Recycled child's bog jacket

A year ago, I made a lap blanket. But since then, we were given a number of quilts and other blankets, and it ended up in the closet.

Meanwhile, one of our smaller children began to need another winter sweater. I thought of using the lap blanket to make a little "bog jacket" or "bog coat", which is a simple and ancient jacket pattern that can be made from a single square of fabric, using the entire square. It is best known to weavers, but is called a "bog jacket" because one of those bodies found years ago very well-preserved in a peat bog was wearing one made of leather.

Knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann adapted the design for knitting, and put it in her book Knitting Around. At one point I knitted a baby-sized version, which has worked out well and was not quickly outgrown.  I might as well add here that I accidentally mixed in a little wool yarn with the acrylics in this project; the wool felted and shrank, while the acrylics didn't, but I was able to give the shrunken areas a good pull and restore some of the lost width. The lost length didn't matter, because the design runs long on the baby.

There's an example photo here, without the extra fullness in the lower part that Zimmermann added to make room for a thick diaper.

Anyway, in her design the vertical slit that needs to be made is accomplished by dividing the knitting onto separate needles and balls of yarn at that point, while the horizontal slits are made by knitting in a strand of contrasting yarn, which is removed later, with the loose stitches being grafted elsewhere to make the seams for the sleeves and across the chest.

Since I was working with a finished piece of knitting, and I was in a hurry, I decided not to unravel and graft, but to sew and cut, and then sew again.

Knitters really hate cutting into their knitting, because they have a great fear of unraveling stitches, but if you sew in a line of short stitches along every edge that you want to preserve, before you cut, then it is safe to do.  Some of my washcloths are portions of sweaters that I have sewn and cut in this way. I've had no problems with them unraveling. I've also altered sweaters.

In this case, because I wanted to keep the edges a little stretchy, I chose to use a short zigzag stitch. Be warned that this tends to make a curly "lettuce" edge, especially if you stretch it out while sewing, which is sometimes a desirable effect. After sewing around each cut I was going to make, I carefully did the cutting.

The final sewing was a little tricky, in making the right parts go to the right places, but it also went quickly.

To finish it, I found two old coat buttons, and crocheted yarn chains long enough to loop around them. I sewed on the buttons and loops, and it was finished--except for picking off a number of little bits of yarn, the loops that were severed when I did the cutting.

It came out a nice size for the child, with lots of room to grow.

Holiday interlude

I spent a bit of time thinking about how to spend my Christmas money, and ended up at the used book store.

Most of the time, I buy books from a thrift store or from the little book sale area at the library, so going into a real bookstore is like a trip to the candy store--except better, because you can read a book more than once.

Within the wider selection of books, I found a number of books that related to areas that I want to branch out into more.

My second stop was the craft store. I don't visit these very often either, because so many of the things in them, I could make for myself, if I wanted to put in the time and effort. What I did buy was basic materials:  leather remnants, wool roving, and fabric paint.

My third stop was for the really mundane things:  socks and a new toilet brush. I've had a remarkably hard time buying socks in the past, either because they weren't quite what I was looking for or needed, or because they were beyond my budget. I've settled on buying ankle socks a few pairs at a time, and using them as the feet for homemade knee-high tights.

I decided not to buy a new dish drying rack yet, but to just turn the old one around, so that the more worn-looking parts are at the back.

Also, I received a box of garage sale fabric from a visiting relative. There is a large piece of fleece that should be good for one or two pairs of child-sized pants, one and a half bedsheets, and more than enough upholstery fabric to cover the chair that I brought home from vacation. While I was busy with holiday preparations, my mending pile outgrew the small amount of cupboard space that I allotted for it, so I'm going to have to get to work on that again sometime soon.

Bedwetting hack

A book I have on natural remedies contains testimonials from several people on the power of honey to stop bedwetting.

The treatment is to give the child somewhere between one teaspoon and one tablespoon of honey before bedtime.

I'm pretty sure that the way that it works is to raise the child's blood glucose levels far enough that their body has to keep additional water in their bloodstream to keep their blood sugar from going too high, instead of sending the water to the bladder. So I don't consider this a very healthy solution for regular use, just one that is useful for those I-really-don't-want-to-deal-with-this-today situations...such as during the holidays.

Since the active ingredient is a form of sugar, plain table sugar should have this effect as well, and so should Christmas candy.

Santa's workshop

I finished making three Christmas gifts today, and while I was out Christmas shopping, I had ideas for about four more projects.

I have to balance those with cleaning the house before our family gatherings, and also some rest, though.

The usual

My life lately has mostly consisted of maintenance:  the usual cleaning, tightening loose screws, and troubleshooting appliances.

I also finished knitting the hat I am giving for a Christmas present, and I looked up how to make the pompom for it. I have an additional little knitting project going on with the leftover yarn.

I cut another jar's worth of kitchen wipes, from fabric that I have no other use for, with the assistance of a tiny human who was happy to have the job of putting them into the jar.

The older children have been taking on some of the snackmaking work; wacky cake and popcorn, so far this week.

Wacky cake is very easy to make, and doesn't require milk or eggs, although we do use milk in ours, instead of water.  The recipe I use is in this post.

My husband's work had some kind of a catered lunch, and he brought home quite a bit of leftover pasta and salad and bread from it, easily enough for two meals.

One of his co-workers has the interest, time, ability, tools, and space to work on cars, and has been helping him do some of the work that needs to be done on our aging vehicle.

An interesting take

Dorothy Sayers, in an address titled "Are Women Human?", which she gave to a Women's Society in 1938, gave an answer to the chauvinist objection that women were "taking men's jobs" by listing a number of female occupations in medieval times that had since then been taken over by men:

It is a formidable list of jobs:  the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry.  The whole catering industry and...the whole of the nation's brewing and distilling.  All the preserving, pickling and bottling industry, all the bacon-curing.  And (since in those days a man was often absent from home for months together on war or business) a very large share in the management of landed estates.... Even the dairy-maid in her simple bonnet has gone....

Sayers believed that work should be done by those who are best fitted for it, whether male or female, and that the work should be not only well done, but also worth doing well. Since industrialization had taken over much of women's traditional work, then women should be allowed to take on other kinds of work.

The more modern book Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes, similarly chronicles the shift of industry out of and away from the home, and suggests ways to bring some of it back in. It has been a number of years since I read this book, but it is safe to say that she wasn't a conservative Christian when she wrote it. More like an anti-capitalist feminist.

Neither of these authors concerned themselves much, if I remember rightly, with the idea of home being the place for the production of new people. That is another thing has largely been outsourced, over the last few decades, in this case to other countries. In her speech, Sayers did mention the impossibility of housing a family with a dozen children in "a small flat", but she was perhaps forgetting the small size of many medieval peasant dwellings. Even my father-in-law grew up in a house that was under 450 square feet, and they weren't so far from having a dozen children.

There is a book that I used to own, The Structures of Everyday Life:  The Limits of the Possible, that goes deeply into the economics of European life, a few centuries after the Medieval period. Most families owned only a few pieces of furniture. France at one point instituted a prize for families that reached twelve children, although it was not able to feed the population that it already had; the book said that there were many French families at that time with twenty children or more.

Paleoclimate in Minnesota

I continue to prepare for my comments on our electric utility's plans to go to zero-carbon-emissions.

Since the whole point of their effort is to stop climate change, I thought I'd take a quick look at Minnesota's historic climate...all of it.

In the Permian Era, Minnesota was at the bottom of an ocean. At various later times, much of it was covered by smaller seas. Even today, a lot of it is covered by water; it's the "Land of 10,000 lakes" after all, although actually there are even more of them than that.

As recently as the Cretaceous Period, Minnesota's climate was tropical. During the Ice Age in the Pleistocene, Minnesota was under glaciers. One of these is much more habitable than the other.

Finds

I got some of my Christmas shopping done at the thrift store, but I also found a couple of other things while I was there.

The first was four spools of cotton carpet warp thread. I can definitely use these, since I have found that crochet cotton thread is a bit weak for the warp of the things I am trying to weave.

The other was a copy of The Brothers Lionheart, a children's book by Astrid Lindgren, originally written in Swedish. Last year, in a different thrift store, I bought a Norwegian translation of it. With a little help from the pictures and a Norwegian dictionary, I read it all the way through, over and over, and basically worked it out like a hundred-page puzzle. Norwegian has a lot of similarities to English, although there is a twist to them, and that helped a lot. By the sixth time through the book, I could understand most of it, or at least I thought I could.

So it is exciting to have the English translation now, and see how well I did in figuring out the Norwegian. So far, it looks like I got most of it right.

Aspirations

When I started this blog, I planned on leaving politics out of it, but it turned out that politics doesn't plan on leaving me alone, and is having serious effects on my household's finances.  In today's example, Minnesota is working hard to transform itself into the California of the Midwest.

It's all kind of intertwined, but at the foundation are a solid belief in climate change*, and a steadfast faith in the power of collective, government-led effort to get things done.  There is a law on Minnesota's books, the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which mandates a 30% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, and a 80% reduction by 2050.  The state is not on track to meet those goals, but by golly, they're trying.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is considering adopting California's ZEV and LEV standards, as several other states have already done. The initial public comment period on this effort closed yesterday; fortunately I was working on some of these things yesterday morning, and I noticed the deadline in time to get my comments prepared and submitted.

The LEV (Low Emissions Vehicle) standard would require that most new vehicles sold in Minnesota meet California emission standards. Apparently, federal law requires that states wanting to set more stringent emissions standards must either use the California standards, or do nothing.  The MPCA may take Colorado's LEV standard (which basically incorporates the California standard by reference) as a model for Minnesota's version.

I don't see how letting another state write your state's laws can end well.  Population of Los Angeles metro area:  4 million.  Population of the entire state of Minnesota:  5.7 million.

The ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) standard would set delivery quotas for electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles for car manufacturers wishing to sell new cars in Minnesota. From a news report, it appears that people wanting to buy ZEV vehicles in Minnesota at present are having a bit of a hard time finding them, though most of them manage to purchase one in the end.

It turns out that this slight shortage in ZEV supply is because California and several others states have adopted ZEV standards, so the manufacturers are delivering these vehicles first to the states where they are required to deliver them.  In my comments, I pointed out that the economic forces at play will sort this situation out over time, without any government intervention at all. And that if government intervention sets the ZEV quotas above demand, then the manufacturers and dealers may start having to subsidize ZEV sales by charging more for higher-emissions vehicles.

This is another of those "unintended consequences" that keep popping up. They're never in my favor, either.

The MPCA claims that the LEV and ZEV standards would only affect manufacturers and dealers.  That is baloney; new car buyers would also be affected, as well as used car buyers in a few years as these vehicles trickle into the used car market.

Colorado's LEV standard exempts passenger vehicles over twelve passengers; I see a fifteen-passenger high-emissions van in my future.  Our family is large, but not that large. It's not a gain on the climate change front, either.

On the utility front, our utility is proposing to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, and to get to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050; not only meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement**, but exceeding them. They are asking for permission from the Public Utilities Commission to retire all of their coal-powered plants ten years early, and to build a lot more wind and solar power generation capacity.

The problems, of course, are that wind and solar electricity generation often don't track with electricity demand, and that it is very hard and expensive to store excess electricity in large quantities for the times when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining--which could be for days or even weeks.

Their solution is *waving the magic Technology wand* to use the power of technology to manage demand rather than supply. That looks to me like it is going to involve some kind of real-time pricing:  very cheap electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and very expensive electricity when they aren't.

Minnesota does have a nuclear power plant, but from what I've read, it sounds like they are working only on keeping it open, and not on building another one. The environment lobby Force is very strong in Minnesota, and it does not always act coherently.

Buried deep within the bowels of the utility's Carbon Report, I have found an implied wish list:  1.  Substantial tax subsidies for their "de-carbonization".  2.  That Minnesota be converted to a "high-electrification state, requiring that electricity be used for cooking, water heating, space heating, and passenger vehicles.  3.  That private generation of electricity (at least at the level of large businesses, etc.) be banned.

So, their brilliant plan to stop climate change and save the world is to use my tax money to force me to use electricity for everything, and then, when their zero-carbon-emissions electricity proves unreliable, to bar me from making my own electricity.

I just finished reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which makes a strong case that socialism always requires some sort of a common cause, and always ends up using coercion by force. I am also in the middle of a book about the history of the Baptist church in Russia.  Under the Soviet Union the Communists found it politically convenient to set the Church up as the internal enemy of all good Communists--as opposed to creating an external enemy that they might end up having to fight a war with, if passions ran too high.

More and more, I am starting to see climate change as the modern unifying cause of the socialists, the justification that they are using to take over control over more and more of the world's physical economic activity. Climate change cannot be separated from economic activity, because in their view economic activity causes climate change. The climate modelers are having to incorporate manufacturing and land use and so on into their models, and they already are showing a distinct tendency to want to control those activities in order to control climate change. This will not end well; it doesn't even end well when the economists are in charge.


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*The short version of my opinion of climate change is that we are working very hard to solve a problem that may not even exist.

**I read the Paris Agreement. It's only sixteen pages, but it has already spawned a complex of committees busily generating large quantities of documents written in bureaucrat-ese.  The character of the Paris Agreement can be seen clearly in its practice of calling a regular international assessment of progress toward reducing carbon emissions a "global stocktake"--overt Newspeak, in an Orwellian global program. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but the process will take some time.

Almost a routine

I found this post at Laine's Letters...Revisited! a few months ago, and it has been very helpful.

In particular, I took the advice about setting down my daily routine on four index cards. Nothing is scheduled by time, it is just a sequence of tasks to go through. Start at the top, and work my way down, and when there are interruptions, that's okay.  When one card's tasks are finished, flip to the next one. I do try to make sure that our meals land at regular times, though.

It very nicely solves the perennial daily problem of Too Many Things To Do And No Idea Where To Start.

A pot scrubber and a new knitting project

My homemade pot scrubber was wearing out, and it was time to make a new one. I have some plastic mesh produce bags tucked away in my craft drawer, but I also had a few narrow lengths of tulle, salvaged from gift wrapping. I chose to use the tulle this time.

I didn't follow my pattern from before, but instead did a chain ring, followed by a round of half double stitches, followed by a round of slip stitches, increasing as necessary to keep it flat. The result is denser than what I usually do. I probably would have been better off doing a single round of double stitches; I don't think there was enough tulle to do triples.

For the knitting project, I've started knitting a hat to give as a Christmas present. I bought the yarn a while back, and did a gauge swatch, and figured out how many stitches around it would need to be. I also decided to make it double-layered, as I did for my own hat.  Today I actually cast on and knitted the first inch or so. With my recently improved knitting speed, I should easily be able to finish it before Christmas.

I've also been selectively cutting down the dead plants in the flower beds. Some I am leaving there until spring, because I like to look at them. Since I learned this year that you can get usable fiber from nettle plants, I've been looking forward to harvesting the patch of nettles that is well-established in one of our flower beds, but by the time I got to them, there were only a few of them still standing, and the rest were down and mixed in with some other tall plants.