered.

I did scattered decreases, as needed, trying the hat on as I went.

I finished up with a few yards of string left over, worked in the ends, and then gave it a bath in some strong tea, to dye it browner.  That was yesterday, and it is still drying.

What I've been up to

Resting after Wardrobe in a Week.

Mopping up a few last things from that week.

Being sick.

And finishing these:

Which are a kind of slipper or light shoe (flat heel and very thin sole), based mostly on the method of Mary Wales Loomis.

I don't have her book, although I'm sure it is marvelous and well worth the money, if you want to make your own shoes.  I have gone off the information she has helpfully provided on her site, paying back with prayers for her well-being.

Her method is to make a pair of plaster casts using shoes you already have, then build up the inner parts of the shoes with stiffened buckram and structural pieces scavenged from old shoes, then sew up the uppers (around the top edge), stretch them around the forms, hand sew back and forth across the bottoms to hold them in place, then glue on the soles and heels, and put in the insoles.

Here are my forms (plaster plus some papier mache filling out gaps; I didn't have quite enough plaster, and not enough got down into the toes), with my stiffened buckram drying around it:

I was in a no-buy mood at that stage, so I used burlap scraps for buckram at the sides, heel stiffening from an old pair of shoes that I pulled apart (very educational, deconstructing a higher-quality shoe; highly recommended), and for the toes I handwove crochet cotton--something that is worthy of a post of its own.

After this step, I set all this aside to work on WiaW, and to be sick with a nasty summer cold.  During that time, we had very humid weather, and my plaster/papier mache forms started growing mold inside their loose plastic bags.

When I got back to them, I found the mold, taped the bags completely closed, and tried to get the shoes finished off quickly, so I could throw the forms away.

The hardest part in making shoes is actually fiddling around and thinking about the next step.

Cutting leather is not that hard; I use kitchen shears, and occasionally a steak knife.

It is indeed a wonderful thing to have accurate models, to build up your shoes around.  Note that these shouldn't be shaped exactly like your feet, but instead like the space that your feet will need inside the shoe. So the better fitting the shoes that you make your forms from, the better the final result will fit.  That was what held me back when I was trying to start making shoes, several years ago:  I didn't own any shoes that fit me well enough to be worth duplicating.

There were several points in the shoemaking process where actually buying the book would have been helpful.  This was certainly a very challenging project for me, and I was tempted at times to give up.

One point where I had a lot of problems was how to keep the edge of the upper from sliding around or stretching out of shape while stitching across the bottom.  I did run a few long stitches across the hole to help hold the shape, but it wasn't enough to keep the entire top edge from ending up about 3/8 to 1/2 inch lower than I had intended--which is a lot, for a shoe.

Another is that the cotton upholstery velvet that I was using is thick, and was hard to gather up underneath the foot neatly.  I decided that the underside was too bumpy to glue to directly, so I elected to do a two-needle saddle stitch around the edges of the sole, making holes with an awl (which could be improvised from a nail and a small chunk of wood, if necessary, but I happen to have one).

(Sometimes people cut a little groove in the leather for the stitches to sit down in, but in this case the leather was too thin.)

Still, the slippers are wearable for the intended purpose, and I learned a lot that may be helpful in the future.

Costs:  $13 (at full retail) for vegetable-tanned leather for the sole, cotton velvet was handed down to me (and dyed with some leftover dye during WiaW), inner lining is from an old skirt, sole was stitched with about $3 of waxed braided cord left over from an earlier project, inner sole is about $1 worth of scrap leather from surplus store, buckram was handmade from hand-me-down materials and scraps, fabric stiffener fluid was handed down to me, a pair of teardown shoes for potential parts (only heel stiffening used) and assembly hints was $7 at Goodwill, and the thread was a Christmas gift.

Barge Cement (available at Hobby Lobby) was $8, but I ended up not using any for this project.

The shoes I disassembled did give me one valuable hint about how to make the shoe bend in the right place:  put a pattern of little slits into the inner sole at that point, enough to make it more flexible there, while not reducing the strength of the leather by too much.  In these shoes, the inner sole was not even leather, but a high-quality paperboard--no wonder modern shoes start falling apart when they get wet!

WiaW: Day 6

My final day of "Wardrobe in a Week"!

What I did today:

artistically repaired several small holes in a T-shirt

sewed a T-shirt from new fabric

overdyed a skirt that I sewed this week with brown dye; some of the previously printed portions took up the dye less than the rest, leaving it with a subtle pattern that I like

experimented with dabbing acrylic paint onto my solid black swimsuit; happy with the colors I chose, but not happy with the final result--but likely I can improve it with one more dabbed-on layer of the first color, just mixed with white to make it stand out a bit more


Next steps:

REST!

Put away the piles of fabric that are taking up half of the school room,

Get the house vacuumed,

And get on with my life.

WiaW: Day 5

Tomorrow will be my last working day of my "Wardrobe in a Week".  Today I:

put my homemade interfacing (painted fabric) into a collar--by basting it onto the top edge, and covering it with another layer of the shirt fabric (left over from when I made the shirt last year); the interfacing seems to have about the right amount of stiffness, and the collar looks much better

ironed (!) two skirts that are cut on the bias, which have a problem with the hem rolling up about three times over, making the skirts a bit too short; this needs a more permanent solution

made another working-around-home skirt from start to finish, after realizing that the one I started before (of coarse woven polyester) will be much too heavy and hot for summer wear; this one from cotton from a handed-down duvet cover

sewed up a small hole in a T-shirt

made a minor alteration to a homemade nursing bra

did an experiment with joining the legs of homemade tights (which had holes in the heels) to the feet of socks that I really didn't like that much as socks


I also had some accomplishments in deciding what not to do as I finish up this week:

not sewing the polyester skirt, as already mentioned

not sewing two blouses that I had planned on making; they can wait until fall

not sewing a full set of new underwear, only repairing what I already have

WiaW: Day 4

Today I:

did an experiment in making homemade interfacing by giving muslin a thin coat of acrylic paint

fixed a button that was about to fall off, including darning the fabric it was attached to

reclaimed the elastic from two old skirts, and...

...finished the "good" skirt:  waistband, pocket, and hem

cut fabric for a T-shirt

shortened two older T-shirts

WiaW: Day 3

More "Wardrobe in a Week" progress:

cut out fabric for two skirts--one for "good" and one for working around the house-- and sewed all the vertical seams; the one for working I made big (on purpose), and will have to take in some at the waist

finished the felt hat, including blanket stitching all the way around the brim (by hand); it looks goofy and a bit too floppy, but workable for being out in the yard

drew up a pajama pants pattern, and cut out and sewed up a pair; when in doubt, make them BIG

adjusted sewing plans, based on available fabric, to have one of the shirts that I am going to make be a T-shirt

WiaW: Day 2

Sewing was rather light today, as I was busy for much of the day dealing with laundry and yard work and such, but I did get several things done:

made over a much-too-large T-shirt, so that it fits; also replaced its designer logo with a reverse applique flower, in an Alabama Chanin sort of style, but with crochet cotton instead of buttonhole thread

adjusted the straps on my swimsuit; this turned out to only require untying the knots I had made in them before

shortened a tank top to be only a tank bra, which is replacing a nursing bra that was very worn out

shortened the sleeves on a long-sleeved T-shirt to make them three-quarter sleeves (which I find more practical for frequent handwashing)

sketched patterns for a long A-line skirt and for a baseball cap

cut out and started hand-sewing a felt hat (just out of synthetic craft felt) to wear while doing yard work, until I make a baseball cap to replace the one that fell apart in the wash last week

WiaW: Day 1

My first day of actual sewing, for my "Wardrobe in a Week" effort. Today I focused on getting a number of small repairs and alterations done, which moved seven items of clothing out of my to-do pile and back into my closet:

2 bras repaired; mended a rip and replaced a missing hook and (with needlenose pliers) bent one of the other hooks back to something like its original shape

replaced a button on a pajama top

did a line of simple embroidery around the neckline of a (previously homemade) T-shirt

repaired some embroidery on the neckline of a different (also homemade) T-shirt

made over a skirt to be shorter and narrower, to serve as an underskirt for my two wrap skirts

took out a goofy-looking side seam on another skirt, and sewed it back up


I also got a few other things done:

soaked an older T-shirt in Oxyclean (I am not an affiliate of anything) to see if it helped...it did, a little

washed and dried the quilting fabric I bought, to preshrink it before sewing

drew up a quick pattern for a camisole, and cut the fabric; started sewing, but doubt that it is going to go well with this particular fabric (very thin)

again looked over several of the remaining items of clothing to be dealt with, and decided what to do with them

WiaW: Final preparations

I did not get done all of the things that I wanted to, but I got enough done...I think.

I made a trip to the fabric store, and after much deliberation spent my $25 budget on enough quilting cotton to make a skirt, plus elastic for making underwear, and dye. (I have plenty of fabric at home, just in the wrong weaves, fibers, and colors...one of those attributes I can change, although I consider dyes to be too toxic for me to use more than occasionally.)

The cheaper fabrics for sale at the store make more sense if you realize that their true purpose is not to be sewn up and enjoyed, but to drive you to pay more to buy the fabrics that are tastefully designed and useful.

I also spent some time digging through my baskets of fabric just looking, and in making decisions about what I am going to sew this week--including making some more rectangle color sketches to see how various tops and skirts work together.

WiaW: Planning session 4

I went around the house and gathered all the fabric that is potentially available for sewing into clothes, into a couple of laundry baskets.

I also went back to my chart of needed outfits for various activities. I crossed out the clothing I am going to retire, and made note of the clothing that needed alteration, and came up with a fairly solid list of what new clothing I need to make, and in what colors and patterns to coordinate with the rest of my summer wardrobe.

All along I've been writing down ideas for modifying fabric and for making improvements to my clothing.

I made a tentative sewing schedule for next week, first the knit fabrics, and then the woven fabrics, along with a list of tasks under each category.

I still have to make some choices about which fabrics to actually use (or to buy), and I still have to draw up some patterns, before next week.

WiaW: Planning session 3

Planning for next week's "Wardrobe in a Week" continues....

I still haven't had a big-enough block of truly free time for trying on and evaluating the clothing that I already have. But I got the idea of just wearing some of the clothes that I don't wear as often, this week while I'm planning. Most of the rest, I wear frequently enough that I don't really need to try them on.

I set a budget of $25 for the week. I started with $5, but realized that this is an area where I should be spending a bit more than that, at this time in my life. Some of the clothes I am replacing are five--or even ten--years old and have been in regular use that whole time.

I have been keeping my eyes open around the house for potential materials. We have multiple fabric stashes in this house, along with a shelf in the linen closet that is jammed full of sheets. I have even been eying my bedroom curtains, but I know they are very faded in places.

I checked out a seamstress's book from the library (Anna Zapp's The Zapp Method of Couture Sewing, which seems quite good, although more oriented toward personalizing commercial patterns than toward drawing your own). I used her measuring scheme, which involves taking something like seventy measurements, for taking my own measurements. She recommends always rounding a measurement up, if in doubt--it's much easier to alter something in the direction of smaller rather than larger.

Another of her tips is to take garments that fit you well, and measure the ease (the extra room built into the garment so it's not skintight and you can move) at various points. I haven't done that yet, but I made a list of clothes to measure when I get a chance.

I also took a look at my fabric store coupons; I'm likely going to be buying at least some fabric and elastic.

WiaW: Planning Session 2

"Wardrobe in a Week" planning in my homemade blank book continues....

I made a clothing inventory, listed by Item, Condition, and Actions. So far, I've done this entirely from memory while the baby was napping in my bedroom; there are some things I need to actually look at and try on.

"Actions" includes the item's needed repairs, along with possible alterations and repurposing. Some things just need to be completely retired.

I also had some fun making drawings of possible color and pattern combinations, based on my actual and potential clothing. A few years ago, I made a set of little clothing silhouettes, like paper dolls' clothes, depicting basic shirt, blouse, skirt, pants, sweater, and jacket shapes. I got these out and traced around them in my planning booklet, then colored them in, in a variety of combinations.

After a while, though, I got tired of carefully tracing my little templates, and just started drawing rectangles, where the top third of a rectangle represents my neck-to-waist portion, and the bottom two-thirds represents my waist-to-ankles portion.  That is not so far from my actual shape, as seen from the front when I am wearing a long skirt.

WiaW: Planning Session 1

This is my week of planning before doing a "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing blitz next week (for my summer wardrobe only).

I started by making a blank book for this project by stapling several sheets of white paper together along the top, and then turning it sideways. (Using the paper sideways gives more room for ideas to spread out and blossom, I recently learned.)

I began my analysis by figuring out how many waking hours in a week I have--about 119 hours out of 168--and how I typically spend my time during the week...the idea being that I will need more outfits for the activities that I do most often.

I found that I spend 95% of my waking hours working at home (on various things), running errands, or on informal outings. The other 5% is mainly spent at church and church events, along with errands in less informal settings, such as going to the bank. There is also the possibility of having weddings and funerals to attend, or of having unusually messy work to do somewhere.

Next, I made a chart of how many outfits I estimate will need this summer, based on the above activities, and a laundry schedule of one laundry day per week. I temporarily filled this chart in with outfits consisting of clothing I already have; this is to expose some of the more obvious gaps in my wardrobe. More will appear as I choose to retire or repurpose some items.

I also started making a list of repairs and alterations and new sewing that I want to do next week. Since I will need to be very efficient with my time next to accomplish everything I want to do, I am thinking now about how to minimize sewing machine set-up time, such as time spent changing needles or thread, or winding bobbins. So I'm going to be sorting and batching these tasks by the needle and the thread that are required.

DIY microwave popcorn, and chocolate chunks (not together)

We've been doing some experiments with making different things at home.

I found a microwave popcorn recipe online that works well enough for a child of a certain age to prepare for themselves (although it doesn't scale up well for a family of our size; if it's all of us, we might as well make popcorn on the stove in the stockpot like we usually do).

Homemade microwave popcorn:

1/4 cup popcorn kernels
1/4 teaspoon vegetable oil
about 1/4 teaspoon or so of salt
a paper lunch bag

Mix the kernels, oil, and salt in a small bowl, and put in bag.  Fold the top of the bag over twice, firmly, and set the bag upright in the microwave.  Microwave for two minutes MAXIMUM, and stop sooner if fewer than two kernels per second are popping as the popping dies down.

We also experimented with making homemade chocolate chunks, as a substitute for chocolate chips. The two recipes I looked at used either coconut oil, or a mix of coconut oil and butter as a base. So I doubt these are cheaper than store-bought chocolate chips.

One of the recipes used a 1:1 ratio of oil to cocoa powder; the other a 2:1 ratio.  I tried 1:1, which seemed rather strong (bitter and possibly containing enough caffeine to interfere with sleep), and which needed a fair amount of additional sugar to make kid-palatable.

With the warm weather this week, the coconut oil is completely liquid, so I didn't bother heating it up before mixing. The chunks also tended to liquefy a few minutes after being removed from the freezer; the bar cookies that we used them in were somewhat marbled with melted chocolate.

I can't give an exact recipe for how we made the chunks, but I was aiming for a yield of about 1 cup, so it was something like:

Homemade chocolate chunks

3/4 cup coconut oil
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Heat coconut oil on low heat to melt, if solid. Mix in other ingredients. Add additional sugar to taste, if desired. Pour into a shallow pan and freeze. Cut into chunks before using; keep cool until baked or eaten.

I thought of adding in a little powdered milk to stabilize them a bit, but I thought it would be too grainy, unless I ground the powdered milk into a finer powder. I might try that next time.

Coming soon: "Wardrobe in a Week"

Summer weather is here, and I've become increasingly frustrated with my warm-weather clothes, for a number of reasons. My maternity clothes are too large, and the rest are still too small. Some are nearly worn out, and others just look tired. Also, my tastes have matured a bit, so much of the clothing that I've been wearing for years looks All Wrong now. Some of it never really worked as well as I would have liked. Some of it used to work, but the pieces that they worked with wore out and were retired.

So I am planning on doing a sewing spree on the week of June 11 to get a workable summer wardrobe for myself together...Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

Naturally, getting all that done in one week requires spending the entire week before it in planning and preparation. That is my plan for next week.

Homemade bread

One of the things I have been working on lately is getting back to doing my own bread baking. I baked bread regularly when I was single, and occasionally after I married. For a while we had a bread machine. The reasons I gave it up were that I didn't find a bread recipe that my much-pickier-than-me husband really liked, and that I had more important things to struggle with accomplishing, once the babies started coming.

Now that I have the luxury of several older children in the house, along with the luxury of a mellow baby that loves to sleep, I can make bread if I really want to.

I am using a basic traditional 2-loaf white bread recipe, but adding in sunflower seeds, and also some wheat berries and oat groats (both coarsely ground).  For a grinder, we have a Komo grain mill (I am not an affiliate of anything) which was very expensive, but which works well and should last, although I believe it is possible to grind these grains in an old-fashioned meat grinder as well.

I went with my husband on the grain mill purchase because of some homeschool mom's book that I read (I may have the title and author written down somewhere, but not in my head), which said that the two best dietary changes she made for her family were to reduce their dairy consumption, and to switch to whole-wheat flour.

I figured that since her family in the book sounded like mine, that her advice was likely to work for us. And I believe it does, although we can't always afford to stock up on wheat or other grains (which we mostly order online from Breadtopia, or occasionally buy under the Bob's Red Mill brand at the grocery store; I am not an affiliate of anything).

I found that sunflower seeds from the bulk section were cheaper than the pre-packaged ones.  (I should probably write a post sometime about how I do math in my head at the grocery store.)

Since we have other bread-eaters in the house now, besides my husband and I, we can easily get through two loaves of homemade bread in a day or two.

My goal here is to get back into the practice of breadmaking far enough to be able to whip through making a batch without having to think about it much.

I believe Friday was the traditional baking day in the Wash-on-Monday routine, and Friday (or Saturday) works well as a baking day for our family.

The secret formula behind modern life...

...the compound interest formula:

A = P * (1 + (r/n))^^nt, where A is the total amount that will be paid, P is the principal of the loan, r is the interest rate per year (as a decimal), n is the number of times the interest is compounded during a year, and t is the number of years of the loan.

 ^^ means exponent; the Advanced or Scientific versions of a computer's Calculator can handle those.

I call it a secret formula, because I don't have it memorized, and I couldn't even find it in our home library. I ended up having to look it up online. Nor was it part of my high school education. I'm not sure I even saw it in a college class.

But it does have a huge impact on modern life. My husband recently sent me a "I got $90,000 into student loan debt and now my life sucks" online article.

The writer mentioned that she had split a $10 per month Netflix bill with her college roommate.

I dug up the compound interest formula, and figured out just how much that Netflix really cost her:

$5 per month = $60 dollars per year; that's P here.

Her highest interest rate loan was 9.25%, so let r = 0.0925.

Student loan interest is compounded monthly, I believe, so n = 12.

For the time period t, I chose 20 years, because it will take her at least that long to pay off all those loans, unless she marries unusually well. She is only now beginning to realize that she'll be paying on those loans for the rest of her life if she only pays the interest due, and never pays down the principal.

The result came out to almost $387 a year; more than five times what she thought it cost her. For Netflix alone. Now run a similar calculation for her new clothing from the mall and similar non-necessities.

There's a reason that the Bible contains many admonitions to avoid debt, if at all possible, and also, for ancient Israel, laws for limiting how far Israelites could get into financial bondage on the one hand, or could enslave their countrymen and capture all the wealth, on the other.

Grab and go water and emergency water at the same time

We keep several half-gallon (64 oz.) plastic juice bottles full of clean water in the basement for an emergency water supply. These will keep for months, if you put in two drops of chlorine bleach (per half gallon of water), and keep them in a dark place.  (The name-brand bleach that I have is 8.3% sodium hypochlorite.)

It is a good idea to rotate these bottles and their contents occasionally, as neither will last forever. One way I do that is to grab one when we're on the way out the door to go on an impromptu outdoor adventure. Two birds with one stone:  rotating the water, and preventing unplanned purchases of bottled water.

I don't buy juice regularly, but three or four bottles a year is enough to replace the older water bottles long before they fail--I've never had one fail in storage yet.

Why modern clothing doesn't fit: Hat edition

I just learned that modern one-size-fits-most women's hats are made for 22-inch heads.  (There is some good hat sizing information here.)  My head circumference is 23 inches, which is on the larger end of Large.

I had noticed that the few hats I tried were always too small--one of them, made of fabric, I did significant alterations to, to give myself head room--but I didn't realize that it was a generalized sort of not-fitting-ness.

The book that I learned this tidbit from is The Lost Art of Dress (I am not an Amazon affiliate), by Linda Przybyszewski. It is an interesting look at some of the history of professional home economists in this country, and, as the title says, also conveys some inklings of just what has been lost to common knowledge in the area of dress, in the last few decades.  Well worth reading.

No-sew soft fabric box

I had a pile of old magazines and papers that I am keeping for collage and art journaling, sitting in a corner and needing a container to look Organized. I was thinking of making a shallow box from cardboard, but I got tired of waiting for cardboard to show up, and made a box out of fabric instead...a double layer of green twill from my fabric stash--which I had just looked through.

The box is shaped like this parchment paper pan liner, and is held together at the corners by safety pins. I shaped it around a magazine so that it would be wide enough and long enough.

I bent one of the pins, trying to force it through the layers of fabric, but I have plenty; Grandma sent me off to college with a good supply of them.

Places for wet things

I got tired of being perpetually short of places to hang up wet clothing, and set up a foldable drying rack in my bathtub. Then I put up a wire clothesline in the back yard. These were both things that I already had, but hadn't figured out the right place for, yet.

Investing in knowledge

One simple idea has come up several times recently in various books that I've been reading:  if you understand the principles of good design and good taste, you can make better choices from the set of material goods that is currently available, and can put them to more effective use...thus being much more efficient with your resources in the long run.

Fixing a toilet that runs too long

One of our toilets went from running a rather long time after a flush, to running a very long time.... Time to look in the tank and see what is going on.

In my experience, there are several reasons a toilet might run too long:  the flapper or cup that closes the hole at the bottom doesn't sit right, or the float (a cup or a ball) needs to be adjusted, or the inlet valve is bad and needs to be replaced.  (Remember:  I am not a plumber.  Nor a handyman.)

The first is easy to check:  flush and watch, maybe give it a nudge to see if it is in place.  For the third, a bad inlet valve will, I believe, leave the toilet running continuously.  At least that was the case the one time that I've seen.

For the second reason, a float that is too low will let water start spilling down the upright overflow tube before the float gets high enough to mechanically turn off the water.  Again, flush, and watch.

This was the case this time, fortunately; no need to do more internet research or go out to buy parts.

This particular toilet is a fairly common brand, not high-quality, and the plastic innards look rather chintzy. The float cup is connected to the shut-off lever by a plastic rod.  It took me some fiddling and careful disassembly (not wanting to snap the plastic) to figure out how to adjust the rod to raise the float cup.  But once I more or less understood how it worked, it was easy to put back together, and, voila!

Now the toilet tank refills much more quickly.

Before I started, I consulted both of our DIY fix-everything-around-the-house books.  The Reader's Digest Fix It Yourself book I like a lot, but it does zip through the topic of plumbing quite rapidly.  The Black and Decker book is also occasionally useful.

Enjoying the outdoors

With the (finally) warmer weather, we've been able to eat some of our lunches outdoors, and it is a whole different experience from eating inside. A large tray or cookie sheet to carry things on, and a place to set it outside, help a lot.

I've also been outside to catch a sunset or two; our house isn't well-situated to see them from indoors--which is one of its greatest flaws.

Planters for cheap

Our deck has several built-in planters. Each one of these has a shallow rectangular plastic box that holds a few inches of potting soil. These boxes are so old that they are simply disintegrating. Our budget for replacements was Not Much.

My solution is to replace them with plastic five-gallon buckets, cut to the right height. Our meat market sells empty, clean condensed milk buckets for a nominal cost (fifty cents each, last time I heard). Each planter has space for two buckets.

The plastic boxes were resting on some 2x4 supports to elevate them to the right height; underneath the 2x4s were a solid shelf, so I took those out, and then measured how tall the buckets needed to be. The height came to eleven inches, which is, conveniently, not on the thickened part of the bucket that the handle hooks into.

To cut each bucket, I started with a regular wood handsaw to start a slot through, and then continued cutting with a narrower saw with fairly large teeth, which I think is actually for drywall. After cutting, I used a sharp knife to trim and scrape and clean up the rough edges.

Then I drilled a few drainage holes in the bottom of each bucket, and threw in some flattened plastic bottles to loosely cover the holes and provide some internal drainage space, before filling the buckets with potting soil from the old planter box liners.

So far I've made four of these; two planters' worth.

The cut-off buckets still look like cut-off buckets, and not anything fancy, but they are only visible from above, and I'm planning on planting something with a bit of bushiness to it in them.

Painting a toilet seat

Our toilet seat (white painted wood) was badly stained and worn. I followed the procedure here, using similar products from the same manufacturer (cost for spray primer and paint under $10 altogether), and repainted it.

I used a separate primer, and did two coats of that first, followed by three coats of paint. I missed the part where she said she used gloss paint; I used semi-gloss.

Lessons learned:

1.  Beware of modern innovations; I had to look online to find out how to even get our particular model of toilet seat off the toilet. One you know the magic secret, it is very easy. Without the magic secret, you can't do it without breaking pieces of the hinges. (We have windows like that too, here.)

2.  Once the seat is off, expect some fun cleaning, especially if you have multiple boys.

3.  Pulling off the bumper pads on the seat was no problem (with a small flat screwdriver); they have plastic pegs on the back side that slide into holes.

4.  I was hoping to be able to remove the hinges so I could lay both seat and lid flat for painting at the same time, but the screws were too corroded for me to feel confident about doing that. I ended up putting the whole thing on its side, alternating the sides from one coat to the next.

5.  Primer and paint will not really fill in any rough spots; better sand these well beforehand.

6.  Don't overcoat the area around the hinges trying to get every last bit covered. Don't worry if the white plastic hinges get painted; they will still work.

7.  Thin coats dry a lot faster.

8.  The paint is very white, and it is a cooler white. My bathroom, between toilet, seat, tub, baseboards, counter, and toilet paper, has six different whites going on in one small area, and now this new white sticks out a bit. I think I can live with that, but I'm sure that some people cannot.


EDITED TO ADD:  In use, the new paint job was pristine for about three weeks, and then started wearing away in the same way the original paint had.  I gave the underside of the seat new coats of  spray paint in October, which went quite quickly and easily compared to the work I did above.  Paint isn't the most durable, but it is relatively easy to refresh.

Sharpening scrapers

Cabinet scrapers aren't usually included in the modern toolbox, but they work very well for smoothing surfaces--better than sandpaper--and I highly recommend them.

A simple thin, flat piece of steel will work for scraping, but if the edges are sharpened and burnished correctly, it is much more effective. Some woodworkers have developed specialized scraper sharpenings for different work, but just the basics will get you pretty far along.

New cabinet scrapers usually come unsharpened, and should be sharpened before the first use.

There is a good article here on how to sharpen and shape a scraper.  (And an even better one here, with pictures.) The basic idea is that you make the edge of the scraper perpendicular (or square) to the sides, and then put pressure on the edge of each side (using a burnisher--a piece of smooth steel that is of harder steel than the scraper, such as a tool made of tool steel) to make the steel overhang the scraper's edge by a tiny bit:  "raising a burr". Then use the burnisher again to bend the burr back toward the side. The end result should be that there is a tiny, continuous blade of sharpened steel all around the scraper (and perpendicular to its surface). This is what does the cutting when the scraper is used.

When I sharpened my scrapers, I didn't use blocks or jigs, but did it all freehand. It took some fiddling to figure out how to position my hands and the scraper and the burnisher to make the metal go how I wanted, but eventually I got there.

The first article also pointed out some interesting things about how burnishing actually hardens the steel of the scraper and makes the cutting edge last longer.

Strawberry glob update

The lady who made this dessert for us was kind enough to share the recipe with me. My guess on the ingredients was far off. Also, the actual name is "Strawberry Glop", not "Strawberry Glob".

The recipe is as follows:

Strawberry Glop

2 10-ounce packages of quick-thaw strawberries
6 ounce strawberry gelatin
3 Cups whipped topping

Put gelatin into 2 Cups of boiling water.
Add strawberries.
Stir until berries separate and gelatin thickens.
Stir in whipped topping.

Homemade socks

I retired a few pairs of my socks recently, and for some reason I don't feel that buying new socks at this time is the right answer. So this is what I have been doing instead:

1.  Repairing holes in socks by darning. Way back when, I tried darning cotton socks with wool yarn, and didn't like how the results felt on my feet. This time around, I have been using wool yarn on wool socks, and crochet cotton on cotton socks. The basic idea of darning is simple:  replace the missing material with a woven-in-place mesh that is anchored all around to non-deteriorated material.

I don't much like weaving, but weaving on a scale as small as this is tolerable.

2.  Knitting new socks. We had almost a pound of fine, matching wool yarn in our stash, which apparently cost my husband 50 cents altogether at a garage sale or something. I have started knitting a pair of socks from this yarn, but it will take a while, probably until fall (at least).

3.  Sewing socklike leggings or tights. It occurred to me, out of the blue, that perhaps some of the excess kids' clothes that are sitting in our garage waiting to be donated would work for making longer stockings. I looked and found a sweatshirt that had enough fabric. From past experience I knew how to cut and sew stockings quickly:  I don't bother doing anything fancy at the heel, I just make a long, tapered tube that has the right circumference at the right points (and that is closed at the small end. the toe), and finish it with some elastic at the top.

The heels do wear out first, but that would have happened anyway. With my feet, the circumferences at the ankle, heel, and widest part of the foot are all about the same, so I just get the width right and let it sort itself out in the wearing. (It does leave a wrinkle at the front ankle, which I am not fussy about.)

I have also used T-shirt fabrics, including some with spandex, for these before. Their lifespan, I would say, is "slightly better than pantyhose."

4.  Learning from experience. The socks I knitted from the nice wool yarn, last time around, ended up accidentally being shrunk into kid-size socks (very thick and warm ones). The socks I made out of recycled wool blanket yarn did not felt at all, and also stretched out a fair amount, and they have needed darning at various times.  The latest yarn I am using now will felt, I know, so I am knitting them slightly large.

Read the fine print

I was reading the Terms and Conditions for a regional bank that recently bought up a local bank, and I was struck by the blatantly hostile tone throughout the whole mess of legalese. Their terms, needless to say, are extremely unfavorable, from a potential customer's point of view.

The tone of their big pictures-low text sales piece was completely the opposite:  "Happy Happy Friendly Bank, Happy Happy Sunshine You:  Happy."

It took me a bit to figure out that both of these tones were completely intentional. The Terms and Conditions are hostile on purpose; they are meant to drive away potential banking customers:  the ones who can read, and do math, and plan ahead for any length of time longer than two minutes.

The customers that they want are the people who will only glance at the fluff sales literature, and never read the Terms and Conditions of how their accounts can and will be pillaged.  "Pillaged" is not too strong a word here...it was that bad.  This bank is going to take their hard-earned money and use it to gobble up some more small banks...then rinse and repeat.

Jesus, remember me in your Kingdom.

While thinking about this, I randomly found Isaiah chapter 17, where God promises that plunderers will themselves be plundered. Immediately after reading that, I randomly opened my Bible to Jeremiah chapter 30, where God says basically the same thing (but to a different prophet at a different time in history). The message here seems clear:  Justice is coming.

 

Book review: Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found

The full title is Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found:  Unconventional Design from Castoffs. The book is a few years old now, but still good.

Authors Linda and John Meyers present a wide range of items for the home, made or remade, mostly using salvaged materials. (There were a couple of jobs that they sent out to professional fabricators.) Together they are "Wary Meyers". John formerly worked for Anthropologie designing window displays; I've been told these displays are extremely creative, but I've never seen any for myself.

Anyway I found this book wildly inspiring, as well as informative, although annoying at a couple of points.

I'll start with the elements that make this book one that I can highly recommend:

1.  Their examples of creatively using and re-using materials, from brand-new plexiglass and fabric all the way down to pool noodles and a piece of wood pried from an old sofa's weathered skeleton.

2.  The sketchbook drawings showing all the brainstorming that takes place before they choose an idea to pick up and carry through with.

Seriously, these are well worth seeing, but if you can't, you can easily do something similar yourself:  Take a sheet of plain paper, turn it sideways, and make a bunch of little sketches at first while you play with different ideas for a material (turn off the internal critic for a while); then make larger and more detailed sketches as you close in on what you actually like and want to build. Having the paper be wider horizontally than vertically does a lot more than you might think for broadening your thinking.

3.  At a couple of points, they give hints for knowing when to stop working on a project; how to avoid overworking it. For me, this usually isn't a problem, as my children ensure that I can barely get anything done, let alone overdone, but it is still good to know what to watch out for. Their examples were a chair, where they painted the seat but later regretted also painting the rusty legs, and a (faux) mantel made out of scrap wood, which they regretted painting white, liking the mix of wood tones better.

The points that were annoying to me mostly are a matter of envy on my part:  they were able to go all over the place (childfree), buying and scrounging all sorts of things, and then to spend hours and hours and hours putting them together in new, creative ways, and eventually they were even getting paid to do that and write about it. They have a great deal of design knowledge; there are allusions in the book that are going right over my head.

Experimental pleated paper lampshade

I've been playing with the idea of changing out the fabric sleeve (which is cylindrical) over the frame for the shade of the hanging light I made a while back. I tried just plain white fabric, which was okay, but not that great against the whiter ceiling.

The other thing I've tried so far is plain white paper, pleated. The idea came from something one of the kids did with a piece of paper and some tape:  folding it in pleats and then running a couple of strips of "invisible" tape across it, holding the pleats in place. It looked (to me) modern and manufactured; like something much more sophisticated than mere paper and tape.

So I made a quick lampshade along those lines. It is currently being held up by a couple of clothespins. It, too, is not quite right for the place where it is, but it will do until I find something better.

Practicing coziness

Our family is being clobbered by a nasty cold virus and a big snowstorm at the same time. My latest big project has been stalled at Almost Done for several days, and I have no energy to finish it.

But I have kept up with the most essential housework, we have plenty of good things to eat, and we are nice and warm, with interesting things to do while the snow flies.

Size 3 knitting needles from bamboo skewers

I needed some knitting needles small enough (in diameter) to handle fine yarn.

At first I worked on making some from a piece of heavy steel wire that we had; cut to length with a hacksaw, shape the ends with a metalworking file, and sand smooth. But they are weightier than I want to deal with while knitting thinner yarn.

Then I went looking through our bucket-of-dowels-and-such, to see if we had any very thin dowels left; no luck.

So I ended up in the kitchen, raiding my husband's supply of bamboo skewers. They just needed a little sanding (220 grit) to smooth them and blunt the tips a little. They appear to be about a size three.

Cheap round chopsticks are around a size 8 knitting needle, and 1/4 inch dowels are size 10.

Research: Cost per 1000 calories

I've been doing some investigation into grocery costs, and settled on cost per 1000 calories as one measure to look into.  (Not all calories are nutritionally equal, of course!!!)

The idea came from a comment I read online, someone saying that cakes from store-bought mixes were the cheapest calories that his mom could get for their family.

I don't buy cake mixes, and haven't checked into what they cost yet, but it is true that the cheapest calories I've figured so far have been for white flour and sugar, at about $0.25 to $0.30 per 1000 calories, and then canola oil at $0.33. 

I want to gather a bit more data before I post the whole list; there are some things that we buy in bulk, rather than at the grocery store.

I did notice, though, that one of the most expensive foods that we buy for our family is plain yogurt (not low-fat). I have at times made yogurt at home, using store-bought yogurt only for starter cultures; the only hard thing with that is maintaining the right temperature for long enough. I used to use a little electric mug warmer, with a stack of metal juice cans ends for spacers, as the mug warmer alone would keep a quart jar of yogurt rather too warm.

But I have an idea now for a different way to maintain a moderate temperature, so I will try it out and report on my results.

Flat diapers experiment

I had a couple of used flannel sheets to work with a while back, and decided to experiment by making flat diapers out of them, instead of prefolds. (A set of prefold instructions, not by me, are here; I use a similar method--a center pad sandwiched between two outer layers--but I cut the outside layers as one piece, if possible.)

For flat diapers, all you do is cut large rectangles and hem them. To use one on a baby, you fold the diaper into a smaller rectangle, or a triangle, trying to put the greatness thickness where it will be needed the most. Then pin at the sides with diaper pins, and put on a water-resistant diaper cover, which could be PUL, or wool, or nylon "plastic pants", or an empty pocket diaper (any of which may need to be handwashed, depending on your washer; read the manual).

(Diaper pins are not so easy to find anymore, except online; the last time we bought them was by special order.)

The main advantage of flat diapers is that they are easier (and faster) to wash and dry than prefolds.

I did notice, though, that they seemed to be shedding more lint in the dryer than my prefold diapers ever did. I think this is because the entirety of both sides of the fabric is exposed; with a prefold diaper, the inner layers are more protected from abrasion, and any lint they shed might be trapped inside the diaper.

So I expect that the flat diapers will have a somewhat shorter lifespan than the prefolds. A prefold might take me 45 minutes or so to cut and sew; a flat diaper under ten minutes.

I think I got about ten flat diapers out of a single full/double flannel sheet, but that was probably from the sheet that was very worn in the middle.

I will also add that I was reminded recently about the old practice of "turning" an old (flat) sheet to extend its lifespan:  cut it down the middle the long way, and make the old middle into the new edges, and the old edges into the new middle. This leaves a seam down the center, but that is tolerable. I have a sheet (made by L.L. Bean) that has been going strong for over a decade, which I plan to use this technique on, when the time comes.

A new line of sight

I discovered only recently that if you sit in exactly the right place in my house, at the right time of day and the right time of year, you can just see a local landmark through the trees.

Serendipity:  finding something that you weren't even looking for.


(My second book:  The Serendipitous Sabbatical:  Rest in Unexpected Places)

Sabbatical observation: Hair refractions

One day during my sabbatical, I was looking at how strands of my hair refracted direct sunlight.  (Being careful to not look directly at the sun, of course, as everyone should have learned by last summer.) Refraction means that the rays of white daylight were bent slightly by the strands of hair, and so the hair acted like a miniature prism and smeared the light out into little rainbows. 

I am very nearsighted, and for me small or narrow light sources blur out quite widely, so I had no problem seeing the colors in them.

What I noticed is that the most direct sunlight gave me purer rainbow colors, but light that was not quite so direct gave me rainbow colors that were blended with my hair color (brown), and these resulting colors were ones that were familiar to me....

...Because they are exactly the same colors that were recommended for women of my coloring by the Color Me Beautiful method (a "dress by your color season" book from the 1980's).

I don't know how well this can be seen with other people's eyes, or other people's hair, but for me it was quite interesting.

If you want more on the science of hair refraction, here is an older paper from Stanford on modeling the optical effects of hair.

Decoupaged wastebasket

I missed the opportunity to buy a plastic wastebasket in the color I wanted, while that color was still in style.  But there is more than one way to skin a horse....

I had a sheet of paper from one of my marbling-with-shaving-cream experiments (method described briefly here), marbled in the color that I wanted. I used decoupage medium to glue it to one side of our black wastebasket, and then sealed it with another coat of decoupage medium.

I don't know how to do this without the paper wrinkling to some extent, but the marbled pattern hides the wrinkles fairly well.

This wastebasket lives under our bathroom sink; now it is a welcome burst of color when I open the cabinet door.

There is room for improvement, though, in that the wastebasket still shows a strip of black at the bottom; I should have papered it from the bottom up rather than from the top down, since the top edge is usually covered by a plastic bag.

Spring refreshing: School room

I had some free time, and was a bit at loose ends. I picked up The Nesting Place, by Myquillyn Smith, and started looking at the pictures again. Which made me want to apply some of her techniques to the room I was in:  our "school room".

One of these techniques is simply to consider what the purposes and functions of the room are. For this room, I started making a list...which went on and on...and I ended up with seventeen purposes for this one room.

An aside:  Our previous house had one small living room. This house has three not-small living rooms, and it seemed excessive to me at first. But God knows what he is doing, and we do use all three of these rooms heavily.

Then I listed all the things that needed to be in the room to support those functions. Almost everything was there already, but there are a few things that we can add to make the room work much better for our family:

1.  Two more footstools; the one I made before is constantly being used for seating at the low table (repurposed coffee table), or as a perch for the shorter members of the family to see out of the window, or as a satisfyingly hefty toy to roll around, or as a rather unstable step stool.

2.  One more light source; we try to keep the overhead lights off in the evening and instead use lamps for lighting. This room has one lamp and needs about one more. My husband has an LED project planned that will probably cover this need.

3.  Folders for homeschool paperwork and assignments, instead of one big pile of papers.

The second technique is to "quiet the room" by taking down all of the decorative items (things on the wall can stay, if you want). When they are all down, it is much easier to dust the surfaces, and also to think of new possibilities. And then things can go back where they were, or not, and you can bring in different or new things, and just play around with making changes.

It is very useful for when you have gotten so accustomed to your decorating that you aren't really seeing any of it anymore.

So I went through the room, quieting, straightening, dusting, and rearranging, and I got a lot done in the time that I had.

Homemade ricotta cheese

I had been wanting to try making homemade ricotta for a long time, and finally got around to it.

I used this recipe and method from The Kitchn. In short:  1/2 gallon of milk (not skim or ultra-pasteurized), 1/3 C of lemon juice or vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt. Heat milk to 200 degrees F, stir in your acid, let sit for 10 minutes, strain through cheesecloth to remove whey (which can be used in place of water in baking later; haven't tried that myself yet).

Other recipes recommend heating the milk to 180 degrees F, or to "starting to simmer". I found the latter much more useful, as it was a pain to keep checking the milk temperature over and over with the thermometer.

There was also a wide variation in straining times; it depends on how dry you want it to be at the end. If you drain it overnight and press it together, it is basically a farmer's cheese. (You can also get a sort of cheese by straining plain yogurt overnight; may not work as well with low-fat yogurt).

I tried it once with lemon juice, and another time with vinegar. Lemon juice gives it a better flavor, but they both work.

For straining, the first time I used a clean piece of white cotton fabric (and threw it away afterward; not worth the trouble to wash it with the appliances and plumbing that we have) and a colander--actually, the steamer basket of our main stockpot. The second time, I used an unprinted paper towel, which also worked (and didn't seem to shed fibers into the cheese).

The yield comes to about two cups of ricotta, and a quart and a half of whey, for one half-gallon of milk.

My husband approved of the ricotta, but the children didn't like it...so there was more for us!

In terms of time needed to make the cheese, it takes some time, and a bit of hands-on time, so it is not something that I plan on doing often. But it is nice to know about and be able to do. 

Spring decor: Tissue paper flowers

Recently The Nester reminded me that the time for spring decorating had come. I pulled out one thing that I made about two years ago:  a floppy pink pom-pom made out of strips from an old T-shirt. That was the only spring-y decoration I had.

But an importer* of cheap Chinese party decorations has been sending us catalogs, and what mostly stands out to me in them are the paper lanterns and large fluffy paper balls. I had put "paper lantern" on my things-to-make list, and intended to use some tissue paper that I had saved. But with the Spring theme, I decided to use the tissue paper for flowers instead.

I ended up making three different versions, all basically constructed in the same way:

1.  With one sheet of pink tissue paper, I cut it into three long strips, of different widths, and cut flower petal tips along one edge of each strip. Then, starting with the narrowest strip and ending with the widest, I carefully rolled them up, into a fair imitation of a rose, securing it at the stem with twine when I finished.

2.  With one sheet of purple tissue paper, I folded it lengthwise, then cut the long (unfolded) edges with scissors to make a fringe. Again, I rolled it up, and this time tied it at the "stem" with tape. 

3.  The remaining three sheets of tissue paper were white.  I experimented with painting them, with red acrylic paint and water to make pink streaks, and found that it came out...streaky, as I was trying to mix the paint and water right on the tissue paper, and it wasn't holding up well. Mixing them off the paper and using a much wider brush, I could have covered more of the paper than I did.

After the paint dried, I cut each sheet into three long strips, folded and cut each strip to make a fringe just like I did with the purple paper, and started rolling them up.

This time, though, I had more strips to work with, and I decided to alternate them so that the fringe stuck out on both sides of the "stem".

When I finished rolling them all up, and tied them with a string in the middle, and fluffed out the fringe a bit, it made a poofy, fluffy paper flower ball just like the ones in the catalog...except that it needed a little trimming where a few ends stuck out too far. Which I gave it.

I hung it up in the living room, close enough to the hanging lamp that it made its fabric cover look drab. So then I started experimenting with putting a different fabric on it, but that wasn't quite right either...so I'm still working on that one.

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*Now a Berkshire Hathaway company!!  I find that very amusing. 

Last chance? (Technical books)

I just learned that the (online) bookstore formerly known as Lindsay's Technical Books (which was sold to an employee when Mr. Lindsay retired) is liquidating their remaining inventory at a heavy discount.

Lindsay's book catalogs were always entertaining reading, and you could learn a useful thing or two just by reading his book descriptions. He also dispensed kicks in the pants toward actually using your brains and making something yourself. The how-to books that I bought there (in Lindsay's time) were all worth the money, although the projects were frequently not as workable in the present day as I would have liked.

Exercise pants

My sweat pants that I use for exercising at home needed to be retired, so I used yet another piece of the polyester fabric that I received for Christmas to make myself new exercise pants.

For a pattern, I measured myself and sketched out a pattern (complete with seam allowances, and ease for room to move), knowing that I could alter it anywhere that it didn't fit.

I have been experimenting recently with doing away with the outside leg seams on pants, by making each leg a single piece of fabric that extends all the way up to the waist, and that joins with the other leg in the front and back; making a pair of pants from two larger pieces of fabric, instead of four smaller ones.

I took my current measurements to use in the pattern; if you're going to make something for yourself, you might as well customize it. A hint I learned (from Sewing for Plus Sizes, by Barbara Deckert) is to also measure your hips and thighs while sitting down, but I skipped that this time.

The fabric was rather thin, so I partially lined it with one of the other polyester knits; some of which I had to piece together. I basted each lining piece to the edges of its corresponding main piece before sewing the main pieces together. I used a piece of reclaimed elastic for the waistband.

Upon trying it on, I found two things that needed to be changed:  I forgot to measure my calves, and the pants were too tight there. Also, for some reason, the pants were much too long. The first I fixed by making a slash in each pants leg and sewing a long triangle of fabric into it.  The second just needed cutting and hemming at a higher point.

The end result is a bit funny-looking--the geometry of pants is tricky to get right, and I was throwing these pants together quickly--but fits fairly well and will serve its purpose.

Ungraying kids' clothes

I took the gray kids' clothes, and experimented with changing their color using chlorine bleach.

Procedure:  Dilute bleach in a quantity of water, enough for the clothes to move freely. Add clothing, and stir with a stick; watch for color changes in the water and in the clothes. Try for even exposures of the fabrics to the bleach, and for minimization of bleaching time. Remove clothes carefully (not splashing yourself), drain water, and rinse clothes in fresh water at least once.

Chlorine is rough on fibers, and will weaken them (or eat right through them, if you use enough, for long enough), so it must be used with care.

Results:  The bleach had very little effect on the clothes that were cotton/polyester blends...probably because the white fibers were cotton (already bleached) while the gray fibers were polyester (not dyed; made of actual gray polyester).  There were changes in the colors of the 97% and 100% cotton items:  either toward an orange or toward a purple--depending on the dye used to make the gray, I suppose.  The orangey ones needed heavy bleaching to get to an orange color.

Organizing kids' clothes

In the past year, several people have handed down children's clothing to us. Each time, I pulled out a few things that would fit my children at the time, and packed the rest away into closets and spare dresser drawers.

Which meant that I would soon have a very hard time finding the clothes that fit my children next.

Today, the right time for organizing it all came about:  It had risen to the top of my Big Projects list; I had accumulated enough boxes; and someone just dropped off another bag of clothing. Also, it was just before laundry day, so I could put anything that needed washing into the laundry queue (and there were some things that needed it).  Things that come out of the laundry process, later this week, can be integrated into the clothing storage system I have created.

The first step was to pull out ALL of the clothes...boxes, bags, and (in some cases) entire dresser drawers. Everything was hauled to the living room and sorted by size and girls' versus boys'. I also made a pile for worn/unwanted clothing. As I wrote before, I am on a campaign to get rid of gray children's clothing in my house; this was a good time to carry that through.

I let the older children choose their wardrobes from the available clothing; what they don't want may be used later by a younger sibling.

Then I packed up the clothing that was to be stored, into boxes. I started with the largest sizes, which will be in storage the longest before being used, and worked downward, labeling each box front and back with the size.*  When I ran out of boxes, the rest fit into one large dresser drawer, that I had already been using for the purpose anyway.

I still have the Unwanted pile to sort through:  Give Away versus Re-Use/Recycle. Worn-out clothing gets stripped of buttons, zippers, and possibly elastic, and is then cut up into small rags to use in place of paper towels.

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I've adopted this practice of labeling both narrow ends of the box for all of our storage boxes, so that I can read the label no matter which side is facing forward.