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.

Laundry soap again, and a dustpan

I made another batch of laundry soap.  This is the second batch since my last post about it, and one batch makes two gallons, so we use about one gallon every two and a half months.  I use normal laundry detergent for cloth diapers and my husband's work clothes. 

Elder Child and I were out looking for a broom and dustpan.  We both prefer metal dustpans, and ended up going in together on a cookie sheet, which I cut in half with tin snips, and smoothed with files and sandpaper.  I was planning to make wooden handles, but the ends of the cookie sheet are handle-like enough.

Cutting the metal with vintage giant-scissors-type tin snips was difficult, and required bending the metal a little to give the snips room to move along, so I had to straighten the cut edges afterward.  I believe modern tin snips make better use of leverage and are easier to use.

I also found out that a needle with the tip broken off can be re-sharpened.  I used the narrow side of a small sharpening stone of medium coarseness.  The needle was leaving little grooves in it, so this is not something I would want to do on the broad face.  

Preparations

I got my Christmas shopping more or less done, and most of it in one round of going into one store after another right before closing time.  I was blessed to be able to find some good things in the limited time that I had.

Last weekend we had 8+ inches of snow, most of which melted as the thunderstorms came through.  No storm damage here, although there was an unusual and oppressive feeling in the air as the storm approached.

I've done a few little experimental projects, aside from gift-making.  One was to flatten a peach can and play around with shaping the metal.  It was easy to cut with tin snips of the giant-scissors style.

Another was to do a quick little crochet snowflake using string, in the same style as this hanging, where the crochet is colored and stiffened afterward with paint.

I am planning to run some more scraps of fabric through the laminator, and perhaps to do some more woodcarving for gifts.

An embroidery I am working on is proceeding, although I've not put much time into it:  a little scene of a shack in the woods.  It will probably turn out well just because I am too busy to overwork it.

One child has ambitiously planned and made the gingerbread for a gingerbread village.  Another is preparing for a cooperative Christmas craft booth effort with friends next year.

Tis the season now

I haven't been feeling the Christmas spirit much, but I finally just turned on some Christmas music and pulled out our two boxes of Christmas decorations, to see what I could put up around the house.  I also pulled out my Joy sign, which can be seen in this post.

I have several ideas for Christmas crafts, but am only just getting started on them.  

The one I did complete wasn't one that I planned.  My husband found a bagged-up broken necklace in his office.  I took the beads, and I strung them on memory wire to make a bracelet that I will give as a Christmas gift.

The memory wire is from a package that I bought at Hobby Lobby quite a while back.  It has a lot of flexibility, but when it is released, it returns to a more or less flat coil.  It's not suitable for younger children, because it will only take so much abuse before breaking.  Also, some beads are too heavy for it to really support well, and some beads have rather sharp edges around their holes that will likely weaken the wire.

I had a tiny helper for this project, and it appears that we have another child with exceptional fine-motor skills.

Book recommendation: The Complete Guide to Sharpening...

...by Leonard Lee. The copy I've been reading has gone back to the library, but it has been put on our to-buy list.

It takes on the topic of sharpening from first principles, with numerous electron microscope photographs of edges, and pages of discussion about what is happening on a microscopic level when a woodworking tool is used on wood, or when a tool is sharpened and honed.

Next comes information on tools and techniques for sharpening, including commercial and homemade jigs (guides/supports). Lee is mindful of the low-budget reader, and gives lower-cost options and recommendations on what to buy first.

In the following chapters, he gives specific and extensive instructions on sharpening every bladed woodworking tool I'd ever heard of, and some that I hadn't. Saws and bits are included.  Common household tools like hammers, kitchen knives, pocket knives, scissors, and tweezers are also covered.

Not included:  reel mowers--which are really a special case under the Scissors category, and usually need only re-alignment, rather than sharpening--and scythes.

Lee is or was a tool manufacturer, and gives a lot of hints about to recognize, care for, and skillfully use well-made tools, including how to fine-tune their sharpening for the intended purpose.

I'd consider this book for homeschooling curriculum, mainly for high school students who are strong and careful readers. The prose and pacing aren't dumbed down or drawn out. But even the photographs and diagrams are highly educational in themselves.

I found it interesting that much of the book was basically an introduction to metalworking for woodworkers.

Musical chairs

Recent months have been hard on our mixed collection of dining room chairs.  My favorites are the vintage chairs with welded metal frames, which are mostly monkey-proof. One needs its vinyl seat repaired, after getting new vinyl in 2016, and the others soon will need repair, too.  Of the wooden chairs, one has a cracked back, another has a cracked back and a broken back post/stile, and yet another had also had a broken back for a long time, but it was such a chintzy chair to begin with that I just wound rope around it and kept using it. Now its joints are beginning to loosen up.

So I've begun to "shop the house" for replacement chairs. One of the wooden chairs traded places with a chair in my bedroom. There are two so-so chairs in the basement that I might bring upstairs. There is also the enire back from a free-at-the-side-of-the-road oak chair, which perhaps could replace the back on the super-chintzy chair.

For buying chairs, my first place to look at around here would be the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which sometimes prices things very low.

Covering a hole in the wall

We had a new water shut-off valve to an outside faucet put in. This required cutting a hole into the top of the wall in our basement family room.

Afterward, I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what to do with the hole. Part of the trouble is that the valve handle projects out about an inch from the wall surface. And we need to be able to get to it, occasionally, and turn it.

I started making a sort of panel to cover it, but gave up after a while because of the access issue.

Eventually, I got the idea of just making a little curtain to cover the hole. I found a piece of fabric, and figured out what size to cut it--usually a curtain should be at least 1.5 times wider than the opening you want it to cover, for fullness. I hemmed it on three sides, and made a tunnel for a rod on the other.

In our hardware stash I found a short tension curtain rod that was a good length for this project.

The next thing was figuring out how to hang it all up. I saw that since the hole was at the top of the wall, and the curtain and rod were very light, one possibility would be to hook onto the ceiling drywall.

A slight disadvantage is that the curtain would not hang any wider than the hole at the top, because of the hooks. Below, it could fan out a little.

For hooks, I first thought of using wire in the shape of upside-down Ls. But it seemed to me like the downward pull of the curtain rod would tend to make the hook tip, rest only on the corner of the drywall, and then possibly slide right off.  (I later confirmed this with a small paper-clip model.)

My second idea was to bend the wire in the shape of a 6, with the top curved over enough so that the weight would rest on the drywall on a single point, which would be safely away from the edge. The curtain rod ends would go through the loops of the sixes.

For wire, I found two handles from Chinese take-out boxes that I had saved at some point. I bent them to match, and tried them out. They worked well, and the curtain is definitely an improvement over the bare hole. The folds of the curtain even disguise the projection of the shut-off handle.

Catching up

I've been doing a lot of things around the house. Here are a few of them:

Screen door bracket:  The little piece of metal that connects the screen door to the mechanism that closes it broke.  It is just a small, shaped piece of thin metal with holes drilled in it, and two sides bent in. I was fairly certain that I could make a replacement. I hunted in our hardware hoard, and found a similarly-sized bracket, salvaged from a piece of particle board furniture. It just needed a few holes drilled into it.

Many people don't know that you can drill holes in metal with a non-electric drill. The drill bit does need to be of a material and temper that can cut into the metal, and it is important to get the bit well-tightened into the drill's chuck, to keep it from getting stuck in the metal. It helps to use a little oil to reduce friction, and to put a piece of wood behind it to drill into. I did still have a little trouble with the metal dimpling out on the back side as the drill was about to break through.

We're still going to have to buy a replacement bracket, because the one I made is far too strong; the door's most likely mode of failure is now that the holes for the screws holding the bracket will strip out. The manufacturer (famous window company that starts with "A") has thoughtfully provided for this by putting extra screw holes into the door and bracket, but that only will save us once.

Sewing machine cover:  My sewing machine has a clunky metal case, and I do not enjoy moving the machine in and out of it. Also, I often leave my sewing machine out for long periods. I used a laminated plastic bag from our last bulk buy of rice, and sewed a quick dust cover for my sewing machine. The machine was able to sew the plastic just fine, though I used more care than usual, just in case.

Transplanting grass:  For some reason, the grass here loves to grow in the flower beds, but hates to grow in the lawn. Plus I had a bit of bare ground from shifting the landscaping timbers around a little. I moved some large chunks that were very nearly rollable sod, as well as one smaller clump, to that bare spot. After planting, I gave them a good dose of water. So far, they are surviving.

Free greens:  My husband brought home some lamb's quarter weeds from his garden plot, and I fried up the leaves. They are edible only in moderation, because they contain some oxalic acid. We also have wood sorrel and purslane growing in the yard (unsprayed), along with dandelions, of course.

This is the chart that I have been looking for

Comparison of the temperatures of different burning gasses. Note that these are significantly lower than they are given elsewhere on the internet; don't ask me why. I'll put the elsewhere temperatures in parentheses.

Most notable ones are:

MAPP gas:  2900 deg F  (3670, 3730)
Propane:  1950 deg F  (3600)
Natural gas (methane):  2750 deg F  (3500)
Butane:  1760 deg F

From elsewhere, I'll add:

Methanol (available as that HEET stuff for cars):  3398 deg F
Ethanol:  3488 deg F

The linked page also has melting points of various metals:

Aluminum:  1220 deg F
Copper:  1981 deg F
Iron/Steel:  2802 deg F
Tin:  450 deg F

Once upon a time, I took a glass-bead-making class, and used a MAPP gas torch.

In the slightly less distant past, I heated pennies to red hot over a little methanol-burning camp stove, and was able to shape and work them. I used my very long stainless-steel tweezers from the beadmaking class to hold each penny in the flame.

In addition, here are glue gun temperatures:

Hot melt glue gun:  375-450 degrees F
Low melt glue gun:  250 degrees F

I was wondering if the low melt glue gun would melt paraffin, but apparently it is far too hot for the job.

A surprise

Tucked in with the handed-down stash of quilting fabric that I received recently were some odds and ends of sewing needles and notions, including a number of safety pins.

My grandmother gave me a little box of safety pins before I went off to college, and I still have most of them. They came in very handy at times.

But I was surprised, when I started using these new safety pins, how much flimsier they were than the older ones. I estimate that they are about half as strong as the older ones, in terms of the pull that they will withstand before bending and springing open.  Maybe even less than that.

Isn't it wonderful how modern technology has brought us so many ways to make things not only much cheaper, but much less useful as well.  /sarcasm

Wire hair pick/pick comb

A recent self-challenge project:

The handle is made of coat hanger wire, the rest is a slightly thinner wire. I made a simple jig--two screws screwed most of the way into a block of wood--for making evenly-spaced bends. After bending, I used pliers to tighten the curves a bit. I also used a metalworking file to round the ends of the wires. I used sandpaper to grind off some rust; I should have done that step first. It works well enough, although there are some slight modifications I would make on a second try.

Research questions and experiments

Things I've been working out lately:


1.  Will a regular hole punch (for paper) punch holes in aluminum from the side of a beverage can?

Yes, easily. They don't make packaging like they used to.


2.  Can hydrogenated lard be used to make soap?

The internet says yes. I did actually try this five years ago, but must have used a little too much lard as the soap came out with a lardy smell, and yellowed a lot over time. We have been using it as hand soap all this time, and are now down to the last few bars.


3.  Can I put a few stitches through my wool-blanket-inside-a-duvet-cover-throw, to keep the blanket from bunching up in the end of the cover?

No, the duvet cover material is not strong enough to hold the blanket if only a few stitches are used. Especially if the children use the throw for playing tug of war. You'd have to use a lot of stitches, and by then it would be a quilt.


4.  Should I put all my sweaters on one shelf, and all my shirts (jersey) on another, instead of having one shelf for casual and one for more dressed-up?

Yes, get the sweaters out of the way.


5.  Why isn't the upper thread on my sewing machine catching the lower thread??

The needle is in backwards.


6.  Will putting extra snaps on the seat covers I made for the dining room chairs help keep them from being pulled off all the time?

Yes, somewhat. The engineering problem here is that if the connection is stronger than the fabric, the fabric will rip under force. (Reinforcing the fabric at the stress points would be awkward.) If the connection is too weak, the covers will be coming off all the time. This is an extremely important point in design, worthy of a block quote in bold:

You have to design not just how it is going to work, but how it is going to break.

Make it break somewhere that is easy to fix.

Wool coat to cape conversion experiment

For a long time, I have wanted a long wool cape; an older woman at church had one, and she always looked so dignified in it.

For fabric, I found a large and long wool coat at a rummage sale. I put it in my closet and kept my eye out for another coat in a compatible color, so I would have enough fabric.

But I didn't find one. After about two years, my mother-in-law gave us her old cheerleading cape to use for dress-up play. I looked at how it was put together, and thought that maybe there was enough fabric in the coat I had to make a similar cape. Maybe the reason I wasn't finding what I was looking for was because I didn't really need it.

Well, the coat did have enough fabric, just barely, for a "using every part of the pig but the squeal" sort of reconstruction. I took it almost completely apart, using a seam ripper, and laid out the pieces, and sewed here and pieced there, with many pauses to think about what step to take next. The center front and center back are nearly the same as in the original coat, but the rest took a lot of creative reworking. Capes are usually simple, structurally--only the shoulders need close fitting, and the rest of it drapes from there--but I had to work with the fabric that I had.

After several months, it is now all done but for some pressing:

The curves at the top edges of the hand holes were formerly the side front sleeve seams; I turned those pieces literally upside down.

The fabric left over:

Detail of the hook and loop, which are made of a scrap of thick copper wire, a penny that I experimented with annealing and hammering some time ago, and a piece of beaten wire that we picked up someplace for free:

While the barbarians clamor at the gates...

...for me to provide them their bread (lunch) and circuses (Lego Star Wars video game), I will give a quick update:

The choice between fixing up the old computer and buying a new used computer was made for me, when the old computer died...in the processor, according to my husband's interpretation of the error lights. He went to the local FreeGeek for me, knowing my requirements, and picked up a computer...for only $10, plus a couple more for extra memory, because they were still selling rebuilt computers at half price to get them out the door. The new computer is a little slow sometimes, but it does what I want. It is also very clean inside; the old computer had a decade of dust and cat dander in it. I may do something to the outside of it; black isn't really my color.

In other projects, I pulled out an unfinished crochet project, and started making it into something else. Originally, I was crocheting irises out of acrylic yarn, and I had gotten to the point of having two flowers and some leaves. I like the technique of taking different colors of yarn and "painting" with them, but it takes a lot of mental energy. Also, I needed a new dishcloth. So I took the crocheted pieces for one of the flowers, and unraveled the others for yarn to knit around the pieces and join them together. This involved picking up stitches, knitting them, and using techniques like short rows to fill in the spaces and turn tilted edges into square edges. Now the knitting is done, and I have dozens of ends to work in. Some I will work in along the surface, for color and texture. Others I am going to have to just tie and cut short.

I also took out the last of the dollar store cotton string, and crocheted a comet to go with the crocheted star, and stiffened it with white paint in the same way. (The comet is a circle, with a tail.) They are on the same wall in the bedroom now, and go together well. A while back, I put a frieze of paper snowflakes over the closet door, I am thinking of replacing them with something else soon. I also made a small copper star for the bookshelf, just by cutting the shape out of thin sheet copper with not-my-best scissors. (The copper is from a roll that I bought at the art store years ago.) I brought in a pottery bowl from the kitchen, to set on top of the bookcase.

I did some more drawing on my white vase with the blue permanent marker. It is fun, and if I were a professional designer this would definitely be one of my go-to techniques for developing new decorative patterns, but the marker tends to rub off if I'm not careful. I believe the art store has markers for ceramics that mark more durably.

Mobile

I had a room that needed a little something along the lines of a chandelier to hang in it. I ended up making a mobile to hang from the light fixture:

Materials:  paperboard, paper, paint, wire. Tools:  pencil, scissors, paintbrush, needlenose pliers. The ball in the middle is a sheet of paper that I crumpled, wet, and kneaded...basically a large spitball. I left the edges of the paperboard rough and didn't try hard to evenly space the circles.

The mobile's shape is based on a mobile that my grandma had at her house; hers was black and red, and smaller. The form is also vaguely (and inaccurately) atomic, which ties in with my physics background.  The mobile catches the light from the high windows well.

Some pictures

A few projects from the past, while brushing up on my photography skills for the future.

Detail of a picture frame corner, made of thin plywood, copper-coated strapping, and a copper screw:

Linen with pattern tracings for toddler pants:

The footrest under my desk:

Leg of my desk/table, leftover paint over rough wood; I like the texture a lot:

The camera focused on the suitcase in the background,,,it is Samsonite, and if the key is lost they will send you a new one for free.

Folding chair feet

A while back, I bought a folding chair from the thrift store; I think it cost $2. The only thing it lacked were the rubber tips for the feet. After rummaging through our doodads and scraps, I came up with a solution which used:

a piece of pipe that would slip over the ends of the chair legs
washers that would fit inside the pipe but not the chair legs
a stick (probably maple) from my husband's stash
double-sided tape

Pieces of the stick became the new chair feet, which I slid into sleeves cut from the pipe. The washers keep the inner ends of the sticks out of the chair legs. The double-sided tape went around the chair legs to help the upper ends of the sleeves stay on.

So the actual handwork was only sawing and filing and a little whittling. I used a hacksaw to cut the pipe, and rounded and smoothed the cut edges with a file (a metalworker's file; almost exactly the same technique as filing your nails). I sawed the stick with a regular saw, whittled it down to the right diameter, and rounded the edges at the end with the file as well. Then I put it all together, and the new chair feet are working well.

Small changes

I moved the curtain rod in the school room up as high as I could. This lets in a little more light, and makes the windows look taller. It didn't take long, either.

Last weekend I made more things to go on the walls:  a paper twist from an off-white paper sample for the dining room, and a chain of three small wire wreaths to go in the bathroom.

A while back, while I was looking in the scrap pile for wood to make a shoe rack for the coat closet, I found an old crate that we weren't using that was just the right size.

I used leftover tablecloth fabric from making skirts to make pockets for some of my other skirts; simple bags sewn to the inside of the waistbands. I'm not a purse person.

I salvaged a simple Ikea lamp that my husband was going to throw away, and I'm in the process of painting and rewiring it; I found a new cord (with socket) at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $3. When it's finished. it will go in the school room, which only has an overhead fixture at the moment.

Coat hooks and a sign

The problem with living in a Fifties rambler in a cold climate is that it is essentially a warm-climate house design. The slope of the roof is shallow and tends to develop ice dams. There is also zero provision of space in the interior layout for multiple children at a time to get suited up in long socks, snow pants, boots, coats, hats, and mittens, or to store any of that stuff. So I had to give a corner of the family room over to that function. Each child in our family has an old crate to hold their winter accessories, and these crates are stackable, but we still needed a row of coat hooks.

I didn't want to buy hooks, so I decided to make my own, out of coat hanger wire that I would bend around a jig. We keep a stock of wire coat hangers for creative purposes, although they are getting harder to find these days. For my jig, I just drove several screws partway into the block of wood that we use as a drilling block, and I placed them at the points of an imaginary cross. Using nails in slightly large holes might have been better, as I had to remove screws at various times as I was bending the wire.

The first coat hanger I used was the thickest in the bunch, which made some of the bending difficult.  I mostly used small vise grips when I needed pliers, and in places did some pounding with a hammer. To cut the wire, I grip it with the vise grips and bend it back and forth, until it breaks from metal fatigue.

I started each hook in the same way, with a loop bent around one of the screws, and from there looped the wire around the other screws in sequence. Then I removed the screw at the bottom, and bent that loop up (with difficulty) to form a hook. After that, I made another loop freehand, and bent that up as well, to make two hanging surfaces per hook. The freehand loops differ, so the hooks are different as well as similar.

As a mounting board for the hooks, I found a piece of plywood from the lumber motherlode. I intended to finish it by decoupaging a portion of a map on it, but the plywood and the map that I wanted to use didn't work well together, so I decided to color the plywood with crayon instead. I started a vine design across the top in green, and filled in the rest with light green, and then rubbed it down with scrap wool. Even then, the crayon didn't get all the way down into the texture of the plywood.

But then I decided that I didn't like it, because it was too bright and disconnected from the rest of the room. So I took red acrylic paint and wiped it over the whole thing, not trying to get it down into the plywood. The crayon still shows, but now the board looks weathered and somewhat mysterious. "Old circus" is how I would describe it. I won't say it's pretty, but I do like it a lot.

I used assorted old screws to attach the hooks to the board, and wall anchors to attach the board to the wall. With the crates in one tall stack instead of two short ones, the coat corner miraculously became functional and almost organized.

I used similar techniques to make a mileage sign to one of our favorite parts of the world.  I found a wood stake in the woodpile, wrote the place and miles on it with wide-tip permanent marker, and then wiped red acrylic paint over it as a sort of stain. When the paint dried, I put two screws in the top, and tied twine across, for a hanger. After it was on the wall, the black permanent marker seemed too dark, so I went over it with light green crayon, which makes the lettering look dark green.

With these two things up on the walls, I am getting to the point in decorating where I can see something that I like, no matter where I happen to be looking in the house. It really does make a difference.

Keeping busy

Recent projects:

Mailbox flag:  a piece of aluminum from an old baking pan, cut with tin snips, smoothed with a file, punched with a hammer and an old nail, then buffed with sandpaper.  A few old screws to attach it to the wood that sheathes the mailbox and restrict its rotation. It mostly works, just a little prone to putting itself in the down position.

Curtains:  cutting the fabric into panels and hemming them by hand. This is where it pays to have chosen fabric that you like; it takes a little time to hem multiple yards, even at two hem stitches per inch.

Baby fence for laundry room:  the opening is more than five feet wide, and what I opted to do was to buy an old oak door from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and place it on its side across the opening. The door was $35, although there were crappy old doors with layers and layers of old paint (lead paint??) for as little as $5. This particular door had a swinging mechanism at the top that I took off and was able to use to secure one end of the door to the wall. The other end is held in place by boxes for now.

Furniture reassembly:  much of my furniture was inspired by the book Nomadic Furniture, and either breaks down or folds up for moving. I finally got the last piece of furniture (a kid loft) assembled. Note to self: LABEL the pieces of this loft next time, to make this process go faster.

Things on walls: I hung up a length of thin rope in the room that seems destined to be our homeschool room (despite our very informal homeschooling approach), across the wall so that I can hang up the children's artwork with clothespins.  Fast, easy, and cheap.

Next up: figuring out how to actually hang the curtains, at the moments some are just draped over the rods, and the rest are held up by clothespins hiding in the background.