Family members handed down to me a bag or two of some quilter's old fabric and thread stash...dating from the early '90s, by the look of the fabric patterns.
Some of the fabric I simply cut up and put in the kitchen wipes jar.
The rest I sorted out and started thinking about using.
One piece was just about enough for a blouse, minus the sleeves, but there was also a coordinating piece of fabric that was just big enough for the sleeves.
With the homemade blouse pattern that I have, it now takes me roughly three hours of working time to sew a blouse. (Or, in real time, about three days.) I finished sewing it yesterday, and I'm wearing it now.
The collar is a little goofy (as usual), and it's a bit too long, but otherwise it turned out well.
There are two smaller pieces of fabric in the stash that I started putting together into a hat.
Also there are three or four smaller pieces that I think would work well for a baby garment.
I'm going to have to look at the other larger pieces again, to see what other possibilities there might be.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Saturday, July 28, 2018
On laundry
Up until we moved into this house, which has a high-efficiency washer, I had been using homemade laundry soap for most of our laundry.
The exception was cloth diapers, for which I used laundry detergent. The reason being, that I was told that laundry soaps (including commercial ones) would leave a slight residue of soap scum on the diapers, which can build up over time and affect absorbency.
When we moved here, I looked into whether the homemade soap would work well in a high-efficiency machine, and the answer was, "No, it will gum up the machine over time." So I switched, out of Christian love for our landlord, and we dealt with the higher cost of laundry detergent over homemade laundry soap.
Some months ago, Backwoods Home Magazine ran a short article about homemade laundry soaps being terrible because they leave soap scum on the fabrics. I have the bad scientific habit of always running little thought experiments on claims that are made to me, and always looking for how my knowledge might be extended and increased.
So, in reading this article, my reaction was, "Yes, but...", where the But was that many of the clothes and linens that I had washed for years with laundry soap were still going strong, and hadn't worn out.
The soap scum residue seems to be actually protecting the fibers. We still have sheets and towels from the beginning of our marriage that haven't worn out yet. The towels are certainly dingy (we're not bothering to replace them until we get through the worst of our small-children-in-the-house years), and not very absorbent, but they have not worn out. The few I have gotten rid of, over the years, were the ones that were too badly stained.
And the same thing for clothing...some of the clothes I was recently making replacements for were ten years old, and were worn regularly (weekly, more or less) that whole time.
There was also an account I read of a family dumped off in a remote Russian village, a few years before World War II, where the mother introduced the practice of washing laundry with soap to the villagers (who had been in the habit of never washing their clothing at all)...she told them it would make their clothing last longer.
Surely removing dirt and bacteria will make clothing last much longer, but now I've begun to think that the soap had something to do with it, too.
I actually have a control set in my own house for evaluating the claim that soap extends textile durability: the cloth diapers, which I have all along washed with detergents.
A load of cloth diapers will certainly produce more dryer lint than our regular laundry does, but there are some other factors that contribute to that also: the flannel fabric tends to shed, the diapers get double-washed each time, and they need a longer drying cycle than the rest of the laundry does.
The working life of a cloth diaper around here is roughly two to three years, being used two or three times per week. That comes out to a roughly 25% shorter lifespan for a cotton fabric, I'm guessing, from washing with detergent versus soap.
In the present era of incredibly cheap textiles, that's not necessarily a big deal, but in a world where textiles are labor-intensive and hard to come by, that would be a significant saving of human effort.
As for the "ick" factor of having old soap scum buildup on my fabrics, my personal opinion is that it isn't going to jump off and hurt me. Other people's opinions may vary.
The other big difference between modern laundry and laundry in the old days is the water temperature used...the HE washer here (Read the Manual) admits that its Hot water setting is, for the sake of energy efficiency, not very hot at all. In the 19th century, they used to give much of the laundry a good simmer in near-boiling water. That probably removed an excess of soap scum, I'm guessing, while not completely stripping the fibers.
Washboards, by the way, work mostly by setting up and pushing little waves of water pressure through the fabric, not by the friction of the fabric rubbing against the board.
The exception was cloth diapers, for which I used laundry detergent. The reason being, that I was told that laundry soaps (including commercial ones) would leave a slight residue of soap scum on the diapers, which can build up over time and affect absorbency.
When we moved here, I looked into whether the homemade soap would work well in a high-efficiency machine, and the answer was, "No, it will gum up the machine over time." So I switched, out of Christian love for our landlord, and we dealt with the higher cost of laundry detergent over homemade laundry soap.
Some months ago, Backwoods Home Magazine ran a short article about homemade laundry soaps being terrible because they leave soap scum on the fabrics. I have the bad scientific habit of always running little thought experiments on claims that are made to me, and always looking for how my knowledge might be extended and increased.
So, in reading this article, my reaction was, "Yes, but...", where the But was that many of the clothes and linens that I had washed for years with laundry soap were still going strong, and hadn't worn out.
The soap scum residue seems to be actually protecting the fibers. We still have sheets and towels from the beginning of our marriage that haven't worn out yet. The towels are certainly dingy (we're not bothering to replace them until we get through the worst of our small-children-in-the-house years), and not very absorbent, but they have not worn out. The few I have gotten rid of, over the years, were the ones that were too badly stained.
And the same thing for clothing...some of the clothes I was recently making replacements for were ten years old, and were worn regularly (weekly, more or less) that whole time.
There was also an account I read of a family dumped off in a remote Russian village, a few years before World War II, where the mother introduced the practice of washing laundry with soap to the villagers (who had been in the habit of never washing their clothing at all)...she told them it would make their clothing last longer.
Surely removing dirt and bacteria will make clothing last much longer, but now I've begun to think that the soap had something to do with it, too.
I actually have a control set in my own house for evaluating the claim that soap extends textile durability: the cloth diapers, which I have all along washed with detergents.
A load of cloth diapers will certainly produce more dryer lint than our regular laundry does, but there are some other factors that contribute to that also: the flannel fabric tends to shed, the diapers get double-washed each time, and they need a longer drying cycle than the rest of the laundry does.
The working life of a cloth diaper around here is roughly two to three years, being used two or three times per week. That comes out to a roughly 25% shorter lifespan for a cotton fabric, I'm guessing, from washing with detergent versus soap.
In the present era of incredibly cheap textiles, that's not necessarily a big deal, but in a world where textiles are labor-intensive and hard to come by, that would be a significant saving of human effort.
As for the "ick" factor of having old soap scum buildup on my fabrics, my personal opinion is that it isn't going to jump off and hurt me. Other people's opinions may vary.
The other big difference between modern laundry and laundry in the old days is the water temperature used...the HE washer here (Read the Manual) admits that its Hot water setting is, for the sake of energy efficiency, not very hot at all. In the 19th century, they used to give much of the laundry a good simmer in near-boiling water. That probably removed an excess of soap scum, I'm guessing, while not completely stripping the fibers.
Washboards, by the way, work mostly by setting up and pushing little waves of water pressure through the fabric, not by the friction of the fabric rubbing against the board.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Everything
"Boy, God thinks of everything!"...this is something that I have said more than once recently, as I was finding that everything I needed was right there at hand.
I suppose I can't be too surprised that the Creator of everything from quasars to quarks sometimes delights in working out seemingly minor details for His children.
I suppose I can't be too surprised that the Creator of everything from quasars to quarks sometimes delights in working out seemingly minor details for His children.
Monday, July 23, 2018
The cost of driving a used car
Doing some math with six years of receipts for our used Mazda MPV....
To preface the numbers, we bought this car used, a few thousand miles past the warranty expiration, and we quickly learned that Mazda's engineers had gotten rather good at engineering parts to just barely survive the warranty period.
Total repair costs (not including oil changes and the like), divided by months of ownership: $212 per month. It needed a repair once every three months, on average, although actually there were more in the first few years than in the last few.
One of those repairs, though, was a transmission rebuild. Taking that out, repair costs per month would have been $172 per month.
Purchase price minus the sale price when we sold it, divided by months of ownership, equals $90/month. Purchase price alone, $119 per month. (We paid all this up front, in cash.)
This why I allot $200/month for car repairs in our budget, and try to keep enough savings on hand to cover a major repair (or most of the price of a new used car).
To preface the numbers, we bought this car used, a few thousand miles past the warranty expiration, and we quickly learned that Mazda's engineers had gotten rather good at engineering parts to just barely survive the warranty period.
Total repair costs (not including oil changes and the like), divided by months of ownership: $212 per month. It needed a repair once every three months, on average, although actually there were more in the first few years than in the last few.
One of those repairs, though, was a transmission rebuild. Taking that out, repair costs per month would have been $172 per month.
Purchase price minus the sale price when we sold it, divided by months of ownership, equals $90/month. Purchase price alone, $119 per month. (We paid all this up front, in cash.)
This why I allot $200/month for car repairs in our budget, and try to keep enough savings on hand to cover a major repair (or most of the price of a new used car).
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Summer hat
I had a plan to crochet a summer hat out of cotton string, and then scrunch some paint into it to stiffen it.
But Walmart didn't have enough cotton string, when I went.
What they did have was about 400 feet of hemp string (in the crafts section) for $5, so I went with that.
I started at the brim, made a long chain, and worked upward, with a single crochet (**American terminology**) stitch to start with for the first two rows--for firmness--then switching to half double stitch, which is a bit faster to crochet for the area covered.
I did scattered decreases, as needed, trying the hat on as I went.
I finished up with a few yards of string left over, worked in the ends, and then gave it a bath in some strong tea, to dye it browner. That was yesterday, and it is still drying.
But Walmart didn't have enough cotton string, when I went.
What they did have was about 400 feet of hemp string (in the crafts section) for $5, so I went with that.
I started at the brim, made a long chain, and worked upward, with a single crochet (**American terminology**) stitch to start with for the first two rows--for firmness--then switching to half double stitch, which is a bit faster to crochet for the area covered.
I did scattered decreases, as needed, trying the hat on as I went.
I finished up with a few yards of string left over, worked in the ends, and then gave it a bath in some strong tea, to dye it browner. That was yesterday, and it is still drying.
Friday, July 6, 2018
What I've been up to
Resting after Wardrobe in a Week.
Mopping up a few last things from that week.
Being sick.
And finishing these:
Which are a kind of slipper or light shoe (flat heel and very thin sole), based mostly on the method of Mary Wales Loomis.
I don't have her book, although I'm sure it is marvelous and well worth the money, if you want to make your own shoes. I have gone off the information she has helpfully provided on her site, paying back with prayers for her well-being.
Her method is to make a pair of plaster casts using shoes you already have, then build up the inner parts of the shoes with stiffened buckram and structural pieces scavenged from old shoes, then sew up the uppers (around the top edge), stretch them around the forms, hand sew back and forth across the bottoms to hold them in place, then glue on the soles and heels, and put in the insoles.
Here are my forms (plaster plus some papier mache filling out gaps; I didn't have quite enough plaster, and not enough got down into the toes), with my stiffened buckram drying around it:
I was in a no-buy mood at that stage, so I used burlap scraps for buckram at the sides, heel stiffening from an old pair of shoes that I pulled apart (very educational, deconstructing a higher-quality shoe; highly recommended), and for the toes I handwove crochet cotton--something that is worthy of a post of its own.
After this step, I set all this aside to work on WiaW, and to be sick with a nasty summer cold. During that time, we had very humid weather, and my plaster/papier mache forms started growing mold inside their loose plastic bags.
When I got back to them, I found the mold, taped the bags completely closed, and tried to get the shoes finished off quickly, so I could throw the forms away.
The hardest part in making shoes is actually fiddling around and thinking about the next step.
Cutting leather is not that hard; I use kitchen shears, and occasionally a steak knife.
It is indeed a wonderful thing to have accurate models, to build up your shoes around. Note that these shouldn't be shaped exactly like your feet, but instead like the space that your feet will need inside the shoe. So the better fitting the shoes that you make your forms from, the better the final result will fit. That was what held me back when I was trying to start making shoes, several years ago: I didn't own any shoes that fit me well enough to be worth duplicating.
There were several points in the shoemaking process where actually buying the book would have been helpful. This was certainly a very challenging project for me, and I was tempted at times to give up.
One point where I had a lot of problems was how to keep the edge of the upper from sliding around or stretching out of shape while stitching across the bottom. I did run a few long stitches across the hole to help hold the shape, but it wasn't enough to keep the entire top edge from ending up about 3/8 to 1/2 inch lower than I had intended--which is a lot, for a shoe.
Another is that the cotton upholstery velvet that I was using is thick, and was hard to gather up underneath the foot neatly. I decided that the underside was too bumpy to glue to directly, so I elected to do a two-needle saddle stitch around the edges of the sole, making holes with an awl (which could be improvised from a nail and a small chunk of wood, if necessary, but I happen to have one).
(Sometimes people cut a little groove in the leather for the stitches to sit down in, but in this case the leather was too thin.)
Still, the slippers are wearable for the intended purpose, and I learned a lot that may be helpful in the future.
Costs: $13 (at full retail) for vegetable-tanned leather for the sole, cotton velvet was handed down to me (and dyed with some leftover dye during WiaW), inner lining is from an old skirt, sole was stitched with about $3 of waxed braided cord left over from an earlier project, inner sole is about $1 worth of scrap leather from surplus store, buckram was handmade from hand-me-down materials and scraps, fabric stiffener fluid was handed down to me, a pair of teardown shoes for potential parts (only heel stiffening used) and assembly hints was $7 at Goodwill, and the thread was a Christmas gift.
Barge Cement (available at Hobby Lobby) was $8, but I ended up not using any for this project.
The shoes I disassembled did give me one valuable hint about how to make the shoe bend in the right place: put a pattern of little slits into the inner sole at that point, enough to make it more flexible there, while not reducing the strength of the leather by too much. In these shoes, the inner sole was not even leather, but a high-quality paperboard--no wonder modern shoes start falling apart when they get wet!
Mopping up a few last things from that week.
Being sick.
And finishing these:
Which are a kind of slipper or light shoe (flat heel and very thin sole), based mostly on the method of Mary Wales Loomis.
I don't have her book, although I'm sure it is marvelous and well worth the money, if you want to make your own shoes. I have gone off the information she has helpfully provided on her site, paying back with prayers for her well-being.
Her method is to make a pair of plaster casts using shoes you already have, then build up the inner parts of the shoes with stiffened buckram and structural pieces scavenged from old shoes, then sew up the uppers (around the top edge), stretch them around the forms, hand sew back and forth across the bottoms to hold them in place, then glue on the soles and heels, and put in the insoles.
Here are my forms (plaster plus some papier mache filling out gaps; I didn't have quite enough plaster, and not enough got down into the toes), with my stiffened buckram drying around it:
I was in a no-buy mood at that stage, so I used burlap scraps for buckram at the sides, heel stiffening from an old pair of shoes that I pulled apart (very educational, deconstructing a higher-quality shoe; highly recommended), and for the toes I handwove crochet cotton--something that is worthy of a post of its own.
After this step, I set all this aside to work on WiaW, and to be sick with a nasty summer cold. During that time, we had very humid weather, and my plaster/papier mache forms started growing mold inside their loose plastic bags.
When I got back to them, I found the mold, taped the bags completely closed, and tried to get the shoes finished off quickly, so I could throw the forms away.
The hardest part in making shoes is actually fiddling around and thinking about the next step.
Cutting leather is not that hard; I use kitchen shears, and occasionally a steak knife.
It is indeed a wonderful thing to have accurate models, to build up your shoes around. Note that these shouldn't be shaped exactly like your feet, but instead like the space that your feet will need inside the shoe. So the better fitting the shoes that you make your forms from, the better the final result will fit. That was what held me back when I was trying to start making shoes, several years ago: I didn't own any shoes that fit me well enough to be worth duplicating.
There were several points in the shoemaking process where actually buying the book would have been helpful. This was certainly a very challenging project for me, and I was tempted at times to give up.
One point where I had a lot of problems was how to keep the edge of the upper from sliding around or stretching out of shape while stitching across the bottom. I did run a few long stitches across the hole to help hold the shape, but it wasn't enough to keep the entire top edge from ending up about 3/8 to 1/2 inch lower than I had intended--which is a lot, for a shoe.
Another is that the cotton upholstery velvet that I was using is thick, and was hard to gather up underneath the foot neatly. I decided that the underside was too bumpy to glue to directly, so I elected to do a two-needle saddle stitch around the edges of the sole, making holes with an awl (which could be improvised from a nail and a small chunk of wood, if necessary, but I happen to have one).
(Sometimes people cut a little groove in the leather for the stitches to sit down in, but in this case the leather was too thin.)
Still, the slippers are wearable for the intended purpose, and I learned a lot that may be helpful in the future.
Costs: $13 (at full retail) for vegetable-tanned leather for the sole, cotton velvet was handed down to me (and dyed with some leftover dye during WiaW), inner lining is from an old skirt, sole was stitched with about $3 of waxed braided cord left over from an earlier project, inner sole is about $1 worth of scrap leather from surplus store, buckram was handmade from hand-me-down materials and scraps, fabric stiffener fluid was handed down to me, a pair of teardown shoes for potential parts (only heel stiffening used) and assembly hints was $7 at Goodwill, and the thread was a Christmas gift.
Barge Cement (available at Hobby Lobby) was $8, but I ended up not using any for this project.
The shoes I disassembled did give me one valuable hint about how to make the shoe bend in the right place: put a pattern of little slits into the inner sole at that point, enough to make it more flexible there, while not reducing the strength of the leather by too much. In these shoes, the inner sole was not even leather, but a high-quality paperboard--no wonder modern shoes start falling apart when they get wet!
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