Footstool

I was going to call this project the Nomadic Footstool, because cardboard furniture reminds me of Papanek and Hennessey's Nomadic Furniture,  but I ended up using much more foam and adhesive than I had originally planned, so it's more like regular furniture. The center core is tightly rolled-up cardboard, which rolls up much more nicely if you pre-crease it every inch or two. I used duct tape internally to secure the ends of each piece of cardboard, and then made notches to secure the final end to the side. Once rolled and secured, the cardboard is quite strong. On top there is a double layer of one-inch memory foam; I had a large scrap from trimming down a rummage sale mattress topper to fit a smaller bed. I found, after making the top, that I had enough foam left to put a single layer around on the side. The foam is attached to itself and to the cardboard by heavy-duty spray adhesive; I had half a can of this left over after the couch project. The fabric is a sort of microfiber fake suede, very soft. I sewed strips together for the sides, and hand-sewed on circles for the top and bottom. You can see where I rolled down the top edge of the "sleeve" and sewed on the top circle.

Functionally, it works well. The top is squishy enough to be comfortable. The foam on the sides feels nice when you pick it up. It is easy to scoot out of the way, and strong enough to sit on. Visually it is too small next to the armchair that I am using it with, but it adds an element of roundness to a room that contains mostly rectangular objects.

The creative sap is rising

My mother-in-law declutters frequently, and she usually stops by our house on her way to Goodwill to let us pick through the boxes and see if there is anything we want. Most recently, she gave us pairs of pillowcases, hand towels, and bath towels, along with pottery items that she made way back when, several cast resin bird plaques, a few pieces of old china, and some other things.

The pillowcases were black, but I soaked them in water with bleach for a few minutes, and bleached them to a dark brown. Bleaching weakens fabrics, so I didn't try for anything lighter.

The children claimed the bird plaques, but one child let me hang his in the dining room, where it fits right in and adds joy to the room.

I used some large pieces of denim that she gave me on an earlier visit to make a cover for The Wedge--a large wedge of vinyl-covered foam that appears to have been retired from service in some school phys ed program. It is very popular in our household for sliding, tipping, and fort-building, but it was very red and rather worn. I don't usually like to use denim for slipcovers, because it feels clammy without a warm body inside it, but for The Wedge this doesn't matter, and I had just enough material.

As for other projects, last weekend I got over to the ArtScraps store, and for under $4 bought some upholstery remnants (which even match!), jersey fabric, a single earring, and a medium-size piece of canvas.

I had to put some thought into how to use the upholstery fabric, which is in straight strips a few inches wide, and decided to make an ottoman or footstool. For the core of it, I am using cardboard from boxes, rolled up with the ridges running up and down. I have this step done, but I might re-roll it with more frequent creasing and tighter rolling, because the current roll is somewhat polygonal, rather than circular, and the end product is likely to be used for forts and indoor gymnastics. I actually sat in the chair that it is going to go with, and found out how high I wanted it to be by stacking books and measuring the pile; if you're going to make something for yourself, you might as well make it the perfect size.

I will be using the jersey fabric to make myself a shirt, sometime, and will probably overdye/stain it with cheap black tea, because the color is a little bright for me.

The earring is a clip-on, made of wood; I am thinking of making it into a button.

At a random rummage sale on the way home, I found an ice bucket. I was looking for one to use as a compost bucket. We do not have a compost bin yet; I was thinking of buying a municipally-subsidized bin for $40, but after some discussion with my husband and consultation of our rummage-sale composting book, we decided to use what we have--metal garden fencing which we bought to keep our children inside our community garden plot in our days of apartment living, and then outside of our raised bed garden at the last house--and make a circular wire bin that we can take down when we move.

Also, I am making a fabric-wrapped-around-clothesline basket. One way is to use a sewing machine and sew it into a coil with a wide zigzag stitch, but I am rough enough on my machine with ordinary sewing, and I don't like the look of zigzags, so I am using the fabric to actually weave it together. I have never made one before, so it took a little experimenting at first to get the rhythm right: wrap the fabric once around the clothesline, then (using a big yarn needle) sew it to the previous round with one stitch; repeat in a spiral. This method is much slower than zigzagging, but probably is a bit stronger.

Wool coat to cape conversion experiment

For a long time, I have wanted a long wool cape; an older woman at church had one, and she always looked so dignified in it.

For fabric, I found a large and long wool coat at a rummage sale. I put it in my closet and kept my eye out for another coat in a compatible color, so I would have enough fabric.

But I didn't find one. After about two years, my mother-in-law gave us her old cheerleading cape to use for dress-up play. I looked at how it was put together, and thought that maybe there was enough fabric in the coat I had to make a similar cape. Maybe the reason I wasn't finding what I was looking for was because I didn't really need it.

Well, the coat did have enough fabric, just barely, for a "using every part of the pig but the squeal" sort of reconstruction. I took it almost completely apart, using a seam ripper, and laid out the pieces, and sewed here and pieced there, with many pauses to think about what step to take next. The center front and center back are nearly the same as in the original coat, but the rest took a lot of creative reworking. Capes are usually simple, structurally--only the shoulders need close fitting, and the rest of it drapes from there--but I had to work with the fabric that I had.

After several months, it is now all done but for some pressing:

The curves at the top edges of the hand holes were formerly the side front sleeve seams; I turned those pieces literally upside down.

The fabric left over:

Detail of the hook and loop, which are made of a scrap of thick copper wire, a penny that I experimented with annealing and hammering some time ago, and a piece of beaten wire that we picked up someplace for free:

Beginning knitting

Knitting has a very steep learning curve at the beginning, but once you master the basics, a wide vista of possibilities opens up before you.

From the Lazy Genius, who is still struggling up that learning curve, some hints for the beginning knitter. All her hints are spot on, although in the first one she means circular needles, which I personally have never mastered--I prefer to use one very long pair of straight needles (from dowels three feet long), or a larger number of shorter straight needles for wide projects.

Children around the age of six or seven can have good enough motor skills (and perseverance, which is vital) to learn to knit.  As my friend said, "The best way to learn to do a new craft is to read a book for teaching children how to do it," because a craft book targeted at children has to stick closely to the true essentials of the technique.

The small things and the not-so-small things

Another series of small wins:

I figured out how to re-attach the wreath hook on the front door (after it fell down...it was only held up by double-sided tape!) in a more secure manner, using screws. So I don't have to buy a new one.

I altered a pair of jeans that was too big, by taking in the side seams. Hint:  try them on first, inside-out, and see how much needs to be taken off. Also:  watch out for the rivets while you are sewing!

I started some seeds, in folded newspaper pots. These pots are easy to make, but hard to keep folded without being stapled or filled with soil.

I've been keeping up with the mending.

I applied KonMari folding to the bed linen, and it looks much more organized.

I pushed through and made it over the peak of the hill for my Major Sewing Project; the rest of the work is downhill.

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is a small rug for the bedroom. I've been testing various ideas, and have settled on a granny-hexagon, to be crocheted from about $3 of dollar store twine (probably jute), for organic texture.

I also did a Nester-style "quieting the room" exercise in the bedroom--taking down all the decorations--to see what it needed. Most of the things went right back where they were, but it was good to have worked it all through again.

I scavenged some pine twigs from last year's Christmas tree, for a future project.

I found a nice pair of walking shoes at Goodwill for $7, although somewhat Providentially, because I passed them over at first and only took a quick second look as I was leaving. Shoe shopping usually makes me cry, because my size is very hard to find. These shoes are replacing a pair of shoes that were Providential when I found them (on vacation, after the soles of my hiking boots suddenly started melting into tar--don't ask me why--and I was left with only dress shoes while camping in the rain), they were even in my size, but they are really too narrow in the toe for me to wear long-term.


Plus one BIG WIN:

I figured out what I want being in my home to feel like...I knew before what I liked and what I didn't, but now I have one phrase that covers it all. And looking around, most of what we have already supports that theme. I've done a little tweaking since then, to bring it out a little more clearly.

A few years ago, I read a book about how to work your way toward a two-word Style Statement for your personal style; probably this book. My decorating theme isn't the same as the two words I came up with back then (which still fit me well enough), but
it fits within the broader style.

In Alexandra Stoddard's books, the idea of decorating a room to feel like being in a garden often comes up, but somehow that never seemed quite right for me...I'm not nearly as into gardens as she is. I had to find my own favorite thing, and now I have.

Organizing fabric, and more gardening plans

I used the KonMari method to organize my modest fabric stash. Aside from some larger pieces and some denim, it all fits in one drawer. The method has you fold each item into a neat rectangle, and then stand it up vertically. The genius of this approach is that it allows part of each item to always be visible, so there is no digging to find anything, and nothing gets lost and squashed at the bottom of the drawer. I find that this method is much easier to apply to sewing fabric, which is mostly square, than to clothing, which mostly isn't. Every item has its own sweet spot where it is folded enough, but not too much. And folded items take up less space, giving you breathing room: 

In the same way, I organized some children's clothing in sizes that we don't need at the moment...it is amazing to look into the drawer and see everything at a glance.

I am planning on reviewing the book at some point, but I need to re-read it first.

As for gardening, my husband found a source of food-grade five gallon buckets:  a local food business is selling their empty buckets for fifty cents each. He is amassing a collection of buckets for container gardening, using two nested buckets per container, with a space for a water reservoir between. Apparently the big challenge in container gardening is in keeping everything watered.

Some other sources of lower-cost plants, that I didn't mention in the last post:  cuttings and splits and seeds from other people's established gardens.

An actual crafts project, and garden thoughts

We have a fireplace, set in a wall of brick veneer. I like the brick, but it sucks up all the light at that end of the room...and the room is painted to match it, so all other walls suck up light too. There is no mantel. I've been thinking for a while about finding something light-giving and lightweight to hang over the fireplace, that doesn't involve drilling into the brick.

I used to own lots of craft books, but at the moment we only have one. In this book is a project that uses coarse sandpaper to transfer crayon designs to fabric in a sort of pointillist texture:  draw a reversed image on the sandpaper with crayon, place fabric and a press cloth over it, and iron on high.

For fabric, I recently picked up a lot of smaller pieces of white fabric at the church craft supplies giveaway. A couple of the children colored pieces of sandpaper, and I colored several more.

With ironing, some brands and colors of crayons transferred more thoroughly than others, and many were light to the point of being washed out; not necessarily a problem in such a dark room. I used string to hang the pieces of fabric across the brick, in a Soulemama sort of banner, from cup hooks that I set into the wood trim. I made it so that I can easily string up something different later.

In other news, we've been planning next season's gardening. Last year, we didn't know what perennials were going to come up in the flower beds, and we had almost no money to work with. We bought a few packets of vegetable seeds, did some indoor seed starting, and for the rest just planted old seeds from our stash (many of which didn't sprout). In a couple of places I "planted" by selective weeding: choose a couple of the friendlier types of weeds (purslane, for example) to keep, and pull up the rest. This year we have a better idea of where we are starting from, and can throw a very modest amount of money into plants and seeds and equipment. I have plans to build or buy myself a hoe. We have a couple of hoes, but I think I need one just like the one Grandma had. For flowers, I am heavily favoring perennials or self-seeding annuals, to minimize long-term seed costs.