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.