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.

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.

Sent outside

We have a free-from-the-side-of-the-road table that is not needed in the house, but which could be useful on the deck. I don’t know whether to call it a large end table or a small coffee table, but it is a little over two feet square.

To help it weather the outdoors, at least for this summer, it needed its grooved top protected, and the shelf underneath mostly removed.

I did the shelf part first, since the table would have to be upside down for that. I drilled holes at the corners with a bit brace, started cutting with a keyhole saw, and finished each cut with a regular hand saw. Otherwise, I could have used my husband’s jig saw, but I prefer hand tools, which are usually much quieter, safer, and cheaper than power tools.

For the top, my preference would have been to cover it with sheet metal, but what I had was fabric left over from the latest armchair project:  some sort of canvas with a waterproof backing. I had to piece it together a little, and for this I did flat seams by overlapping two pieces, and then running two parallel lines of stitching down through the overlapped part. This particular fabric was a bit difficult to maneuver through my sewing machine with the size of pieces that I was working with, so the end result does not lie perfectly flat. Just good enough for a temporary solution.

Having run out of upholstery tacks with the chair project, the best solution for securing the fabric to the top was staples, along the sides of the top. I folded the edges of the fabric under before stapling. Like always, I found it difficult to hold the staple gun firmly enough to make all the staples to go in smoothly; many of them got some assistance from a hammer afterward.

And that was it. Ideally, I would like to paint both base and top, in different colors, but that is not a priority at the moment.

Fine adjustments

I have been thinking about something from Cozy Minimalist Home which says that our furnishings should have both presence (style) and breathing room. That was why I was working recently on decorating and painting a cardboard box for the children's paper supply:  the papers are in a very central position on the bookshelves, and without the box, they tended to spread widely.

The puff paint embossing worked out well, aside from the paint coming out of the bottles rather unevenly. I did have to wipe off and redo a few parts before it dried, because I smeared them while working on other parts. After it dried thoroughly, but before painting over it, I did a pencil rubbing, to see how the relief turned out. The paper stuck to the paint in a few places, but only slightly.

The whole thing got two coats of paint, with paint that I wanted to use up as the undercoat, and craft paint for the top coat.  Dried and in place, the box does add style to that part of the room.

I also made one or two other small changes to the arrangement of things on the bookshelves, to help with the breathing room issue.

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.

A frugal transformation

The neighbors gave our family a lamp and a small side table. We did need the lamp, for a reading light in one of the children's bedrooms, but we didn't need the table.

The table hung out for a bit in the living room, but it clearly wasn't sturdy enough to survive for long. Looking more closely at it, the top was a hollow box made out of hardboard.

I also noticed that without the legs, the top could be turned into a painting, and hung on the wall as artwork. There was an empty section of wall in the family room that had been needing decoration for a long time.

For colors, I decided to go with the existing family room decor colors, which are basically the rainbow colors, plus white. There's also a lot of pale blue, but I left that out of the painting.

For a design and painting technique, I decided to do patterns of dots. I'm much better at placing dots than at spreading paint where I want it to go, and a structured pattern would counteract some of the visual chaos that goes on in the room. The table top was already red, so I left it that way as the background color.

Then I did the dots, in patterns that varied by color. It came out fairly well--I picked a good stopping point and didn't overwork it--but it's definitely an amateur effort.

With the help of some hardware from our hoard, I hung it up. The wall it's on is not well-lit, so the white dots are by far the most prominent, followed by the yellow dots, and the rest are much harder to distinguish from the background, without moving closer to it.

If you're going to do wood countertops...

...this is the way to do them.

I've used the spar urethane that they used on the countertop a few times before, and I like the stuff a lot. One project was a set of shelves with a projecting counter, built of 2x4s, 2x2s, 1x10s, and plywood, which I built for additional shelf and counter space in our tiny apartment kitchen. Several moves later, we still have it, but now it is serving as a somewhat wobbly workbench in the basement.

After reading her post, out of curiosity I went to see how well the urethane on the counter of that shelf had held up. Originally, I put two good coats on, and called it good. Now it is very much dented and scraped up by tools, but it is all still there, except for a couple of chips on the edge, and one place where someone sawed into it a little.

I also used the stuff on my plywood hot tub, the furo, way back when. I put at least ten coats on the inside. Spar urethane does not fill in gaps, I found, without some assistance (toothpicks, in this case). It did leak just a little after a few years of use, but it was set up in a shower, so it didn't matter.

The most recent project was the bathroom stool, where the urethane is holding up very nicely...unlike most of the other finishes in there.

Fall wardrobe tweaks

I did a quick assessment of my wardrobe for fall, and was happy to find that I already had just about everything I need. Most of what needed to be done was to forcibly retire some items.

From past wardrobe inventories, for example the one in my Wardrobe in a Week effort, I know that 95% of my daytime wardrobe needs to be "working casual".

I did sew one thing, a skirt from a synthetic fabric out of my stash. I have nailed down the style and length of skirt that I like best, but I'm still experimenting a bit with the fullness. For this one, I tried a narrower skirt than I usually make, and I found that I like the result, but that I wouldn't want to go any narrower.

The time needed to cut out and sew the skirt was about two and a half hours, including doing a zigzag stitch around the edges of all of the pieces, to keep them from fraying--which was very necessary with this particular fabric.

The fabric's color didn't go well with the rest of my wardrobe, so I overdyed the skirt. I have been trying to get away from dyeing things, because the chemicals involved are quite toxic, but sometimes it is the most economical solution.

The fabric took up much more of the dye than I had expected, but in the end it looks a bit chintzy. I think it could benefit from a lining to give it more body, but I don't think I have the fabric for that right now.

Weaving

I've been working off and on, over the last couple of months, in building a simple table loom and trying it out.

The reference book I'm using is an older one, The Joy of Hand Weaving, by Osma Gallinger Tod, second edition. It is structured as a series of lessons, to take someone from being an absolute beginner at weaving, on into a fair number of intermediate and advanced techniques. There's enough in this book to keep the reader busy for years.

The plans for the loom I built are from this book, aside from a few small modifications of my own. I built the loom two inches wider, to allow me to weave fabric up to twelve inches wide. I put the stopping mechanisms for the rollers on the left side instead of the right. And for the reed/beater, instead of using thin cedar strips from cigar boxes to space the warp threads, I used bamboo skewers. You can still get wooden cigar boxes--there is a cigar box reseller here in the Twin Cities--but it seemed like it would be very difficult to nail the strips without splitting them. I found a hint online about using string to space the skewers, which are set within grooves.

All the wood and other parts are from materials we had lying around, except for the skewers, which cost $1.49 plus sales tax. I cheated and used power tools for a couple of steps, but it could have all been done with hand tools.

Once I had the loom and accessories made, I entered the process of achieving mastery by making every single mistake that could be made...to paraphrase physicist Neils Bohr. So far, I've discovered at least a dozen.

To wind the warp, I flipped over the coffee table that is in the picture, and wound around the legs in an X pattern. That worked well until I tried to take it off; the sticks I was using to keep everything straight (lease sticks) slid out and left me with a mess, but I eventually untangled enough to warp the loom with a yard or so of warp.

Then I experimented with using a wide variety of yarns and threads. The teal yarn in the photo was difficult to weave, because it has large nubs every few inches that kept getting caught on the warp threads. Another yarn was very thin, and took a lot of rows to make one inch of weaving. Still, I think it was good to start off with the more difficult yarns, as an attentive beginner.

My first weaving I hung up as a wall hanging. I've started on a small rug, which I will have to weave in strips, then join, but I haven't gotten very far with it yet.

One thing that surprised me about weaving was how tiring it was at first to be reaching so far forward so frequently, until I grew some more muscle to help hold my arms up.

Big bed in a small room

Because of the distribution of children in our family, we made the master bedroom a shared children's room, and put our bed in one of the smaller bedrooms. It's a king-size bed, so it takes up most of the floor space.

The bed left just enough room at its foot for a narrow walkway to the closet and to the far side of the room; the path always felt cramped.

But! I just had an idea! A king-sized bed is not exactly a square, even though it looks like one. It is a few inches longer than it is wide...so, if I turned the bed sideways--just the bed, not us--then I could free up a little more space at the foot, which would make it easier to get around the bed.

I tried it, and I found that turning the bed gave me three more inches. Which doesn't sound like a big difference, but now I can walk straight through there, instead of having to turn sideways a bit and sidle through.

I lost three inches at the sides of the bed, but it doesn't matter as much, because there was more room there to begin with.

I'm not sure this change is going to sit well with my husband, though--his feet were hanging off the end of the bed even before I moved it.  I'll have to see how long it takes him to notice.

Back to sewing

This week is ridiculously overscheduled, but I finally got clear enough to get back into making things.

I finished the embroidery portion of a project that I started several years ago, making several long panels that I intend to assemble into a tiered skirt.

I did a review of my wardrobe notebooks, and made a list of things that I need to make, replace, alter, or buy.

One of the smaller projects on the list was to trim the edges of a sweater that I had turned into a cardigan; it just needed a little something more to look finished. I had some ribbon yarn left over from the armchair-reupholstering project, and the colors went together well, so I used that.

My mother-in-law gave me two grocery bags of fabric scraps, and I have been thinking about what to do with them. There was a partially-deconstructed flannel shirt, which I am making into some new cloth napkins; there was enough fabric for five or six.  My goal is to have about twenty napkins altogether; about half a dozen need to be replaced.

I think there are one or two pieces of fabric in the bags that are large enough for a blouse. Most of the rest is headed for quilt squares.

Furniture re-arranging

The next step in my living room was to get the main pieces of furniture arranged. The largest is our couch, and it does have a certain amount of presence or style to it--which is important in the Cozy Minimalist method.

We've always had the couch against the longest wall, but it is the darkest place in the room, and that placement doesn't work well for either everyday life or for parties. One of my goals was to have a more focused seating area for conversation, so I moved the couch away from the wall and toward the main focal point in the room, the fireplace, and toward the brightest lamp in the room.

With the addition of two armchairs, voila, a place to read or converse!

Right away, I started using both the couch and the chairs a lot more. I discovered that having the couch away from the wall means that I can get the toys out from under it by just shoving them through...which is wonderfully easy compared to how it was before.

I left the computer table where it was, but neatened it a bit.

We still have our Christmas tree up, so I have been working around it, but it is a thing that we have every year, so I need to include it in my planning for this room.

For the smaller furniture, mostly bookshelves, I experimented with putting them in different locations, but they ended up where they were before.

Our little stump table went by one of the armchairs.

The coffee table is behind the couch now.  It is too big and too rectangular to go in the conversation area, so I am planning on making a sort of round ottoman to go in that spot. The couch being out in the middle of the room acts as almost a room divider, creating two distinct areas; the room is long--and almost twice the size of our previous house's living room.

Six approaches for dealing with Too Much Beige

The Cozy Minimalist method gave me the assignment of going to Pinterest to collect inspiration. I have some issues with Pinterest, but I did it, and I found some repeating themes in the rooms I liked.

Those themes, though, didn't readily transfer to the room that I have to work with, so I went back a second time, and searched for specific solutions to its specific decorating problems:  way too much beige, and way too much 1980s.

Possible solutions for the beige:

1.  Bury it under paint or Stuff.

2.  Use white for almost everything else in the room.

3.  Use neutrals for the rest of the room, and use a variety of textures and patterns to add interest.

4.  Treat the beige as a pastel, and use a lot of other pastels in the room.

5.  Think of the beige as some kind of coffee or chocolate flavor, and use other food-related browns for the rest of the room.

6.  Treat the beige as a neutral background, for "pops" of color, or art, or high-quality furniture to stand out against.


These can for the most part be combined; in my living room, I am burying most of the beige carpet under rugs, and treating the dark beige walls as a backdrop for art, furniture, and colorful textiles.

I can't do the second option; far too much unpainted woodwork and wood furniture. Number 5 would give me a depressingly brown room.

As for the heavy 1980s vibe, including the black-and-brass fireplace front, I am just living with it, but I'm trying to incorporate a few newer and more modern things into the room.

Ready for a change

Now that the holiday gauntlet has been run, I am ready to get back to more intentionally working on my home.

I did an analysis of our dining room, and its table.  The table is rectangular, homemade, and narrow--the top was originally a homemade door, not made by me. It seats ten at the very most.

The space we have for it is eight feet by nine feet, off the end of our kitchen. If our children were out of their spilling years, I would consider moving our main eating area to the front living room, which is much larger.

When we have company for dinner, we have an extra table of the same height and width, that we can place against one end, out into our living room. It adds two or three more seats to the table.

The first thing I looked at, in thinking about how the table works, was to look up the dimensions of tables that were a bit bigger, and compare both area and perimeter.  Area determines how many things you can put on the table; perimeter determines how many people can sit at it.

We can't really have a longer table in the space we have there. I looked at wider tables, but I realized that the additional perimeter would not be enough to actually provide us with any additional seating; we're better off just bringing out the auxiliary table when we need it.

I also thought a bit about a circular table, but our family would fill it, and there would not be a way to easily accomodate guests.

So I ended up right where I started, keeping our current table.

Later I experimented with turning it the other way in the room. The problem there is that a major traffic path runs through the room. I discovered that the table and chairs took up exactly the same width of the room either way, but the perception of width was greater when the table was squeezing the traffic lane, rather than the baby's high chair. And although moving the table would give better long views to those sitting at the table, it wasn't really worth it.

I am also working heavily on our living room now, and it seemed best to limit the areas of discombobulation for the time being.  As much as possible, anyway; making changes always seems to have a ripple effect and provoke further changes.

Makeup for my wall and ceiling

My bedroom ceiling is white, and the walls are ivory. In many places around the edge of the ceiling, you can see where the person who painted the walls touched the ceiling with the paint roller, leaving a splotch.

These splotches have annoyed me ever since we moved in, especially the ones that I can see clearly from the bed.

Finally I took our last piece of white chalk, climbed up on a chair, and chalked over the worst of the splotches, blending the chalk into the paint gently with a finger--just like blending makeup.

From below, this makes the splotches much less noticeable, and hopefully they are now well below my usual threshold of noticing things.

Some people are actually allergic to chalk, so this is not for everyone. I expect that I will need to renew the chalk occasionally, as it gradually falls off the ceiling.

WiaW: Day 2

Sewing was rather light today, as I was busy for much of the day dealing with laundry and yard work and such, but I did get several things done:

made over a much-too-large T-shirt, so that it fits; also replaced its designer logo with a reverse applique flower, in an Alabama Chanin sort of style, but with crochet cotton instead of buttonhole thread

adjusted the straps on my swimsuit; this turned out to only require untying the knots I had made in them before

shortened a tank top to be only a tank bra, which is replacing a nursing bra that was very worn out

shortened the sleeves on a long-sleeved T-shirt to make them three-quarter sleeves (which I find more practical for frequent handwashing)

sketched patterns for a long A-line skirt and for a baseball cap

cut out and started hand-sewing a felt hat (just out of synthetic craft felt) to wear while doing yard work, until I make a baseball cap to replace the one that fell apart in the wash last week

Experimental pleated paper lampshade

I've been playing with the idea of changing out the fabric sleeve (which is cylindrical) over the frame for the shade of the hanging light I made a while back. I tried just plain white fabric, which was okay, but not that great against the whiter ceiling.

The other thing I've tried so far is plain white paper, pleated. The idea came from something one of the kids did with a piece of paper and some tape:  folding it in pleats and then running a couple of strips of "invisible" tape across it, holding the pleats in place. It looked (to me) modern and manufactured; like something much more sophisticated than mere paper and tape.

So I made a quick lampshade along those lines. It is currently being held up by a couple of clothespins. It, too, is not quite right for the place where it is, but it will do until I find something better.

Spring refreshing: School room

I had some free time, and was a bit at loose ends. I picked up The Nesting Place, by Myquillyn Smith, and started looking at the pictures again. Which made me want to apply some of her techniques to the room I was in:  our "school room".

One of these techniques is simply to consider what the purposes and functions of the room are. For this room, I started making a list...which went on and on...and I ended up with seventeen purposes for this one room.

An aside:  Our previous house had one small living room. This house has three not-small living rooms, and it seemed excessive to me at first. But God knows what he is doing, and we do use all three of these rooms heavily.

Then I listed all the things that needed to be in the room to support those functions. Almost everything was there already, but there are a few things that we can add to make the room work much better for our family:

1.  Two more footstools; the one I made before is constantly being used for seating at the low table (repurposed coffee table), or as a perch for the shorter members of the family to see out of the window, or as a satisfyingly hefty toy to roll around, or as a rather unstable step stool.

2.  One more light source; we try to keep the overhead lights off in the evening and instead use lamps for lighting. This room has one lamp and needs about one more. My husband has an LED project planned that will probably cover this need.

3.  Folders for homeschool paperwork and assignments, instead of one big pile of papers.

The second technique is to "quiet the room" by taking down all of the decorative items (things on the wall can stay, if you want). When they are all down, it is much easier to dust the surfaces, and also to think of new possibilities. And then things can go back where they were, or not, and you can bring in different or new things, and just play around with making changes.

It is very useful for when you have gotten so accustomed to your decorating that you aren't really seeing any of it anymore.

So I went through the room, quieting, straightening, dusting, and rearranging, and I got a lot done in the time that I had.

Ungraying kids' clothes

I took the gray kids' clothes, and experimented with changing their color using chlorine bleach.

Procedure:  Dilute bleach in a quantity of water, enough for the clothes to move freely. Add clothing, and stir with a stick; watch for color changes in the water and in the clothes. Try for even exposures of the fabrics to the bleach, and for minimization of bleaching time. Remove clothes carefully (not splashing yourself), drain water, and rinse clothes in fresh water at least once.

Chlorine is rough on fibers, and will weaken them (or eat right through them, if you use enough, for long enough), so it must be used with care.

Results:  The bleach had very little effect on the clothes that were cotton/polyester blends...probably because the white fibers were cotton (already bleached) while the gray fibers were polyester (not dyed; made of actual gray polyester).  There were changes in the colors of the 97% and 100% cotton items:  either toward an orange or toward a purple--depending on the dye used to make the gray, I suppose.  The orangey ones needed heavy bleaching to get to an orange color.

Learning to live in the house that I have

I have worked hard over the years to make our household routines more streamlined and efficient, but I continue to find new ways to optimize them.  Each house or apartment that we have lived in has had its own quirks that we have had to learn about and adapt to. Plus our family has done a lot of growing and growing up over the years, which has driven plenty of changes in the household organization.

A recent change I made was to put a small trash can within reach of the family room (behind the baby gate to the laundry room, out of toddler reach). This room has needed a trash can for a long time, but never had one before.

Another change was to start heating the water for my morning tea and the water for the children's hot cereal at the same time. We haven't had a teakettle for some time now, so I had fallen into the habit of making the tea, and then the hot cereal. But now we have two saucepans instead of just one, so I might as well use them.

"What is working here? What is not working? How can I make this better? How can I take good care of this?"--all good questions to keep asking at home.