Update on the kitchen wipes that I "canned"

Post on where they came from, here.

This past week I finished using up the last of my four quart jars of kitchen wipes...which puts our rate of usage at just about one jar per three weeks.

I have some more fabric that I am ready to get rid of now, and I have started cutting it up. We did actually buy some paper towels, too, but only my husband uses them, and not very often. I may break down and use a few next week when I clean the oven.

My fabric that I had all nicely organized back in December has gotten itself back into a muddle. I did pull out an embroidery project that is a few hours of work from being done, and make some progress on it today.

Some tweaks

The neighbors moved, and gave us a television cabinet, which easily found a place in our living room and fits in well.

I experimented with what to display on top of it. For scale, I knew the main object would need to be about two feet high. My first try, bringing in a big vase with dried sorghum stems from another room, along with a couple of other things, looked too cluttered from some angles. For my second try, I stacked a few toys and then draped some green fabric over them--to make a mock-up of a large plant, which I have been thinking about buying. But it was immediately clear that a plant would not work well there; too much competition from all the vegetation outside the windows.

For my third try, I brought up one of the two old mannequins that we have--this one had been in the laundry room for a long time, standing on the washer. The mannequin is from a small department store that operated thirty-odd years ago. It represents a female torso from neck to hip, with no head or arms, and is made of molded foam covered in a stockinette fabric. There's a socket underneath where it can be set up on a stand, but we don't have one.

I found a shirt and sweater in our fabric stash, dressed the mannequin, and set it up on the cabinet. Then I added a piece of white fabric underneath for a simple runner, and a stack of books. Voila!

Later on I went to the thrift store, and found a much prettier and more colorful shirt for the mannequin.

I also finished making the ottoman that I had planning for the little sitting area. It took some time to collect enough cardboard for the core. It is made in the same way as the previous ones, only much larger:  a rolled cardboard core, covered in two layers of fleece, with some padding on the top, and then a cover of upholstery fabric around it all.

Creasing the cardboard every inch or two before rolling it up is a crucial step in this process; otherwise it won't roll up evenly. I rolled up the center unsuccessfully at least three times before I started over with different cardboard, and left the less-well-creased cardboard for the outermost layers.

All the materials were things that I had or scrounged, so there was no cost for this project besides work and duct tape--and sore fingers from sewing through the layers of tough upholstery fabric by hand.

I deliberately made the ottoman large enough to two or three people to share. The main problem with it is that it doesn't stay where I put it; the children keep taking it to use elsewhere.

Felted winter hat

I found two books on felting in the library to use as references for this project.
The books said that it was absolutely essential to do some test swatches with your yarn, in your washer.

Front-loading washers aren't nearly as good as top-loaders for felting, because you can't just stop them in the middle of a cycle, but that is what I have.

From felting my test swatches, I learned that it would take two full wash cycles to get the yarn to felt enough, that its Kool-Aid overdyeing would not be affected by this, and that I was going to have to knit two layers to get the thickness of hat that I wanted.

I measured my swatches before and after to see how much they shrunk; the result was very near what I was told to expect in the books:  forty percent loss in the length, and about twenty percent in the width.

I combined two different hat patterns from the books to come up with a simple hat shape to knit:  knit a straight tube starting at the bottom edge, and then at the top, do ten evenly spaced decreases around, but only do the decreases on every other row. When done, part of the bottom edge is turned up, and part is left down.

At this point, I had a bunch of math to do to see how many stitches I actually needed to knit, and how many inches long, allowing for both my normal knitting gauge as well as how it would shrink.

To get the second layer, I elected to pick up stitches along the brim, and knit essentially a second hat attached to the first, in sort of a long football shape, pushing one end inside the other when I was done.

I decided to loosely tie these two ends together for felting, because I thought that my washer was likely to find some ugly way to distort the hat's shape if I didn't. The hat still came out looking like a squashed pancake, and has some puckers on the top that maybe wouldn't have been there if I hadn't tied it.

After blocking and drying, the hat is serviceable, although not photogenic. It's a bit heavy on my head, as there are almost eight whole ounces of yarn in it.

Stripping towels

I got around to trying to strip my dingy bath towels of build-up of homemade laundry soap and other gunk, despite my scientific hypothesis that build-up protects the fibers.  There are someone else's directions for stripping laundry here, and also here with photos. For a bit more about the chemistry involved, see here.

I wasn't able to find Calgon locally, so I used extra washing soda.

After several hours of soaking in hot water and the stripping solution in the bathtub, the water was almost brown; not as dramatic a change as some of the online examples. The towels still look gray--stripping them didn't do much to restore them to whiteness--but they do have a crisper feel now, and are almost certainly more absorbent than they were.

A bench by the front door

A wooden shelf came home with us from church one day--about one foot wide by four and a half feet long, with slots along the back edge for pamphlets.

It sat in the garage for a while as I tried to figure out what to do with it.

Finally I had the idea of making it into a bench.

Then it sat for another long while, as I thought about how to make a base for it. The shelf has a back piece, and wooden brackets underneath, and is fairly heavy.

Eventually I got to the point where I wanted to get it out of my garage more than I cared about making an attractive base for it, and I decided that I could set it on two plastic milk crates, temporarily.

The milk crates that we have are strong enough to support the weight; some aren't.

I got it all set up with the milk crates opening toward the front, and then I put some of our larger books in them. We still have more books than bookshelves.

The bench works well as a place to put on boots and to unload things that are being brought in. The baby likes to climb up on it to look out of the front windows.