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.

---------------------------------

*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.

------------------------------

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.

Art journaling

I learned a bit about art journaling last year from a library book, and did a one-month daily art journaling challenge. This year, I read another book about art journaling, and started doing it more regularly.

The technique takes a bit of time, a bit at a time, with periods of paint drying and glue drying in between. So I have been intentionally doing only one page per week, and making it part of my Sabbath rest.

Generally speaking, the procedure is to start with a page--not necessarily a blank page--and do some arty stuff to it, then some more arty stuff, and then some more and some more, until it all hangs together (more or less). Mistakes can be torn out or painted over, or papered over. Unconnected bits can be overlapped by another layer, to visually relate them to each other.

For materials I mostly use pens, pencils, acrylic paints, the children's markers and crayons, old magazines, and decoupage medium.

As I said in the previous post, after a bit of playing around, often a theme starts to emerge, and can be reinforced, to build a meaningful artwork. Or, the theme can be chosen beforehand.

I have been incorporating some visual images from my life into my pages, like how the neighbor's lighted window shines out into the darkness after dusk.

Sabbatical project: Crocheted owl

Decorative owls have been a trend for a while, which seems to be on the wane now. I was willing to wait until they started appearing in the thrift stores, until last year. What happened was that I started being interested in owls and some other things, and eventually realized that I was commemorating my grandma, who died ten years ago. She was a huge influence on me, need I say; growing up next door to her was an enormous blessing.

Artistically speaking, when a theme starts to emerge from seeming randomness, then there is the possibility of intentionally encouraging and reinforcing it, to pull everything together into a coherent and meaningful whole.

Grandma had a number of owls in her house, probably many of them gifts from others. But Grandma and owls definitely go together in my mind. So I went on an owl hunt. Because of limited funds, this mostly meant crafting owls. I have a tub of plaster of Paris, and thought about casting an owl. I thought about painting owls, and carving owls out of wood, and making seed art owls. The owl that I actually made and finished, though, was crocheted from yarn out of our stash.

The yarn was brown, orange, and yellow, and looked like it was left over from some crewel embroidery kit from the Seventies. I added in some other scraps of acrylic yarn.

Crochet hints:

1.  Start from the center of the piece. and work outward.

2.  Shaping is accomplished by using stitches of different heights. From shortest to tallest, in crochet this is: slip stitch, single crochet, half double, double crochet, and triple crochet.*  (Below slip stitch you might put just doing an embroidery whip stitch along the edge of the piece.) I found it helpful to think of lines of stitching that I was working across an area, and varying the stitches within each line to vary its height as needed.

The other element of shaping is choosing where to put the stitches; choosing which stitches to hook into, for more or less density and fullness.

3.  Finer details (such as stripes on feathers) can be achieved by embroidery, using yarn to stitch on the surface.

4.  Some subtlety of color can be given by using multiple strands of yarn at a time, where all the strands are not of the same color. For most of the owl, I used two or three strands of the crewel yarn at a time.

5.  Some mistakes can be covered by embroidery; I originally made the owl's pupils much too large, but was able to cover the excess pupils by embroidering over them carefully with the iris color.

6.  Crochet lends itself well to three-dimensional work, such as for the beak of the owl, and to incorporating other materials...such as a stick for the owl's "perch".

-----------------------
* These are in American terminology; I have seen European terminology where everything is moved up by one: their single crochet is our slip stitch, and their double crochet is our single, and so on.

Cleaning a rug with snow

Supposedly rugs were cleaned out in the snow in the old days. This is what I have learned about it, having tried it a few times:

1.  Wait for a good snow; several inches at least.

2.  Vacuum the rug first (or at least give it a good shaking out), and chill it, at least 30 minutes.  You want frozen snow, not melted snow.

3.  Wool fibers are weaker when they are wet.  That means being a bit careful with the rug, especially a flat-woven rug.  Braided rugs are weak in a different way, in the lacing that holds the braids together, so be careful with these as well.

4.  Spread the rug out on the snow, throw some snow over it, and sweep it off with a clean broom.  Alternately, lay the rug out dirty side down, and dance all over it (if you think the rug can stand it).  Either way, there is some agitation of the fibers, and some action that helps carry dirt off the rug.

5.  I have read that snow contains a small amount of ammonia, which helps get greasy particles out of the rug.  The cold also helps grease solidify and fall out.

6.  The hard part about washing rugs isn't washing them, it is drying them.  Especially for a very large rug. What I have done in that case was to carefully fold the rug after cleaning, bring it inside, and then gradually unfold it, moving it with each unfolding to a different part of the floor, so that nothing underneath it was damp for long. This method did leave some visible creases in the rug, though.

All that said, I did take our big living room rug (flat-woven wool) out into the snow and clean it recently, and I can't say that it made much of a difference. The rug does look about half a shade brighter, and sweeping it with snow probably did remove some surface dust, but this method will not take out visible spots or grubbiness. Still, I feel that it was worth the effort, just not by very much. Likely sweeping it indoors and then vacuuming it again (I always vacuum it without the beater brush) would accomplish almost as much.

Cushion slipcovers, with dye transfer

The cushions on our very used glider rocker needed slipcovers. The fabric that I bought for it (a thrift store tablecloth) turned out to not be quite right for it, but in the box of thrifted fabric that I received for Christmas, mixed in with all the polyester were two new pieces of plaid wool.  One in browns and black, one in blue and green and black.

The brown and black piece was just big enough to use for making the slipcovers, but the brown colors were just slightly too frantic for the room, so I decided to try to get some of the blue and green dye from one piece of fabric to the other.

First thing needed is a large stock pot that you are never going to cook food in again; dyes are no good for your health. I had one already. I pre-washed the fabrics in the washer. I filled the stock pot most of the way, put in a small amount of laundry detergent, and the blue-green-black fabric. I bought this to a simmer, and simmered it for a while, stirring it with a dowel from the garage.

Enough dye bled out of it that the water turned almost opaque.  I took out the piece of fabric, set it aside in a bucket, and put the other piece in, again simmering it and stirring for a while. (This other piece also had some detergent on it, from a false start that I had made before.) Then I gave each piece (separately) several rinses in clean water, starting with warmer water, and ending with cold.

The brown and black fabric took up very little color in the dye bath, and what it did take up was mostly black, because of the excess detergent, I think, and because the browns mostly cancelled out the blues and greens, color-wise, before being overwhelmed by the blacks, and also the plaid fabrics didn't contain nearly as much dye as some wool fabrics that I have tried this with before. Anyway, the piece came out slightly mellowed, as well as slightly toned down in color. It related much better to the other colors in the room.

The first step in actually sewing the slipcovers was to get the zippers ready. I had two scavenged zippers that were the right length (or longer).  One of them needed some seam ripping to free it completely from its original setting.

The next step was to cut a top and a bottom piece of fabric for each cushion, which required some careful layout.

I didn't think I had quite enough fabric to accommodate the zippers, so I decided to set the zippers into strips of a fuzzy black polyester fabric that was also in the box. I consulted a sewing reference book to figure out how to sew in the zippers, but still managed to make a bit of a mess of them. Luckily, the zippers were going at the backs and bottoms of the cushions.

Because of the curved shapes of the cushions, and the plaid stripes that I wanted to carefully match, and the ties that I had to leave openings for, I elected to hand sew, with a whip-stitch, the fabrics around the cushions. I did three sides of each cover, then took it off the cushion, turned it inside out, and machine-stitched outside my handstitching, for reinforcement and to reduce raveling. Then I sewed in one side of each zipper strip.

Each time I did that, I did it upside down/inside out! But I recovered by cutting the strips off the covers (I left extra width in the strips, so that was possible), and resewing them correctly. Then I sewed the other edge and the side edges by hand.

Altogether, the slipcovers make the rocker look retro, but boring, like a saggy old plaid couch. (Plaids really highlight any saggy parts; I should keep that in mind in the future when I'm sewing my own clothes.)  It does help to tie some of the other colors in the room together better.