Finally feeling crafty

Last-minute Christmas projects, after yesterday's cookie-baking and caramel popcorn:  a book weight with a rock in one end and beans in the other; a sewing kit; individual quotations cut out of an unreadable gift book and laminated; a piece of fabric laminated; an upholstery fabric remnant sewn into a tote bag; a broken necklace that I double-restrung.

For the sewing kit, I took a small, ugly basket and covered it with fabric, gathering it at the inside bottom and stitching through the fabric and basket under the rim.  It was quick to put together, although I think the gathers will tend to collect dust and odds and ends over time.

Recently we were given an elderly woman's extensive stash of braided rug materials and tools.  I've made a good start on a braided rug, and I plan to work straight through my share of the rolled strips, so I don't need to find storage space for them.  It will be a series of smaller rugs.  There's also a bin of uncut fabric, which I will probably use in clothing projects.

Eldest child has reported difficulty in distinguishing the woolens from the synthetics, even with burn testing.  Perhaps some of the fabrics are blends. 

Some of the fabrics were rather musty, so I washed them and hung them out in the back yard--including throwing long, unrolled strips of fabric up into the trees.  For some reason my husband doesn't approve of the look.  The red strips look festive, the gray and tan ones not so much.

Lawn chair webbing, and other maintenance

I was experimenting this morning with ironing layers of milk jug plastic together--with a layer of baking parchment paper to protect the iron--in the hopes of making a solid enough material for a lawn chair seat.

I gave up after a while.  The plastic bonded poorly, tended to warp and wrinkle, and was rather brittle after it cooled down.

Next idea:  use a big piece of synthetic upholstery fabric to make "giant bias tape"--bands of folded fabric, only with the fabric cut with the grain instead of diagonally as done with real bias tape--and then to use the bands as webbing.

I figured a triple thickness of the fabric would be enough.  I now have the bands cut and the "raw" edges secured with stitching.

The next step, and the hardest one, will be to attach these to the chair frame so that the connectors don't tear out.

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In other work, I managed to pull off the hot glue that I had used to winterize my bedroom window.  Last summer it was on there very firmly, but a second year of temperature changes weakened the bond a lot.  So now I can open the window.

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We've been around to a number of neighborhood yard sales, and we found many useful items, in particular jeans and work pants for teenage boys, and several pairs of shoes that fit me and a child.  I had been in a mall shoe store not long before, where there were practically no acceptable shoes, so it was very timely to find the yard sale shoes.

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I finally got to a leather store, and bought some utility leather for re-covering indoor chair seats.  I've learned from a previous attempt that fabric store vinyl is much less durable than the original vinyl.  If the leather doesn't survive, I'm going to use steel plate.

Putting the leather on took a while, mostly in trying to wrap it gracefully around the corners, given that the leather was too thick to have more than two layers of it on the underside of the seat.  I used carpet tacks from the home improvement store, which worked fine.

Shorts

I used some of the yard sale fabric--a thin cotton throw and a 25-cent flouncy linen skirt--to make a couple of pairs of shorts for myself, to wear under skirts.  I also shortened a pair of pajama pants into shorts.  Partly by hand sewing, partly by machine; hand sewing is much easier to take outside.

I also made a small beginning on the skirt I am planning to make out of cotton T-shirt scraps.  Just two pieces of fabric, backstitched together with a couple of outlined shapes, and then cut out the top layer within the stitching (reverse applique, a la Alabama Chanin).  I need to go back and re-stitch with buttonhole thread, which is much more durable.

It's that time of year again...

 ...when the school district requests that I submit Form ED-01650, "STUDENT REPORT FOR AIDS TO NONPUBLIC STUDENTS", so they can make budget estimates.

This form is actually only required in the fall, required by the Minnesota Department of Education to be submitted to the school district, and I put in some effort last year to confirm that it is only actually required for the nonpublic schools who are requesting certain services:  partial reimbursements for textbooks and materials; health services; guidance/counseling.

The Department of Education and the school districts find Minnesota's homeschool laws somewhat confining, and as usual the bureaucracies demand as much information as they can get away with getting, the better to manage you with.  Birth certificate applications practically want what the mother ate for breakfast now.

In other, more productive activities, I've put up a clothesline, after getting unstuck about where to put it.  I got the idea of tying one end to one of the weed trees in the berry patch, but then I found a better spot.

The weather this month has gone from big snowstorm to 88 degrees back to cool spring weather, with occasional thunderstorms and two rounds of small hail.  I have several warm-weather projects lined up, and have been chugging through indoor spring cleaning and organizing while waiting for the right conditions.  

The children and I have been spring cleaning in the bedrooms.  For me, I got my closet tidied up and brought out the back-up sewing machine, now that cabin fever season is ending and I don't have to be so protective of open floor space.  I'm also in the middle of re-tidying my main fabric drawer.  The older children very competently dealt with their rooms, and the middle children assisted me in getting their room done--in the process, we came up with some good ideas for making it work better.

I saved myself some time by deciding not to do a couple of projects.  A reupholstered armchair was stored in the garage, and I thought I would have to de-upholster and de-critter it, but I looked it over and it is okay as is.

A green hardwood branch came down in the snowstorm, and I've been harvesting pieces of it for various purposes with my pocket knife, which has a saw:  some straight sticks, some pegs, and maybe later some knobs.

We've made a couple of expeditions to the thrift store, and I spent some time reading labels on clothing.  They had a lot more natural-fiber clothing than I expected, but you had to really seek for it.

Doing and undoing

I pushed through repairs on several items from my mending pile, and I have also been going through a much larger pile of handed-down clothing and fabric.

I sorted T-shirts, found the all-cotton ones that we don't want to wear as T-shirts, and cut them up for re-use in an Alabama Chanin-style project, which I can work on outdoors this spring while watching children.

Some of the less worthy fabrics went into the kitchen wipe and baby wipe pipelines.

Other have been butchered down to the re-usable parts, and put away until I get to them.

There were some shorts, which my children don't wear, which are going to be short pants for my youngest when the weather is a little warmer.  No alterations needed, because of the diaper.

The big thing remaining is a wool suit that my mother-in-law shrunk for a project, and then gave up on.  Wool jackets and coats are challenging to disassemble, because there is usually a lot of interfacing and inner structure going on.  It's very educational to see all the work that goes into one, though.  I am thinking of using the wool for a bog jacket, much smaller and simpler than the ones pictured at the link.

I was reading in an older book about how having prints and pictures hung up in a house made it more comfortable, and I had recently come across my set of small classroom butterfly posters and was planning to put them up anyway, so I found a place to string up some crocheted wire, and I hung them up with clothespins.  Only four small nail holes in the wall.

Hard at work

Lots of projects going on around here.  I built a long, rustic bench for kitchen table seating.  I planned it down to the last inch to fit the space and the things I wanted to store under it, then had to root around in the depths of the garage to find all of the wood and hardware that I needed.  The seat is a plank from a waterbed frame.  Several of the other long boards were previously salvaged, attached to stakes, and used as flower bed edging at our old house.  Those needed washing, and were somewhat warped. 

I never did find the box of nails that I was planning to use.  I improvised with bolts and screws that we already had.

I used our drill press to drill some of the bolt holes, and used hand tools for everything else.  There was a pause of about a week with pieces of wood stored under the kitchen table while I thought about how to make a back for the bench.

In the process of building the bench I learned, or re-learned, that I could use nails as easily-removable probes and alignment pins when I was having trouble lining up the pilot holes for screws.

The bench still needs some kind of a finish, particularly on the seat, but I am waiting for warm weather and good ventilation.

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I have also been doing a lot of mending of pants' knees, still have two or three more pairs to go.  Some of the pants are lined, so I can't do my usual method of attaching the patch to the leg seams on the inside, and then stitching the ripped area to the patch.

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I made a belt for a child, complete with a buckle made from coat hanger wire and some sort of a legged spring that I salvaged at some point.  That involved some work with a metal file, not just rounding off the sharp ends, but also filing a deep groove into the wire as a way of cutting it.  I like file work a lot, and I should find an excuse to do more of it.

After I finished the belt, I picked up a leatherworking book from the library.  It turns out there are specialized punches for cutting the slot for the tongue of the buckle, and for rounding the end of the belt, and for making the other holes.  I used kitchen scissors and knives that I had, along with a nail for an awl, and an old preschool-level workbook as a surface that could be nailed into.  I also used waxed thread instead of rivets.

Thread goes fast

I used up half a dozen spools of thread in making the coat, and almost three more since then in other sewing.

I cut fabric for two corduroy skirts, one of which is ready to assemble, once I finish doing some embroidery along the hem.  The handwork is delaying the skirt by only two days, and is visually striking.

I also turned a pile of old clothes into kitchen wipes and baby wipes and a pair of fitted leg warmers for me.  The leg warmers would have been easier if I had sewed the seams first, and then cut the fabric, because the edges of the knit fabric curled up a lot.  I use a zigzag stitch with knits.

I've been transitioning sock styles recently, from homemade knee-high tights with ankle sock feet, to wool blend hiking socks, because I'm not happy with the ankle socks.  The leg warmers are working well in conjunction with the hiking socks, and I will probably make more.  They are just tapered tubes with casings for elastic around the top.

I've also been transitioning my sleepwear toward clothes that resemble my daytime clothes, and I altered a few of my older skirts so they have just elastic at the waist, and not ties that are knotted, and they can be used for either purpose.

A few weeks ago we had a big snowfall of fluffy snow, just what I was waiting for for cleaning my old living room rug, since I never quite had the energy in the warm weather to haul it out and scrub it on a tarp.

Supposedly fluffy snow is best for rug cleaning.  I've read that if you spread a cold rug over the snow, and sweep snow across it, and perhaps dance on it, that the snow will melt slightly and release just enough water and ammonia into the rug to loosen soil.

In practice, I've found that the rug will not get clean, but it will get a little less dirty.  In this case, the rug started out fully dirty, because I didn't clean it at all before I put it in the garage.  Lots of sand came off, and the snow underneath it definitely got dirty.  I moved the rug to fresh snow to do the other side.

We made two large bowls of clean snow into snow ice cream, by adding sugar, cream, and vanilla, and they didn't last long.  I noticed just a slight ammonia taste, so it seems the source of my rug cleaning information was correct.

Continuing with the coat

There was a library book I read once by a popular maker of Western shirts, who said that she always made the shirts quite large, and then altered them in the direction of smaller to fit her client.  

It would have helped if I would have remembered that book earlier in this process.  I had to add width in several places, which was time-consuming as the material was too thick for my sewing machine, and each insertion required two long seams.

Now I am in the finishing stages of the coat...zipper, collar, cuffs, bottom edge, and pockets.  It is amazing how much labor and materials go into such a thing.  The outer shell and lining took almost an entire flat bedsheet.

I've been using my homemade leather thimble very heavily, and I thought I should describe it.  It's a strip of medium-weight leather almost one inch wide and long enough to wrap in a band--shiny side in--around my thumb with about an inch of overlap.  Three stitches of dental floss at the exposed end hold the shape.

The overlapped area is the part I use for pushing a needle.  Having the suede side on the outside helps the end of the needle not slip off.  Wearing it on my thumb lets me use my other fingers for steadying the needle even more.

The thimble is one of my essential tools.  I misplaced it at one point, and then had a miserable time trying to use a steel thimble that was among the sewing supplies I picked up on vacation.  Then I took a couple minutes to make a new leather thimble, until I found the original one again.  It needs new dental floss, but it is still usable as long as at least one stitch holds. 

I've also been using one of the mannequins as a handy coat form.  That helped a lot with the layout of the outer and inner layers.  I cut the pieces large, laid them on, and then I could see where I needed to cut and sew them.

Coat in progress

It seemed best to start from the innards, and work outwards.  I've been piecing together two layers of sweaters (acrylic mostly) and one layer of blanket into a thick vest.  Sleeves, collar, outer shell, lining, and zipper to follow.

The coat shape is a simpler, larger version of a shirt.

When re-using sweaters, it is best to stitch along the edges before actually cutting them, so that the knitting doesn't unravel.

The machine sewing is going about as well as usual.  I decided it was time to take a break when the needle fell way down into the machine when I was cleaning lint out of it.  I'm going to have to turn the machine upside down and shake it to get it out.

Cozy cottage

I made progress on the mending pile.  It is not the easiest or most fun kind of sewing, but it is gratifying to see an entire garment ready to wear again, after putting in much less work than making a new item would take--or than shopping for a new one would take, either.

I also was able to fix a zipper.

I'm been putting off most of my Christmas crafting, aside from a knitted towel experiment, and I'm giving some already-completed projects as gifts instead.

Today is Yooper Scooper weather:  shovel early, shovel often.

I have a pile of used materials to make into a coat.  The most challenging part will be fitting the arms so that the recipient has enough freedom of movement for sparring with siblings. 

Our second mannequin torso was released from dress form duty, so I found an outfit for it and put it back with the other one.

I couldn't find a good place to display Christmas cards, so I've been putting them on the Christmas tree.

A child found a doughnut maker at the thrift store--it's like a waffle iron, but with two doughnut-shaped cavities.  This one was brand-new and unused, and at least forty years old.  An elder sibling bought one at a yard sale a decade ago, and has used it occasionally.

Where's the beans??

I don't know when the cheaper brands of baked beans started being canned as a big lump of beans swimming in a sea of liquid, but now I have encountered it twice, once in a store brand, and once in a brand from one of the largest ag companies.

In the latter case, I pulled out a strainer and measured:  just about exactly half of the can's contents by volume were pourable liquid.

I hate washing strainers.

This reminds me of early in the pandemic, when dried pasta suddenly started taking much longer to cook for some reason.

In other activities, I was able to repair watchbands for two children.  I took a toy apart and pulled some dust out of it that was getting in the way of the mechanism.  I altered a swimsuit so that it would fit for another season.

I knit a dishcloth from acrylic yarn rejected by a child, who also went through a substantial fabric stash and burn-tested samples to separate out the ones with synthetic fibers.

I finished one section of crochet for my curtain project.

Several pairs of pants were retired for being too far gone in the seat, and there is at least one more that needs to be retired, now that I think of it.

My husband dehydrated some cabbage.  I learned that you can freeze tomatoes whole.  Children have been growing mint.

My husband also brought home a vintage metal-frame chair similar to three that we already own.  They are very child-resistant, except for the vinyl seats.  My longer-term plan is to redo them in sturdy leather.

A family from church is making big changes to their diet, and they gave us several boxes of food from their pantry that they could no longer eat.  It was good to get a change from our usual and somewhat tedious simple foods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homebound

For various reasons, I've spent the month very much at home.

I've done a lot of the usual recycling of one thing into another:  new cloth diapers from a flannel sheet, and kitchen wipes from worn-out diapers.  I'm making toddler pants out of some 25-cent yard sale sweatshirts.

I laminated some more pretty papers and fabrics for shelf liners.

I decluttered some things that needed to go.

We made a bunch of birthday decorations from paper, including paper coffee filters.  Most of them are still up.

I got a small crochet hook, so now I can crochet my crochet cotton properly.

New diaper covers

Recently I retired some of our cloth diaper covers, the last of the ones that we bought for our first baby.  I had been extending them for the last baby, who had outgrown them, by pinning them on with the diapers, but the baby started escaping from them regularly.

To replace the diaper covers, I made several new ones:  two layers of fabric with a layer of plastic enclosed in between. For a pattern, I traced around a secondhand pocket diaper that we use as a diaper cover.  It has no elastic around the leg openings, yet it manages to achieve a decent level of containment.  

For plastic, I used ironed-together chip bags for one, and stole my bulk rice bag sewing machine cover for the other.  The rice is both tougher and more flexible.

The sewing procedure is very similar to making prefold cloth diapers, which for some reason I can't find any decent directions for, so:  take the fabric for one side, sew the innards to it on the "wrong" side, then add the fabric for the other side with the "right sides" together and sew around the edges--but leave a gap so you can turn it right side out, and then once it is turned, sew the gap closed. For diapers, I also topstitch around the edges to keep them from inverting in the wash.

For closures, I experimented with using elastic ponytail holders and large (coat) buttons, sewing on the elastics where the tension would keep the loops secure on the buttons.

In practice, this works fairly well, although it would be better to have two elastics per side, so that the back edge doesn't pivot outward and make a gap around the leg.  The buttons I used are large enough that no additional buttons are needed for this.

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Then I made a new cover for my sewing machine, using a nice fabric remnant that was handed down to me, that was too small for a pillow cover.

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I took some water bottles that were getting in the way, filled them with water and two drops of chlorine bleach each, and put them aside for use in emergencies and outings.

Buying chlorine bleach at the grocery store was annoying.  New versions have been introduced since the last time I bought any, in the Pre-Covidian Era.  Now there are fabric-preservatives and new scents added to most of them.

I also use bleach to turn black cotton clothing into brown cotton clothing, socks in particular.  The key is to use very little bleach in sufficient water, and to rinse thoroughly right afterward.

Soap and sewing

A quantity of soap shavings came home with children after an activity.  I melted down the soap to make new bars.

How I should have started was to heat up a little water in the bottom of my laundry soap pan, and then to slowly add soap shavings and dissolve them.  Most of the time, what I had was a softened, gooey mass of soap.  Not as bad as the time I was melting old, dry, hard bits of soap, but not good.  The laundry soap pan does not have a handle, and it took some time to incorporate all of the shavings.

Near the end, I found that turning the heat up from Low to the lower side of Medium was helpful.  The soap was still not anywhere near liquid, but it was at least moldable.  

I packed it into a pan, let it cool, cut it into small bars, and have put them up to dry and harden for a few months.

I suspect they will end up a bit crumbly, but hopefully they will be usable in bar form.  If they aren't, they can go into a future batch of laundry soap.

In other projects, I have been sewing toddler pants, using fabric from old adult clothes and elastic from worn-out kids' pants.  So far I have made four pairs.  The process is a bit time-consuming when I have to pick out multiple rows of stitching to liberate the elastic, and when I have to piece fabric together to make it wide enough.

It was easier to draw up a quick pattern than to dig out an old one.  So these pants look a little goofy, too, but in a slightly different way than previous versions did.

I also worked through several items that needed mending; still have a bag full.

Yesterday I dyed some fabrics in the washer in preparation for making three skirts.  This morning I was able to sketch out a pattern and cut out two of them.  The sewing for these should be straightforward.  The third will be a circle skirt, from a circular tablecloth.

Draped children

My children were getting cloak ideas from this video (which has a recap of the different styles discussed, in the last three minutes), and requested ruana-style cloaks.

The ruana cloak is a simply a long rectangle, slit up the front to the place where it will sit on the back of the neck.  Some people cut out a neck-sized circle at that point, see here for example.  I prefer the look of a straight edge coming down in front.

In use, the front of the ruana can just hang down, or one side can be thrown over the shoulder.  It looks much more elegant than it ought to.

I found enough large pieces of fabric to outfit all the children who wanted one.  It helped that a relative unloaded a bin of linens on us while we were on vacation.

So far this has been all no-sew, but the children all want hoods on their cloaks, and will also need the ends of the slits reinforced.

 

The war of sewing

My sewing machine is currently set up in our basement workshop.  I recently made four skirts:  two from tablecloth fabric, one from a sheet, and one from batik fabric that I was given for Christmas.  I had a lot of problems with breaking threads, and used up several more spools of handed-down thread than I expected to.  I used the same pattern for all four skirts, from a sketch I had in one of the wardrobe booklets that I had made a couple of years ago.  One of the skirts is waiting to be overdyed.

I also sewed a new seat and back for one of our director's chairs, which had been waiting a long time for new canvas.  That process involved more troubleshooting than sewing, because my sewing machine didn't like the weight of thread that I was trying to use.  At one point I had my machine more taken apart for dust removal than I had ever done before; its innards were actually a lot cleaner than I expected.

Turning things over

Sallie Borrink has a new community called Christian Women Seeking Truth going, with a mix of free and subscriber-only content from her.  She's a wise, mature Christian woman with a gift for searching out interesting and informative links.

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I've covered two more boxes with paper for the shelf, and I'm still working hard on my big project, which is now passing through The Stage Where It All Goes to Crap, and entering the Maybe I Can Still Stick the Landing phase. 

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I've also done a lot of organizing of children's clothing. A family at our church regularly hands down their children's outgrown clothing to us, and so I received two more bags to sort out and put away into our "kids' clothes pantry", which now contains sizes from baby all the way up to teenager.

Increments

I mended several pairs of boys' pants, and my husband canned up a batch of tomatoes.

A while back when I was sorting kids' clothes, I found a pair of khaki pants that were clearly too slim to ever fit any of my children. I set them aside in the to-be-dealt-with pile, and then completely forgot about them.  They turned up again just when I was wondering what fabric to use to mend two newly-ripped pairs of khaki pants.... Suspiciously Providential.

A maker family

I took two pieces of fabric left over from making skirts and cut and hemmed them to make handkerchiefs. Someday I am going to take the time to learn how to use a narrow hemmer attachment on a sewing machine, but for now I just fold, pin, and sew.

I also altered the collar on the blouse I just finished, by the most expedient method:  I cut off most of the excess fabric, ripped open the seams at the front edges a little, folded the raw edges in, and then topstitched them closed. It turned out well.

Then I took the blouse and a skirt I finished last year, and dyed them purple with the last of my dye.  (I don't like using dye because of its toxicity, and because most of it goes down the drain.) The two fabrics, both originally cotton sheets, took the dye slightly differently--one is a little more reddish than the other.

My mother-in-law was brainstorming about how to make a easel that she could spin a canvas on, vertically. My husband found a caster to use as a bearing, minus the wheel, and got it started for her.

She mentioned a sort of papier mache-like clay that is made of drywall mud and toilet paper. We may try that someime. 

Some of the children have been making stop-motion animations for a church activity, and they have been working like elves. Another child made a little wooden table, and painted it. I usually avoid painting furniture, because paint isn't durable enough, but the table's color (blue) is quite striking.

Onward

Sewing progress:  I sewed the buttonholes, which went well, aside from making the two edges too close together, which made them harder to cut open. Then I went on and sewed the shoulder seams, the side seams, and the hem, and got the sleeves ready to put in.

Garden and yard:  My husband has been bringing home some cucumbers and pea pods from his garden plot. This year I finally have coneflowers/echinacea growing out front, after several years of unsuccessful attempts. The flax seeds did not come up at all.

Other:   I’ve reactivated my to-do list, and have been knocking off a number of little tasks.