Back at home

A lot of my focus lately has been away from home.

I finished a braided rug, and put it in the bedroom at the foot of the bed under a chest.  The laminate flooring has a tolerable color, and ordinarily I wouldn't think that a rug would add much to the room, especially since I was using up colors I don't like, but it does make the room feel more finished and grounded. 

The rug's colors are medium tones, as is the floor, so the rug adds pattern and softness without standing out.

I went on from there and leaned a long board against the opposite corner, and then draped a long section of quilt top over it.  It's a bit theatrical, and wouldn't have been practical when my children were smaller.  It also is pushing me to incorporate a little more green into the curtains.  That might be as simple as lacing some crochet cotton through the holes in the lace trim, except that I really should wash the curtains first.

Eldest child has been taking remnants of Christmas-themed fabrics and other fabrics, and making reusable gift bags.  Not only reusable, but also reversible, with one side Christmas-y and the other not.  They look very nice.

The yard has greened up, thanks to plantains covering most of the bare areas.  The corner of the yard where my husband's dried mustard? plant from his community garden plot ended up last fall is coming up all mustard.  The flower beds are becoming jungles.  Children have planted things in various places--potatoes, lemons, carrots, and probably also apples.  

Busy at home

I've been making progress on a lot of projects:  putting a new hanger on the back of a smaller mirror, braiding a rug, mending, knitting an oversized hat, yard work, organizing a closet; one thing after another.

I finally got an antique carpet runner that we were given months ago installed onto the stairs.  I didn't realize that it was going to noticeably brighten the space; the previous big-box-store landlord-special runner--which I left on the stairs as an underlayer--is very dark and it soaked up light instead of reflecting and diffusing it around the stairwell. 

I made progress on another project, ironically, by abandoning it:  making a lampshade for a small lamp.  It was complete except for figuring out how to make it sit securely on the lamp. 

Instead, I pulled out a cracked old lampshade that I had been balancing on an Ikea lamp, and tried it on this one.  The lampshade attached well, but it looked not so good, and was much too opaque.

There's little risk in maybe ruining something that is nearly ruined already.  I decided to poke a lot of holes in the lampshade with a sewing needle-after taking it off the lamp, of course.  Within one minute, that task was subcontracted to an enthusiastic tiny human, who did an excellent job.  Little pinpoints of light come through, and they are brighter or dimmer depending where you are in the room.

Later at a yard sale, I found an outdoorsy watercolor print that echoes the colors in our living room, and also the colors of the lamp and lampshade--and even of the frame of the mirror I fixed--and that exemplifies some of our family atmosphere.

I picked up a free pine bookcase headboard for a twin bed, which turned out to be the perfect size to become a header for two plywood shelf units, which were originally the "doors" of a closeable toy shelf that our church retired a few years ago.  The rest of the shelf is on the other side of our living room now.  The headboard is not as deep as the shelves, so there's a space behind it, and also it covers up the tops of the shelves by several inches, but it also lends them a lot more style than they had before, and it functions as a sort of mantel.   Although few mantels have a painted orange crate and a well-dressed half-mannequin preemptively parked on them.  

Outdoors, a child helped me install some garden edging that a departing neighbor didn't want to move to their new house.  Previously there was no delineation between yard and garden in that part of the yard.  It makes a lot more difference than I expected it would, and there's enough left over to replace some badly-deteriorated edging in another part of the yard.

Local writer James Lileks last week bid his beloved home Jasperwood goodbye.  It's homely-ness is something that I am now pondering, as a Christian and a renter and the mother of a large family.  I've seen Mr. Lileks in person at the State Fair a few times, and we've driven through that very expensive Minneapolis neighborhood once or twice.  

Off day; small fake fireplace

I took a day off between two big projects and messed around with making a little hearth under my sewing machine table.  It's the same table I put an oak chair back into two years ago, to connect and stabilize the legs.

The leather chair seat that I mentioned in that post, by the way, has gone from dull green suede to an impressive polished brown, to dull green rougher suede, under heavy wear from children.

Anyway, I had recently moved a large wooden tray from the top of my dresser onto the oak part, and had put a few awkwardly-shaped things in it, including a half-log that separates to reveal a hidden drawer.

I also recently picked up a small box of veneer bricks from a neighbor's spring clean-out; just the bricks' faces.  I knew that I wanted to use them somewhere soon, and that they wouldn't cover a large area.

In the midst of puttering around the house, I was thinking about making a fake fireplace, along the lines of a scrap wood fireplace in the Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found book I reviewed in 2018.

I realized that I had the brick floor, and the log, and the place for it....

The bricks were just enough to line the wooden tray, after breaking a few to fit, with just one tiny piece left over.  Some of them were fake-singed, and I put those toward the front.

For a back, I immediately thought of a long metal sign I had picked up from another neighbor's curbside.  It has a warm, dark copper color.  I bent it into a U shape with the help of an old atlas, by putting one end into the atlas, standing on them, and pulling up on the other end; probably the first time I've ever used a book as a bending brake for metal.  It gave me good, straight, rounded bends.

Putting everything together under the table, the sign-back was too tall to fit under the sewing machine compartment, so I rotated the sign forward 90 degrees and made it into a hood instead--which makes more sense, anyway.

I found a few warm-colored firelike objects to go around the log, including some copper and a glass candle holder--which I lined with an upside-down picture of autumn leaves--and a curly piece of birch bark.

There is even a modest amount of warm air coming out of it when the furnace is on, because it's right in front of a vent.

Even worse, but less worse that it could have been

We discovered that an ambulance ride costs more than rent now.  In Millennial terms, around 400 Starbucks coffees and 150 avocado toasts.  I need to start making friends with drug dealers.

By the gymnastic grace of God, there was same-day treatment and no permanent damage.

ICE has been in our area, but I haven't seen any personally--that I know of.

One thing in my home that I've been appreciating lately is a tall narrow garden trellis that we picked up for free from a neighbor who was moving.  Similar to these curved ones, but with four top spikes that each end in a small ball.

It fits very well in an awkward gap next to an awkward corner in the bathroom, we can hang towels off the spikes, and the trellis keeps them away from the wall.

The Goodwill doesn't really take garden furniture, so it is often given away.  I switched to a metal flower pot stand for my nightstand, and set a wrought-iron-style napkin weight? for picnics? upside-down in it to keep small items from falling through so easily, while still allowing most of the dust through.  I don't put water glasses there because the mattress is frequently used as a trampoline; small house, long winters.

I managed to paint a large picture frame and an office stand that we had picked up at other times, using old toothbrushes as brushes.  Uneven paint coverage, but I think that could be an advantage when trying to simulate marble.  A clear varnish of similar reflectance to polished stone would make it more convincing.

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.

That took long enough

I'm on sabbatical, and working as hard as ever.  I discovered that circumstances are no longer hindering me from doing housework at a fast pace:  "Housercize".

I finally figured out how to semi-stabilize the cabinet of my spare sewing machine.  The cabinet is large and nice, but its support structure was absurdly inadequate.  The legs insert into the cabinet, and are supposed to be steadied by laminated wood arcs, connected by a wood rail.  The layers had begun to separate after years of being stored in a barn, and wouldn't hold the pegs from the legs.  At one point, the whole thing collapsed.  I shoved the legs under it horizontally so the plywood protecting the sewing machine compartment wouldn't be crushed, and left it that way for months, while thinking vaguely of making a pair of short bookshelves to support the cabinet at the ends.

I eventually noticed, in my excavations in the garage, that an oak chair back I had saved from a broken roadside freebie would be just about the right size to replace the underframe.  It turned out to be exactly the right size, more exactly-right than needed because the legs have lots of wobble in them.  I had no trouble in drilling peg holes into the sides of the chair back.

The worst of it was having to set it all back up.  I enlisted two of the sturdier children to lift the cabinet while I connected everything together.  It is still wobbly, but it will do until I find or make the right little bookshelves.

Another project is a computer chair mat, using leather scraps from the surplus store.  These scraps are very thick leather in several different colors, and I bought two boxes' worth.  I am following the same modular-width/free-length design as I did in my last quilt, for efficient re-use of materials.  Three pattern pieces, for width only:  full-strip-width, half-strip-width, quarter-strip-width.  The problem of how to connect them is yet to be solved.

I also covered another chair seat with utility leather.  The first one I did went from a suede-y dull green to a very polished brown after a few months of use.  It shows some scratches.

Christmas stuffed

Every year I start to get the house into reasonably-decluttered order in the fall...and then the holidays hit.

This year, I had the idea of filling up the Christmas decoration boxes with regular decor and other stuff, once the Christmas decorations were up.

It's only two small boxes, and within a few minutes I had found enough items to fill them both.  This was not just swapping regular displays for Christmas decor, but also making some areas downright austere to compensate for ornamental elaboration elsewhere.  

There were a couple of small items that I just put up on the Christmas tree.  A few days ago, I moved a wall hanging to the undecorated back entry, to make room for my Christmas sign.

Another idea I had was to put a tray on top of our toaster oven.  We don't use it often for toasting, but it always has lots of smaller things on top of it because we have very little counter space.  Now it can be cleared off and used much more easily.

Similarly, I put a tray on top of the painted crate we hold to hold tea and teacups, which will make it much easier to plug in the toaster oven when we want to use it.  

Finally fall...

 ...after almost five months of August:  May was August, June was August, July was August, August was August, most of September was August, and even some of October has been August.

We didn't have the air conditioning on at all this year, so fall weather is a reprieve and a chance to really get moving on projects again.

In particular, dealing with all the things that have piled up all over the house.

I don't even have a craft project going on at the moment, except that I delegated one experiment to some bored children by having them draw on fabric with scraps of soap.  I will iron the fabric, wash it, and see if any grease stains from the soap survive the washing.  I'm looking for a way to give plain fabric a subtle pattern.

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Myquillyn Smith, "The Nester", is putting up transcripts with her podcasts now; an example.

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Locally, I'm watching the school board election and the referendums for funding that they have on the ballot.  The school board candidates are unimpressive.  The information from the school board on the referendums managed to outdo our last school district, by putting a lie on the first page instead of the second:  "This publication is not circulated on behalf of any candidate or ballot question."  That was at the bottom of the page, but it says "IT'S TIME TO RENEW" at the top, in much larger letters, and then they go on to do everything but fill in the "YES" ovals in the sample ballot questions.

They're trying to push through a big increase in their operating levy and have it increase with inflation.  Also, they're trying to trying to renew the technology levy, which is actually larger than the current operating levy.

A school district in one of the Twin Cities inner-ring suburbs recently called off in-person school for a day for the upper grades with only two hours notice, after some sort of threat.  I expect there will be much more of that in the future.

Rather a surprise

 One of the washcloths that I made from an old skirt is now threadbare to the point of developing holes.  What I noticed is that the areas that happened to be embroidered from when it was a skirt are not nearly as threadbare; the fabric density there is about double that of the undecorated portions, not including the embroidery yarn and thread--which were stitched as a yarn embroidery "couched" or stitched down with buttonhole thread.

So the embroidery has done a lot to protect the fabric from abrasion, mostly during washing, and has also helped to contain the fibers so they don't work their way out of the fabric.

Willow planter basket

My husband brought home another load of willow branches, and I used about half of it to make a large, bottomless basket as an enclosure for plant pots.

The whole thing took over six hours:  stripping leaves off branches, braiding all of the sufficiently flexible branches into a very long, one-inch-wide braid, loosely coiling and stacking the braid around a two-foot-diameter stump table into a basket form, and then weaving stiffer branches down between the braids--first a few branches, and then taking the semi-structured basket off the stump and putting in the rest.  A hammer would have helped toward the end as the coiled braids tightened up.

It helped that all the branches and I were out in the rain for some of that process, so they didn't dry out while I was working.  The basket is now drying, will need trimming, and definitely has what decorators call "presence".  I will make some kind of a liner for it, later on.

The thinnest willow branches resemble wicker, but are not nearly as strong.  I peeled bark from some of the thicker branches, experimentally, and the bark is not very strong either.

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.

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.

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.

Cutting up, and weaving

I went through my mending basket, and decided which items were worth repairing.  The remainder I cut up, and filled the kitchen wipes jar, and a bag with more wipes, plus I filled a drawer with larger rags that I can cut up as needed, or just use as back-up towels.

I also unearthed my homemade loom and got the project on it going again.  I'm going to have to build up some muscles in my arms and upper back before I can weave for very long at a time.  There is a lot of reaching involved.

I have a plan to make a couple of little Christmas ornaments from juice can ends.  I try to make some kind of ornament every year, in sufficient quantity so each child has one of their own.

We made room for our Christmas tree, somewhat complicated by the fact that my improvised living room table will not fit through any of the interior doorways.  It is going into the back corner, which is a popular napping place because of the heating vent there.

   

Activities

Dehydrated some cabbages.  Sewed a shower curtain.  Replaced the covers of various chair seats, re-using tacks from earlier armchair.  Put a second bar across a closet to support a laundry basket holding all of the family swimming gear.

Have also been watching the squirrels chew up all of the black walnuts and spit the shells onto the driveway.

The local homeschool association has been putting more effort into the diversity statement on their website than into providing accurate information about homeschooling laws or keeping the membership sign-up page updated.  Doubt that's going to end well.

Mother-in-law has been doing some interesting experiments with natural dyes...avocado pits to produce a rose pink.

Sheets and a wreath

My mother-in-law came up with a good set of secondhand sheets from somewhere, which were very welcome here. 

She also brought a box of very nice natural-fiber fabrics and clothing for my eldest child to repurpose.  Child is currently disinterested in any clothing styles less than 200 years old.

Child also went through dozens and dozens of balls of yarn and took samples for burn testing to determine fiber content.  Acrylic and other synthetics melt and drip and curl up while burning, and some of them burn like a cartoon fuse.  

It certainly made me reconsider allowing my family to wear synthetic fibers around open flames.

Cotton, linen, and wool burn much more slowly.  Wool smells like burnt hair.  Cotton sometimes has a small ember still burning at the end when it is blown out.  Linen tends to leave a tiny gray string of ash still hanging

Other children have been busily and ingeniously constructing role-play items from cardboard.

We were given some sweet corn, and my corn huskers left the husks strewn all over outside.  After a couple of days, I separated the leaves and braided them up into a wreath, letting the ends stick out.  The braid was long enough to make two full turns around the wreath; I tied them together with string, and wove a twig through across the top for support.

I still have a little cornhusk wreath that I made last year.  That is now on the back door.

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.

Deployments

Still working on settling our things into place around the house:  putting things on the walls, inserting the largest rug as an underlying layer to the three rugs in the living room, putting re-purposed hooks up in my closet/computer nook so my long skirts can hang on the back wall, covering a panel with fabric so I can place it in front of a window.

I also got some kale and more onions into the freezer.  And I made some kale chips that turned out well.

An apparent package thief made the mistake of dumping empty boxes in our yard while a child was looking out the window.  I don't know if the police will catch up with them, but the Holy Spirit will.

Yes, we have no black walnuts

The squirrels chewed through them all over the summer, and there are absolutely none left.

The kitchen is overflowing, though, with garden harvest:  tomatoes, peppers, and beans.  It was already super-tight on space before.

I built a sleeping loft for one of the children, and there are others in line for lofts of their own.  I ended up using hand tools a lot more than I had planned to, so I am still in recovery mode.  I was many years younger when I made the original loft, which is still in use.  Which reminds me that we bought extra bolts this time to replace the ones in that loft that have broken.

I've also been working on spiffying up our library room, which is my favorite room in the house.  The new rug ended up in there, and I made progress on cleaning the wood blinds that had years of dust on them.

We made an excursion out of town to see the northern lights, but at this latitude it was mostly a glow along the horizon.  Did have a nice view of the stars, and some constellations that I haven't seen for a long time.

Mostly forward progress

I made myself a ruana-style cloak from a tablecloth.  I like it, although I am not as gracefully proportioned as my children are and I look rather clunky in it.  I may add a bit more length to it with a fringe, and I am looking for something better than a clothespin to fasten it with.

I pulled some other items out of storage and found good places in the house for them, such as an old table top that is now leaning against a wall to protect the internet cable, and a little cabinet that fit nicely into the bathroom.

This summer I braided up a few of the corn husks that the children left lying around.  These braids dried and faded in the kitchen.  I then took them, played around a bit, and eventually braided the braids and tied them with a piece of wire to make a mini-wreath for the front door.

I also made a quick visit to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which has tripled and re-arranged their retail space since the last time I was in there.  I found a flat-woven wool rug for $45, which turned out to still have the tag from the rug cleaners on it.  I've been thinking of getting a rug to unify our three rows of seating around the family computers, and if this rug doesn't work there, there are other places in the house that I can try it in.

The reason I was at the store was to find a new light fixture glass thingy for the ceiling fan in our library, to replace the one that broke just as I was finishing up washing it.

I had another mishap with glass, which involved a glass jar unbalancing the recycling bag and tipping it over.  The jar then rolled out, and down onto the step at the back door.  At that point it took a right turn, and proceeded majestically down the basement stairs, ending with a smash on the rug at the bottom.

Putting the rug (dry) through the dryer on Air Dry to get the little tiny shards out worked well, and got most of the wood shavings out of it as well.  I left the dryer lint from an earlier load in the dryer's lint filter to help capture these bits.

I also found that our reel mower not only needed several missing handle bolts replaced (children are suspected in the loss of two of them), but also needed to be re-aligned and oiled. And of course there was one adjustment screw out of the four that I can barely budge, but most of the adjusting needed to be done on the other side, so I managed.