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.  

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.

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.

Not too late to buy seeds

My order at Seed Treasures took only a week to get here, USPS both ways.  They have a lot of tomato and bean varieties, many heirloom varieties of seeds, and also many varieties that can handle the shorter northern growing season. 

Setting up

It was time to enlarge the top of the improvised living room table to make it usable for board games.  I spent some time thinking about building out the cable spool end further, got stuck on how to support the new part from underneath considering the structure of the base, and then remembered that we had some boards that were the right length, and I could just build a whole new table top.  Putting the boards together went quickly; I only had to saw the cross pieces.  The surface is partially varnished from before, and I will probably throw a tablecloth over it when company comes over.

A while back I finished hemming a set of cloth diapers I had cut from a flannel sheet.  The sheet is from a set I bought at a garage sale for $3, and I think I got something like 13 or 14 diapers out of it altogether, including using the pillowcase for a cloth diaper as-is.

I also sewed a pillowcase to actually be used as a pillowcase, from fabric in my stash, and used up most of the thread that kept tangling up in my sewing machine.  It got better-behaved toward the end of the spool.

We had several chairs that needed gluing.  Happily, we have bar clamps now.  When I was done, I had leftover glue, and a pile of sticky bits of fabric I had been wiping up glue with, a wooden skewer that I had been spreading the glue with, and a sheet of paper I had been using to catch drips.  I kneaded the fabric in the glue, arranged it slightly on the paper, stuck the skewer into the center, let it dry, and now I have a fake flower that I can stick out in the window box in the spring.  I'm not sure how the glue will do outdoors, but it should be okay for a while.   

There was a story from one of the local news stations recently about a group that was teaching people how to turn milk jugs into mini-greenhouses:  cut horizontally most of the way around the center, punch a few drainage holes in the bottom, put in soil, plant seeds in it, then close it back up.  My husband has done this before.

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.

Fruitfulness

We have ripe mulberries and blackberries, and yesterday I got out into the farther reaches of the blackberry jungle, and picked enough berries to make two pints of jam.

I almost didn't make the jam, but it seemed like a good thing for the children to see where jam comes from.  It turned out very well, and we used some of it to make blackberry lemonade.

Leverage

How Denmark used what they had to build up their agriculture:

The soil was embarrassingly poor for a country with agricultural pretensions--thin and sandy in most places, boggy or overgrown with heath. But by using imagination, they turned a handicap into an asset. While other countries of Europe were clamping down tariffs on imports of cheap American grain, the Danes let it flood in. Their idea was to feed it to livestock and then export meat, poultry and dairy products to Great Britain and other nearby markets. This helped free them of the burden of growing grain themselves, and they devoted the land they otherwise would have needed for grain to raising high-output crops. As their agricultural productivity soared and the numbers of their animals increased, they found in stable manure an unexpected bonus--the means by which to increase the fertility of their soil.    -- Dale Brown, The Cooking of Scandinavia

So, well, and Sowell

Minnesota's mask mandate began Saturday, by governor's fiat, but is being challenged by Republicans with a lawsuit. Also, it appears to directly contradict Minnesota law which bans masks and other disguises--unless the "medical treatment" exemption in the law is read as including infection prevention.

Cases and deaths are embarrassingly far below model predictions; deaths have not yet reached the level predicted for the end of May.

One of the Republican legislators remarked that the mandate should be at least be paired with further opening up the state.

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We've been getting cucumbers. tomatoes, peppers, and a few peas out of the garden.

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A few Thomas Sowell quotes, from Race and Culture:
 

Throughout history, one of the great sources of cultural achievement, both for groups and for nations and even civilizations, has been a borrowing of cultural features from others who happened to be more advanced in given fields at a given time....Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying others akin to treason.

If all differences between the earnings, occupations, and employment rates of different groups are simply defined as "discrimination," then it is circular reasoning to say that discrimination causes these differences, and compounded meaninglessness to quantify these "effects" of discrimination.

Government may use its power to forbid, coerce, confiscate, punish, or expel.  Goals achievable by these means are well within the effective control of government.  Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve within a politically relevant time period.

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.

Ready to sew

I had a little time, and pulled out some fabric from a sheet and a homemade pattern, and cut out pieces for a blouse.

The pattern is drawn from a thrift store blouse that I had, which was probably home-sewn, since it had no tag. It fit me well, and I eventually wore it out. This will be the fifth blouse that I have made from the pattern.  I’ve gotten better at sewing buttonholes, but still am working on getting the collars to turn out well.

While I was looking for the pattern, I found some interfacing that I had forgotten about; that will probably help.

The other things I’ve been doing lately are mending, and slowly catching up on yard work.

So far Minnesota is not seeing an explosion of coronavirus cases, from the protests or from any other form of opening back up. There have been smaller protests every weekend so far.

Finished the bowl, and a few other things

I decided to use puff paint to cover the gap between the lining strip and the upper inside of the bowl. The gap proved to be a little too big to bridge with paint alone, though, so I found a piece of twine, stuffed it in, and then painted over that. Now the bowl is finished, and in use. With the paint colors that I used, it looks very Eighties.

I also made a new seat for a kid's chair. It's an old school chair, with a metal frame and a plastic seat and back, where the seat had broken. I mangled the rest of the seat off, and then the chair sat for a couple years waiting for the right piece of scrap plywood to come along. I cut the plywood to shape using our scroll saw, found bolts in our hardware hoard, and drilled holes in the plywood for them.

Then I noticed that the bolts were slightly too large for the holes in the metal frame, so I had to drill them out a bit larger. The pointy end of a file will work as a deburring tool (for taking off the little rough bits of metal around the edges) in a pinch.

Out in a flower bed and some planters, I am trying to grow flax this year, from grocery store flax seeds. The idea is from a short article in Farm Show magazine about a Canadian lady who got into growing flax that way.

The magazine looks very interesting, full of very creative homegrown inventions for farm and garden, although I think the single issue of it that I saw was a special edition that gathered these from a number of previous issues. I may try a subscription at some point.

I was growing to try to sprout some of the seeds first, to see if they were growable, but didn't get to that before the time I wanted to plant them, so I just planted away, and will see what comes up.

House arrest continues

The governor extended the stay-at-home order until May 18, while allowing retail businesses to open up curbside service and delivery. Earlier this week, many non-retail businesses were allowed back to work.

The problem with opening businesses, is that their customers may or may not come back. And many businesses have other businesses as their customers.

The governor believes that Minnesota’s coronavirus peak has been delayed until late May or early June. I believe that it is likely to come a bit later than that, just because of the time needed for it to spread that widely. Even when things are opened up, people will still be doing a lot of social distancing.

The best analogy here is to the way that a fire spreads, by fits and starts, flaring up under some conditions, while barely smoldering under others. I have been wondering about computer models of fire spread.  They are probably not very accurate either, because of the element of chance that must frequently come into play.

At present, they are doing more tests and finding more positives, but the ICU population is remaining just about flat, reflecting the fact that the worst cases are coming out of the nursing homes, and aren’t hanging on to life very long after hospitalization.

In any case, I finished up a household inventory this week, and we clearly have plenty of things that we can be doing at home. I sewed a baby sling from fabric that I was intending to use for quilt backing. I divided one hosta plant that really needed it, and moved another that was awkwardly situated in relation to the other plants.

I also used the legs of the coffee table as a frame for winding rug warp, for the little rug that is half woven. This time, I have real cotton rug warp yarn from the thrift store; I had a lot of trouble before with the crochet cotton breaking during weaving.

There are a number of little mending, maintenance, and repair jobs on my list. I have been making progress on those.

Finally, I have been looking for something in the house to paint, and noticed that the box holding the children’s paper supply could use some embellishment. My plan is to lay on a design with puff paint, and then to paint over it all.

A pot scrubber and a new knitting project

My homemade pot scrubber was wearing out, and it was time to make a new one. I have some plastic mesh produce bags tucked away in my craft drawer, but I also had a few narrow lengths of tulle, salvaged from gift wrapping. I chose to use the tulle this time.

I didn't follow my pattern from before, but instead did a chain ring, followed by a round of half double stitches, followed by a round of slip stitches, increasing as necessary to keep it flat. The result is denser than what I usually do. I probably would have been better off doing a single round of double stitches; I don't think there was enough tulle to do triples.

For the knitting project, I've started knitting a hat to give as a Christmas present. I bought the yarn a while back, and did a gauge swatch, and figured out how many stitches around it would need to be. I also decided to make it double-layered, as I did for my own hat.  Today I actually cast on and knitted the first inch or so. With my recently improved knitting speed, I should easily be able to finish it before Christmas.

I've also been selectively cutting down the dead plants in the flower beds. Some I am leaving there until spring, because I like to look at them. Since I learned this year that you can get usable fiber from nettle plants, I've been looking forward to harvesting the patch of nettles that is well-established in one of our flower beds, but by the time I got to them, there were only a few of them still standing, and the rest were down and mixed in with some other tall plants.

Beans

There's a toddler helping shell beans in my kitchen tonight. My husband planted a few pole beans this year, and despite not being able to care for them much, they've produced well.

Last year, with an older child or two helping, we shelled about five pounds of bush beans in two hours or so.

Garden update

This has been a rough year for the vegetable garden, as my husband was unable to work in his plot for much of the summer. Some fellow gardeners pitched in and helped with watering and weeding, though, and we are getting some things out of it now: cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, basil, peppers, and beans.  He had enough cucumbers and tomatoes to give some away, and in turn others have given us kale, summer squash, zucchini, and eggplant.

Harvest time

 I started thinking about some fall wardrobe things, but I quickly came to realize that my time is better spent right now working on preserving our garden produce.

My husband is the family gardener, and despite very limited gardening time this year, he has gotten good yields of beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and onions.  Earlier in the summer, we had broccoli and cabbage, also.

With the first frost of the year coming, he got in as much as he could, and I've been working on it cleaning and storing it.

We have a chest freezer now, so I have been freezing some things.  We also have a canner, but I don't yet feel free enough from urgent interruptions to devote my attention to a canning session.

We were given permission to pick apples in someone's yard, and got close to three bushels from that. I don't know the apple variety, but they do not keep well at all, so I made applesauce and juice from them all, the next day. I figured out a workflow where I peeled apples with the crank apple peeler/corer/slicer, put the peeled slices in the applesauce pot, and ran the end slices (which the peeler misses) through our juicer.

Someone also gave us a pumpkin, and several acorn squash.

The children have helped here and there, without arm-twisting.  They've picked and shelled beans, picked peppers, and helped core apples.

Recently...

...we had a big spell of Life Happens at our house.

Still, I got a few notable things done:

Sewed a laundry bag from an old sheet; double layers of fabric for strength, and French seams just because I could.

Shelled our garden's bean crop. I did two sittings of shelling, and then my oldest children came in and powered through the rest.

Sewed together the pages for my next handmade notebook; very awkward process without a sewing frame. I'm working on the cover now, using the boards from an old and unreadable book.

Planters for cheap

Our deck has several built-in planters. Each one of these has a shallow rectangular plastic box that holds a few inches of potting soil. These boxes are so old that they are simply disintegrating. Our budget for replacements was Not Much.

My solution is to replace them with plastic five-gallon buckets, cut to the right height. Our meat market sells empty, clean condensed milk buckets for a nominal cost (fifty cents each, last time I heard). Each planter has space for two buckets.

The plastic boxes were resting on some 2x4 supports to elevate them to the right height; underneath the 2x4s were a solid shelf, so I took those out, and then measured how tall the buckets needed to be. The height came to eleven inches, which is, conveniently, not on the thickened part of the bucket that the handle hooks into.

To cut each bucket, I started with a regular wood handsaw to start a slot through, and then continued cutting with a narrower saw with fairly large teeth, which I think is actually for drywall. After cutting, I used a sharp knife to trim and scrape and clean up the rough edges.

Then I drilled a few drainage holes in the bottom of each bucket, and threw in some flattened plastic bottles to loosely cover the holes and provide some internal drainage space, before filling the buckets with potting soil from the old planter box liners.

So far I've made four of these; two planters' worth.

The cut-off buckets still look like cut-off buckets, and not anything fancy, but they are only visible from above, and I'm planning on planting something with a bit of bushiness to it in them.

Midsummer update

I had a slow winter, with one cold after another hitting our family, and then I had morning sickness and early pregnancy fatigue on top of it. With the coming of spring, I've been healthier and have had a lot more energy, so I have spent the past several months doing tons of little projects around the house, many of which I will write about in the fall after my sabbatical year ends.

My indoor seed starting this year was a total failure. I didn't find the right amount of moisture for the seeds I was trying to start, and then a marauding toddler came through and made hash of it all. But my heirloom petunia and calendula plants (that I grew from Seed Savers seeds last year) reseeded themselves, and are doing well. Both of them produced lots of flowers last year, and kept on flowering after the first snow or two. The petunias also have a nice odor.

I planted some of my sorghum seeds from last year's plants, in front of the bedroom windows, in case they grow to be nine feet tall again.  But I sowed them densely and haven't thinned them much, in an experiment to see how much that will limit their growth.

One very quick project was to rearrange some of the items in our basement storage space (which is partially visible from the family room) so that the prettiest items are in the most prominent places, and the ugliest items more out of sight, instead of the other way around.