Fun with fabrics

I'm working with a box of handed-down fabric scraps, mostly of medium size, from a neighbor who is downsizing.  So far I have pieced together two different fabrics into a skirt, and have also made a fabric-covered folder and a bag for a set of little wooden toys.  I also see several shirts coming out of this box, eventually.  My long-term plan is to switch to button-down shirts made of woven fabrics; knits are harder to mend.  I have a pattern I made years ago from a thrift-store shirt that fit well.  That shirt had no labels and might have been homemade as well.

I've also experimented with covering small cardboard boxes with these fabrics.  It's not something that I want to spend a lot of time on at this stage in my life, so I was looking for a fast method.  I realized that I could cut wide slits into the sides of the box and just push the fabrics ends through, so they would be held by friction.  If the fabric pieces are wrapped around the outside, and tucked through the slits from the inside, the box can look decent enough.

This reduces the strength of the box, but the advantage besides speed is that the fabric and box can easily be taken apart later and re-used or recycled.   

I've also been deconstructing worn-out clothes into kitchen wipes as usual, and material for patching other clothes, and for other crafts.  I experimented with weaving a side seam cut from a pair of blue jeans in and out of the holes of a small basket I don't like--it came out well. 

I've done some Tightwad-Gazette-style "hourly wage" calculations.  Higher-value pursuits include:  washing Ziploc bags, mending clothes, cutting holey fabrics into wipes that take the place of paper towels, skipping or combining shopping trips, and decluttering to free up floor space. 

Back at home

A lot of my focus lately has been away from home.

I finished a braided rug, and put it in the bedroom at the foot of the bed under a chest.  The laminate flooring has a tolerable color, and ordinarily I wouldn't think that a rug would add much to the room, especially since I was using up colors I don't like, but it does make the room feel more finished and grounded. 

The rug's colors are medium tones, as is the floor, so the rug adds pattern and softness without standing out.

I went on from there and leaned a long board against the opposite corner, and then draped a long section of quilt top over it.  It's a bit theatrical, and wouldn't have been practical when my children were smaller.  It also is pushing me to incorporate a little more green into the curtains.  That might be as simple as lacing some crochet cotton through the holes in the lace trim, except that I really should wash the curtains first.

Eldest child has been taking remnants of Christmas-themed fabrics and other fabrics, and making reusable gift bags.  Not only reusable, but also reversible, with one side Christmas-y and the other not.  They look very nice.

The yard has greened up, thanks to plantains covering most of the bare areas.  The corner of the yard where my husband's dried mustard? plant from his community garden plot ended up last fall is coming up all mustard.  The flower beds are becoming jungles.  Children have planted things in various places--potatoes, lemons, carrots, and probably also apples.  

Busy at home

I've been making progress on a lot of projects:  putting a new hanger on the back of a smaller mirror, braiding a rug, mending, knitting an oversized hat, yard work, organizing a closet; one thing after another.

I finally got an antique carpet runner that we were given months ago installed onto the stairs.  I didn't realize that it was going to noticeably brighten the space; the previous big-box-store landlord-special runner--which I left on the stairs as an underlayer--is very dark and it soaked up light instead of reflecting and diffusing it around the stairwell. 

I made progress on another project, ironically, by abandoning it:  making a lampshade for a small lamp.  It was complete except for figuring out how to make it sit securely on the lamp. 

Instead, I pulled out a cracked old lampshade that I had been balancing on an Ikea lamp, and tried it on this one.  The lampshade attached well, but it looked not so good, and was much too opaque.

There's little risk in maybe ruining something that is nearly ruined already.  I decided to poke a lot of holes in the lampshade with a sewing needle-after taking it off the lamp, of course.  Within one minute, that task was subcontracted to an enthusiastic tiny human, who did an excellent job.  Little pinpoints of light come through, and they are brighter or dimmer depending where you are in the room.

Later at a yard sale, I found an outdoorsy watercolor print that echoes the colors in our living room, and also the colors of the lamp and lampshade--and even of the frame of the mirror I fixed--and that exemplifies some of our family atmosphere.

I picked up a free pine bookcase headboard for a twin bed, which turned out to be the perfect size to become a header for two plywood shelf units, which were originally the "doors" of a closeable toy shelf that our church retired a few years ago.  The rest of the shelf is on the other side of our living room now.  The headboard is not as deep as the shelves, so there's a space behind it, and also it covers up the tops of the shelves by several inches, but it also lends them a lot more style than they had before, and it functions as a sort of mantel.   Although few mantels have a painted orange crate and a well-dressed half-mannequin preemptively parked on them.  

Outdoors, a child helped me install some garden edging that a departing neighbor didn't want to move to their new house.  Previously there was no delineation between yard and garden in that part of the yard.  It makes a lot more difference than I expected it would, and there's enough left over to replace some badly-deteriorated edging in another part of the yard.

Local writer James Lileks last week bid his beloved home Jasperwood goodbye.  It's homely-ness is something that I am now pondering, as a Christian and a renter and the mother of a large family.  I've seen Mr. Lileks in person at the State Fair a few times, and we've driven through that very expensive Minneapolis neighborhood once or twice.  

The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

Off day; small fake fireplace

I took a day off between two big projects and messed around with making a little hearth under my sewing machine table.  It's the same table I put an oak chair back into two years ago, to connect and stabilize the legs.

The leather chair seat that I mentioned in that post, by the way, has gone from dull green suede to an impressive polished brown, to dull green rougher suede, under heavy wear from children.

Anyway, I had recently moved a large wooden tray from the top of my dresser onto the oak part, and had put a few awkwardly-shaped things in it, including a half-log that separates to reveal a hidden drawer.

I also recently picked up a small box of veneer bricks from a neighbor's spring clean-out; just the bricks' faces.  I knew that I wanted to use them somewhere soon, and that they wouldn't cover a large area.

In the midst of puttering around the house, I was thinking about making a fake fireplace, along the lines of a scrap wood fireplace in the Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found book I reviewed in 2018.

I realized that I had the brick floor, and the log, and the place for it....

The bricks were just enough to line the wooden tray, after breaking a few to fit, with just one tiny piece left over.  Some of them were fake-singed, and I put those toward the front.

For a back, I immediately thought of a long metal sign I had picked up from another neighbor's curbside.  It has a warm, dark copper color.  I bent it into a U shape with the help of an old atlas, by putting one end into the atlas, standing on them, and pulling up on the other end; probably the first time I've ever used a book as a bending brake for metal.  It gave me good, straight, rounded bends.

Putting everything together under the table, the sign-back was too tall to fit under the sewing machine compartment, so I rotated the sign forward 90 degrees and made it into a hood instead--which makes more sense, anyway.

I found a few warm-colored firelike objects to go around the log, including some copper and a glass candle holder--which I lined with an upside-down picture of autumn leaves--and a curly piece of birch bark.

There is even a modest amount of warm air coming out of it when the furnace is on, because it's right in front of a vent.

Not out of the weeds yet, and still pouring

Although there has been much grace from God, including the glorious orange and golden sunset we had this evening.  There were also rainbows...in February.

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Another household improvement from last year that I'm appreciating now is a clean laundry sorting area I established in our basement laundry dungeon.  Formerly I did a week's laundry, stored it upstairs, and then sorted and put it all away at once--sometimes ten loads' worth, and caffeine definitely helped.  

I realized with my children getting older and my time less constrained by littles that they could fetch their own laundry and put it away.  I had just gotten a start on the new system when a neighbor Providentially set a shelf out by the curb, the kind with four big square cubbyholes.  That holds clean, sorted laundry for four children now, and on top are improvised containers for the other family members I do laundry for.

On the floor in front of the shelf I put a wire closet organizer shelf, six or eight inches high, from another neighbor's curb, for baskets or bags of laundry waited to be sorted--or taken upstairs, in the case of towels and such.  

I only just realized or remembered the other day that with all this within reach of the dryer, I could just sort laundry straight out of the dryer. 

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Eldest Child led a final effort to use up the remaining apples from the fall.  They were beginning to taste more like pears than apples, and still had to be checked over every week or so to remove the rotting ones.  They lasted a lot longer than I expected.  Very few perfect apples this time.

Even worse, but less worse that it could have been

We discovered that an ambulance ride costs more than rent now.  In Millennial terms, around 400 Starbucks coffees and 150 avocado toasts.  I need to start making friends with drug dealers.

By the gymnastic grace of God, there was same-day treatment and no permanent damage.

ICE has been in our area, but I haven't seen any personally--that I know of.

One thing in my home that I've been appreciating lately is a tall narrow garden trellis that we picked up for free from a neighbor who was moving.  Similar to these curved ones, but with four top spikes that each end in a small ball.

It fits very well in an awkward gap next to an awkward corner in the bathroom, we can hang towels off the spikes, and the trellis keeps them away from the wall.

The Goodwill doesn't really take garden furniture, so it is often given away.  I switched to a metal flower pot stand for my nightstand, and set a wrought-iron-style napkin weight? for picnics? upside-down in it to keep small items from falling through so easily, while still allowing most of the dust through.  I don't put water glasses there because the mattress is frequently used as a trampoline; small house, long winters.

I managed to paint a large picture frame and an office stand that we had picked up at other times, using old toothbrushes as brushes.  Uneven paint coverage, but I think that could be an advantage when trying to simulate marble.  A clear varnish of similar reflectance to polished stone would make it more convincing.