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.