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.

Not out of the weeds yet, and still pouring

Although there has been much grace from God, including the glorious orange and golden sunset we had this evening.  There were also rainbows...in February.

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Another household improvement from last year that I'm appreciating now is a clean laundry sorting area I established in our basement laundry dungeon.  Formerly I did a week's laundry, stored it upstairs, and then sorted and put it all away at once--sometimes ten loads' worth, and caffeine definitely helped.  

I realized with my children getting older and my time less constrained by littles that they could fetch their own laundry and put it away.  I had just gotten a start on the new system when a neighbor Providentially set a shelf out by the curb, the kind with four big square cubbyholes.  That holds clean, sorted laundry for four children now, and on top are improvised containers for the other family members I do laundry for.

On the floor in front of the shelf I put a wire closet organizer shelf, six or eight inches high, from another neighbor's curb, for baskets or bags of laundry waited to be sorted--or taken upstairs, in the case of towels and such.  

I only just realized or remembered the other day that with all this within reach of the dryer, I could just sort laundry straight out of the dryer. 

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Eldest Child led a final effort to use up the remaining apples from the fall.  They were beginning to taste more like pears than apples, and still had to be checked over every week or so to remove the rotting ones.  They lasted a lot longer than I expected.  Very few perfect apples this time.

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.

Still pouring...

...and too utterly ridiculously to write about yet.

However, we still had a good Christmas.  I was crafting little presents up until almost the last minute.

The washer got fixed enough to be functional.  At one point I had a whole system set up with two sturdy plastic bins and a bucket.  The second bin is for having a place to move wet laundry to while getting water out of the first bin and out of the laundry itself.  The bucket is for bailing out the bins.  

It worked okay as a temporary solution, but for a longer term I'd want sturdier laundry tubs.  I don't need a binful of laundry graywater flowing across the floor.  We do have a legless utility sink we trashpicked once; it would need to have the drain hole plugged securely against the suction of the laundry plunger (Rapid Washer).  Currently it is a holding pen for dirty laundry.

I set up a drying rack in the bathtub, to let things drip-dry enough so they could go into the dryer.

We even went to the laundromat once.  Almost deserted, probably because of the threat of a visit from ICE, which was good, because there were hardly any chairs--to keep homeless people from camping there.  A sign on the wall said No Sleeping.

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.

Storms it is

The snow somehow held off until we had finally gotten the yard stuff taken care of.  Since then there has been a whole series of domestic disruptions.  I've only just now gotten the house more or less in order, aside from the washer being broken.  

I happened to have picked up a short RV water hose from someone's curbside a few weeks ago, and so I  experimented with siphoning water out of the washer.  It sort of works if I get all the air out of the hose and bring the lower end down to a basin on the floor; it needs the difference in height to create enough suction for that size of hose, and it only worked for the top half of the water.  

After that, I experimented with using a short hose from the dehumidifier as a flexible water container:  lower entirely into the water, and then lift by both ends.  This worked, but the amount of water it can carry is very small.

I did wash a load of laundry in the bathtub using my antique Rapid Washer-style metal laundry plunger, and experimented with setting wire shelving over the laundry room sink as a place for draining water out of the laundry.  However, really, a stronger force than gravity is needed.

Future loads are waiting until the landlord deals with the washer in one way or another, or until I finish recovering from this cold.

I am appreciative now of two projects I did a while back, which was to take some free-from-a-neighbor bathroom tiles, and two wooden panels from a deconstructed TV armoire, and make two tiled panels:  one for the kitchen behind the wastebasket, and one for the bathroom between the toilet and the side wall; both protecting the walls against family members with bad aim.  Both panels are just leaning against the wall, not attached.  One I finished with grout in the tile joints, and the other with white caulk and a band of paint along the top edge.  Both are much easier to scrub clean than the wall paint, and being speckled white instead of weary beige, they help to brighten the rooms.

The painted wooden frame in the living room now has large red Christmas bells hanging from it.

The apples are for the most part keeping far better than I expected, given their condition when we picked them.  I haven't done much more than sort through them every week or so to pick out the ones that are going bad, and cook up the ones that are partly salvageable.

I realized a year or two ago that the purpose of food is not to be eaten, but to be available to be eaten.

The calm between the storms

I've been working very hard at various things, such as mending, organizing, deep cleaning, family gatherings, and volunteer work, in addition to beginning to write a book for the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo.

Today there was just enough of a break in the schedule to get caught up on raking leaves, and the weather turned out to be just perfect for it.  We made one giant leaf pile in the backyard, and a teenager buried himself in it very comfortably.

Recently my husband and I discovered the clearance paint shelf at the friendly neighborhood big box store.  I painted the outsides of two medium plastic plant pots and made them into baskets for toys and sewing projects.  One of them has a nice contrast between the new color on the outside and the original color on the inside.  I'm not yet at the point of using normal woven baskets much; too fragile.

I also painted the wooden frame from one side of a box spring, which I've been saving with the idea of making a clothes rack, and leaned it up against an empty wall.  I might hang some things from it later.

The 'cleaning reflex' was triggered

Yesterday I took apart my living room, down to rolling up the Very Nice Rug and taking it outside and letting little children jump around on it.

The fall cleaning was long overdue, but it was initiated, in this case, by a child throwing a pinecone and breaking a storm window.

The pinecones were free, from church, but they turned out to be an expensive lesson for that child.

Anyway, having figured out the magic secret of removing the screen and the other storm window--it seems like it is a different secret for every rental we've lived in--I was able to clean the whole window, and then went on to wash the outsides of the other first-floor windows.

Returning inside, with the kids' desktop computers already disconnected to get at the window, I decided to keep going, slowly.

The children wanted the computer table moved to a different wall, and I wanted to move the toy shelf somewhere less prominent, replacing it with bookshelves that were already in the room.

I took out one end table, which used to function as a perch for little children and now only accumulates clutter.

The toy shelf went in front of a window.  I put our very rustic red dollhouse on it, knowing that our cat likes to curl up in one of the upstairs rooms.  Now she can watch both the family and the outside world from up there.  The rest of the dollhouse is again being used for drawing and coloring supplies.  

The second fridge discovers its destiny

The second, "stupid little apartment" fridge was due for a cleaning and defrosting, and then a child left its freezer door ajar for long enough that there was too much frost for it to close.

So, an unscheduled defrosting.  The good part is that wiping the ice and water off the interior more or less took care of the cleaning part, although I did also clean behind and under it.

There's been a bit of a dead mouse smell around, which I thought might be from back there, but it wasn't.  The smell was worse outside, and we looked all over along one whole side of the house several times without finding anything.

It seems to have been in one of the gutter downspout extensions; it went away after we finally got some rain.

Anyway, after getting the fridge dried and plugged back in again, I had an idea.  Instead of being The Overflow Fridge, or The Weird Ingredients of My Husband's Fridge, it could be The Leftover Fridge.

It is smaller and shallower, so there's not room for things to be lost in the back.  Also, if it gets full, I can easily see what can be thrown out to make room.

So far, this is working very well.

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For the toy bin, I found a fabric basket/bag I had made some years ago.  It sits in the bin and holds most of the toys.

First things first

"This seems to be axiomatic--going ahead with the work makes the tools show up.  They also seem to come in threes....Determination is a magnet."  -- Roy Underhill, The Woodwright's Shop:  A Practical Guide to Traditional Woodcraft

I have been lacking determination to finish any projects, except for building a toy bin to go under a play kitchen.  The bin helps get the toys off the floor, but since it is mostly open on the front, they still look like clutter.  I might put a little curtain on it.  I'm planning to put a finish on the bin to visually unite it with the play kitchen.  They are joined with leather straps on the back, and I should anchor the whole thing to the wall when I'm done.

After that, aside from being sick and reading through a stack of free Christian historical novels from the library, I began working through deep-cleaning various household biohazards.  In particular, my eldest child and I cleaned the refrigerator.  It is an early-90's model that is extremely simple and reliable compared to the dysfunctional 2010's fridge at our previous rented house.  

I discovered, through the advanced-level technique of reading the owner's manual that the previous owners thoughtfully left for our landlord, that the drain tray underneath is supposed to be cleaned monthly, instead of never.  There was a whole ecosystem in there.

I also cleared out some rotten onion "mush bombs" in the basement, and cleaned out the utility sink and both of the bathroom sink drains.  I have a length of wire with a little loop at one end like a fishing pole, and a handle at the other which keeps it from falling down the drain, for fishing out clogs.

Next on the deep cleaning list is the second fridge, which is a stupid little apartment fridge that frosts up badly; simple, but not in a good way.

Upgrades

I was able to repair a sink strainer that wouldn't stay in the open position by taking a piece of plastic tube from a marker, the fatter kind of children's marker, and cutting a slit down the side so I could snap it onto the stem of the sink strainer to hold it up.  It would have been easier if I had cut it to the right length before making the slit.

I also experimented with making a simple dust jacket for a book out of quilting fabric.  It looks nice on the shelf with the normal books, although the fabric sticks out a bit at the top and bottom of the spine.  I expect that it will collect dust and need to be washed and ironed at some point.  I perhaps should have pre-shrunk the fabric.

Yesterday I used a handed-down upholstery remnant to replace the seat on a freebie metal patio chair.  The chair uses splines in channels at the sides to hold the fabric in place.  The original plastic mesh didn't have hems or channels sewn at the sides, but I put them in the replacement, for strength.  It took a considerable amount of work to put the new fabric on, with the splines in and with tension across the width.  I am sore today, but not nearly as sore as I should be, thanks to milk.   I had sore muscles before I started.  I'm somewhat doubtful about the strength of the fabric, but it supported an adult's weight, cautiously applied.

During my break I painted new letters on my keyboard.  It's not that old, but almost half of the alphabet had disappeared.  I used a contrasting color of nail polish to paint the missing letters on--in Morse code.  I didn't get all of them on very clearly, but it has helped me learn some more.

Merry Christmas!

The table leaf worked out very well, although we had to turn the living room into a dining room with two tables to seat everyone.  A little too much work to set all that up again for Christmas, when it is just our own family.

Christmas is also going merrily.  The family sculptor improved on a gingerbread house's chimney by adding two Santa legs sticking out of it.

The oldest child has improved rapidly, and is scheduled for surgery in a few weeks to prevent a recurrence.

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.

Accordion and cardboard

Before Christmas, we were doing some post-dentist shopping at a new-to-us thrift store.  They had two vintage accordions in the store.  I was able to go back to the store in January with Christmas money and some savings.  The brown accordion I was thinking of buying was no longer there, but the other one was.  So now I have a pearly-blue accordion, in good-enough condition.  It is both easy and challenging to play.  Previous musical experience with piano and school band is helping, along with a couple of beginner videos.

My husband around that time brought home very large cardboard boxes from work; enough for each of the children to have one of their own.  It was hard to traverse the living room for a while.  Some of the cardboard became cardboard armor and airplanes and rockets.  The armorer has developed some rather advanced techniques for making helmets and workable elbow joints.

We also made an excursion to the Axman Surplus store.  Some of the kids wanted motors, one wanted plastic clips, and I was pleased to find that they still had some airline china, as I wanted a couple of mini-plates.

I was reluctantly beginning to sew new cushion covers for our glider rocker when several of its joints came unglued and I found that a bushing? was missing.  I found the bushing later, and for now we are enjoying having some extra space in the living room.

Put-together

I spent some time this morning butchering a worn-out sheet.  Some of the better parts I am saving for sewing projects, and the rest became kitchen wipes.

Last week I pulled out my old wardrobe planning booklets that I had made, which were very helpful in figuring out what I need to do next wardrobe-wise.

Among the books we've acquired over the last few months was a very interesting one:  The Doll's Dressmaker, by Venus Dodge, which has lots of ideas and patterns for dolls' clothing.  Most of them can be scaled up for human clothing.

The children are of course thinking ahead to Halloween and what their costumes will be.  One of the older ones has put together a very impressive cardboard Stars Wars stormtrooper helmet, and is now looking for a source of EVA foam floor tiles for some other part of the costume.

Lawn chair, lawn chair, chairs, armchair

I finished the first lawn chair, with a pause of a day to grow some more muscle for pushing the awl and for driving screws through fabric that constantly wanted to twist.

There was some fiddly work that went into each connection.  I'd looked through our hardware hoard, and I have a few T-shaped pins from a retired lawn chair, with the "T" being as wide as a strip of webbing, which is wrapped around it, and then the short stem of the "T" is inserted through the webbing and into the chair frame, and holds the webbing in place while spreading out the strain and neatening the ends.

For a similar effect, I used a strip of milk jug plastic for the wide part of the "T", and a screw, with a washer, through it for the stem.  I think the plastic will not hold up that well in the longer term, but it's good enough for now, and I could be wrong since the fabric will protect it from the sun a lot and my lawn chairs are in the shade for most of the day.

With the second chair, the connectors were short bolts that ran through grommets in the ends of the webbing--which were carefully folded into points.  My fabric wouldn't fold down that far, so I did basically the same thing as the first chair, but I saved the grommets and re-used them as washers.

Most of the assembly happened outdoors, and the work for the second chair was spread over three days; it had more bands than the first chair.

The finished lawn chairs have been holding up so far.  They look nice, except for the one chair's arms still being deteriorating plastic.  Which I will probably replace with wood at some point.

I have three other chair projects, and a table project, lined up indoors.  One of them is a tapestry armchair a child bought at a yard sale, which needs major repairs on the springs.

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.

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.

Willow branches

My husband came home with a small load of fresh willow branches.  The thinnest branches are flexible enough to tie in a simple knot.  I'm not good at basketweaving yet, but I know enough to get started, and I've been experimenting as I go.  I started making a bike basket, and got it two-thirds done.  It is really three basket weavings, front, back, and sides/bottom, which I am joining together. 

Twining--weaving with two strands which are twisted between each spoke--is working well.  Braiding three twigs produces a fairly strong strand.

Some branches may end up in a homemade broom.  I think I may try bending and drying a couple of handbag handles.

Towel hangers

A household problem I've been chewing on for a while is where to hang all the bath towels.  I didn't want to attach anything to the wall, and we don't really have bathroom wall space anyway.  There is one corner where something like a coat tree could fit--if the towels were the length of hand towels.

I have thought of cutting all the bath towels across the middle and hemming them; that would be a little hard to sew and still wouldn't really address the problem of quantity hanging space.

What I finally came up with was to pull some spare plastic shower curtain rings out of storage, and put them on the shower rod between the rings holding the shower curtains up, without snapping them closed.

Most of our towels still have homemade loops on them from when I was hanging them in the previous house.  So now I can hang them outside the shower curtains.

The landlord's shower curtain rods are moderately cheap ones, so I limited the number of added rings to a usable minimum.

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We went to a yard sale today, where they were charging $5 per grocery bag.  I found some books and fabric, a sewing pattern, and a single shoe last, four sizes too small for me, but it is interesting to see how it was made to come apart so it could be taken out of the finished shoe.

The children also found several things, including useful household items for their future homes.