Chugging along

I've been doing a lot of organizing and cleaning, and also a little decorating.

The plastic blinds in the kitchen were very bad when we moved in, and I just took them down and bagged them up--I hate mini-blinds too much to spend money on buying new ones.

I finally got around to washing them in the bathtub.  Hot water, dish soap, and spray cleaner had little effect on the thick, tenacious goo that was on them except to soften it a little.  What did work was to scrub with a drippy mixture of baking soda and water.  They came out looking almost new.

To dry the blinds before storing them again, I figured out a way to suspend them from the shower curtain rod by hanging two clothes hangers on it first, and then slipping each end of the top of the blinds into a hanger.

I came out only a little ahead in the end, though, because some little child decided to break one slat, and then another, of the bathroom blinds. I will splint them back together.

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I did a quick decorating project of covering a half-painted canvas--that my husband picked up from some curbside a while back--with fabric, and hanging it on the wall.  I used tacks salvaged from one of my de-upholstery projects.  I put the nail into the wall a little too low, and then compensated by putting a small wooden spool onto the nail before hanging the panel back up.

I used to cover pieces of plywood with fabric, stapled on, and lean them against the wall to hide electrical outlets from the baby, or put them under crates that would otherwise scratch the floor.

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I looked through the mending bag, and found that I have an even dozen pairs of children's pants waiting to be mended.  I'm going to have to switch thread on the sewing machine.  The thread in it now is very prone to jumping free of the thread guides and creating slack that then tangles down inside the machine.  I was making a quick pillowcase for a seat cushion, and had to pause every few stitches to make sure the thread was behaving itself decently.

The seat cushion was for the deconstructed chair in the library.  I also added one piece of the wood to the back, with short drywall screws, and worked out a way to semi-attach the chunks of redwood beam that it is sitting on to each other, so they're not shifting and letting the chair fall over.

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In other tinkering, we replaced the light bulbs in a bedroom with ones of a warm color temperature, and found out why the glass shade was on upside-down--it is too small to accommodate full-size light bulbs.  I worked out a way of suspending it a little lower using a bolt, a nut, and a couple of washers, with the bolt running up through the center of the original hanger, and being secured from falling back out with the nut.  It was a three-handed job, and I might go back and add a short tube as a spacer to steady the shade.