Fiddling around

I've been chugging through a bunch of projects.  I converted a glider rocker with a broken mechanism to a normal rocker, using runners (?) saved from a handed-down family rocker that my children did in, complete with chewed-up ends from the family dog of the time.  I took off the lower level of the glider rocker, and bolted on the runners, after some shaping with a drawknife to remove projecting corners--which was complicated by the discovery of brads that were securing the rocker's cross pieces.  I worked around the brads until I could pull them out, pulled them, and then put them back in when I was done.

The finished rocker sits low and mostly rocks forward.  The runners are worn almost flat in the middle, and the rocking action is clunky.  It occurs to me that some more draw knife work might help there a lot.

Out in the yard, I put down some free leftover ceramic tiles interspersed with a set of marble coasters from a yard sale along a path in the garden, and then made a endpoint by putting down a slice of tree trunk.  The kids brought home three bins of these from a woodworker.

I started turning another tree trunk slice into a stool that can be shoved under the kitchen table, and found that all my drill bits of the right size for drilling pilot holes are getting very dull.

At that point, the family illness-of-the-week caught up with me, and I had to switch to less-strenuous projects:  finishing the embroidery on a tea towel, making more towel loops for the bath towels, taking the lace and worn spots off a vintage linen towel to make it usable, and stitching around the edges of my favorite bath towels so they don't fray.

I've also been enjoying my recent garage sale purchases, which include a little tin xylophone with brass bars that resound for several seconds when struck, and a student-grade violin, which I bought for $20 without even really looking at it, because I knew I still had my violin set-up CD from my previous sabbatical, when I made a fiddle from a kit.  The violin turned out to be in decent condition, just some scratches and stickers.  My husband found a guitar tuner, and I got it tuned up.  Then of course, I had to compare it with the fiddle.  The fiddle sounds better, part of which may be that it is just larger.  I found out that I need my bifocals to see where I'm bowing and fingering at the same time.