Homebound

For various reasons, I've spent the month very much at home.

I've done a lot of the usual recycling of one thing into another:  new cloth diapers from a flannel sheet, and kitchen wipes from worn-out diapers.  I'm making toddler pants out of some 25-cent yard sale sweatshirts.

I laminated some more pretty papers and fabrics for shelf liners.

I decluttered some things that needed to go.

We made a bunch of birthday decorations from paper, including paper coffee filters.  Most of them are still up.

I got a small crochet hook, so now I can crochet my crochet cotton properly.

Paper bag Christmas stars

We made some paper bag stars like these at a Christmas gathering.  We used glue sticks, not a glue gun, though.  They looked good with brown bags, but I think white bags would be better.

We found that it took at least 8 lunch bags per star, to make it full enough to come around full circle. 

I thought a little about making a similar shape with a big accordion-folding of paper at home, but haven't actually tried it out.

This reminds me that I am also planning to make coffee filter watercolored paper flowers again.

Preparations

The little papier-mache birds that I made took a day or two to dry.  Then I took the two best of them, drew eyes on them, and left the rest in a primitive, unfinished style.  I put them up on the wreath and I like how they look there.

Jackie Clay's Pantry Cookbook has a recipe for dipping chocolate made of chocolate chips and food-grade paraffin that I am going to try out before the holidays.

I whittled another cedar branch coat hook, but haven't put it up anywhere. It only took a few minutes to make.

Things around my house are coming together in various ways, and it has been nice to see things looking pretty.

Messing around

I finally caught up enough on housework and big projects that I had time to do more creative things.

Family dropped off some cedar branches over the weekend, and I experimented and made a few wreaths out of them.

Then one of the wreaths seemed like it needed a little bird, so I experimented with papier mache and made three.  One has a little cedar stick in its neck to connect a head and a body of wadded paper (with papier mache over all), and the other two are more two-dimensional, built up around pieces of cardboard.

The paper I used was notebook paper from the school supplies, which just falls apart when it gets wet, so it wasn't the easiest material to work with.  For glue, I just whisked some flour and water together.

Another recent experiment was putting sliced apples and brown sugar (or white sugar plus molasses; same thing, nowadays) in aluminum foil and baking them in the oven.  The juice from the apples steams the apples and combines with the sugar to make a sort of apple syrup.  The result was only a moderate success, though; it came across to the family as a poor attempt at making applesauce.  The apple juice -> apple syrup angle is worth pursuing in the future, though. That part of it was delicious.

Reconstructions

I found a solid-color plastic plate to serve as a tray on the bathroom counter, and it is working much better visually than the patterned one did.

Our neighbors decluttered their grown children's school and art supplies, and gave us two boxes worth.

My mother-in-law dropped off a chair that she had found and painted for us. 

I just finished reading an older book called Tested by Fire. It's the remarkable story of singer and businessman Merrill Womach, who was terribly burned in a plane crash.

The other day I cut out some butterfly appliques from a patterned fabric, and experimented with sticking them up on the wall with plain water.  Most of them fell down after an hour, but one stayed up for almost three days.

I made a sort of tacked-down slipcover for a upholstered chair seat. I had to piece the fabric together, using almost every last scrap. Then I put it on the seat upside down and pinned it at the seams, taking care to put in the pins so that they would be easy to take out while sewing. I used chalk to mark the actual sewing lines before taking it off the seat for sewing.

When the cover was ready, I stapled it to the underside of the chair where I could, and hand-sewed it to the original upholstery where I couldn't.

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Boxes

I thought of various alternatives for making storage boxes for the shelf, and ended up with paper-covered boxes as a medium-term solution.

I happened to have a larger box on hand that I was able to cut apart and reconstruct as two smaller boxes of the size that I wanted.

For the paper, we did another round of shaving cream marbling. This time I tried mixing a base color all through the shaving cream, and then swirling in a second color. It turned out all right, but I think this technique works better if some of the shaving cream is left white, to help the gaps where it doesn't touch the paper harmonize with the marbling.

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A journalist finally got the percentage of Minnesota coronavirus deaths with a serious underlying health condition out of the Department of Health:  94%, with an additional 4% "unknown".

Slices

The "Quick bar cookies" recipe on this post, which is actually a recipe for chocolate chip blondies, is very forgiving. I've recently tried substituting vegetable oil for the butter. This works all right, but comes out a little drier, as butter contains some water that the oil doesn't. I also tried adding cocoa powder and peppermint extract to make something more like a brownie. The family liked the result, and didn't realize that it was almost exactly the same recipe. Rolled oats were not in the original recipe, but I almost always add them, for nutrition.

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We've been very busy, and I was looking for a quick and fun project, and decided to paint one of our stump tables. The stump is a chunk of a large pine tree that my husband brought home from the county yard waste site last year. The wood was very green, and quite wet, so I kept it in the garage for months to dry it out, turning it occasionally. It picked up some dirt during that time, and lost over twenty pounds of weight, maybe as many as forty--I weighed it early on, and then later, but I don't remember the exact numbers.

Eventually I brought it in, and debarked it in the kitchen. There was some mold growing under the bark, so it had to come off.

The stump found a home in our living room/indoor parkour course. I counted the rings; the tree was sixty years old when it was cut down, and more than two feet in diameter.

Anyway, I mixed some paint to approximate a color that would fit into the decor, and painted the sides, just wiping the paint on with scrap fabric. I very soon had several eager helpers.

The color came out a bit bright for the room, so I plan on wiping on another coat at some point.

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A child wanted to learn to make angel food cake, after a lady from church brought us one. I had never made a foam cake, but our efforts were successful.

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Our resident papier-mache artist is thinking ahead to Halloween, and has made a good start on armatures (support structures for the papier mache) for upper and lower skeleton jaws, made out of milk jugs and tape.

A maker family

I took two pieces of fabric left over from making skirts and cut and hemmed them to make handkerchiefs. Someday I am going to take the time to learn how to use a narrow hemmer attachment on a sewing machine, but for now I just fold, pin, and sew.

I also altered the collar on the blouse I just finished, by the most expedient method:  I cut off most of the excess fabric, ripped open the seams at the front edges a little, folded the raw edges in, and then topstitched them closed. It turned out well.

Then I took the blouse and a skirt I finished last year, and dyed them purple with the last of my dye.  (I don't like using dye because of its toxicity, and because most of it goes down the drain.) The two fabrics, both originally cotton sheets, took the dye slightly differently--one is a little more reddish than the other.

My mother-in-law was brainstorming about how to make a easel that she could spin a canvas on, vertically. My husband found a caster to use as a bearing, minus the wheel, and got it started for her.

She mentioned a sort of papier mache-like clay that is made of drywall mud and toilet paper. We may try that someime. 

Some of the children have been making stop-motion animations for a church activity, and they have been working like elves. Another child made a little wooden table, and painted it. I usually avoid painting furniture, because paint isn't durable enough, but the table's color (blue) is quite striking.

Most have tested negative?, and a project

Apparently Minnesota, with a rate of positive tests that has been around ten percent, is also one of the states with the highest rates of positive tests. At the same time, ICU beds have gradually filled beyond the number that were available before the pandemic started.

The Minnesota State Fair, which is a very big deal around here in the weeks going into Labor Day, was cancelled for 2020.

In other news, I have been working on a replacement for a "stuff bowl"--a decorative bowl that serves as a holding place for stray small objects, until they are put away. I had been using one of my husband's large pottery bowls, but he wanted it back.

So I have been trying out a new craft idea:  a sort of papier mache, but with fabric and acrylic or latex paint instead of paper and glue/paste. For a base or form, I used the lower part of an ice cream bucket, cut to the height that I wanted. For fabric, I chose a stretchy textured synthetic that has proven to have poor durability on its own.

A bowl with some kind of a regular visual pattern seemed best for the location, for balance; there are already shiny and organically-textured things there.

I found it helpful to use a smaller plastic container as a stand, so I could work on the bottom, sides, and inside top edge of the bowl all at once. I cut out a largish circle of the fabric, and made regular cuts so that I could closely wrap the form, gluing the fabric in place with paint.

After it dried, I sponged another color of paint on, to help bring out the fabric's textured pattern, and then gave it a coat of Mod Podge, to help the surface feel smoother.

For the inside, I cut a circle of fabric to fit the bottom, painted it in, and then covered a strip of plastic from the remainder of the ice cream bucket with a tube of the fabric, to cover the inner sides. I hot-glued the strip in place, and painted that too.

The next step is to find something to cover the space at the top of the strip.

Lampshade

I finished re-covering an old lampshade, after a great deal of fiddling.

It sat for a long time, while I thought about a lining for it. I was going to use large sheets of watercolor paper, but they were too inflexible and difficult to fit to the lampshade’s slightly tapered shape. Finally I resorted to Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts:  The Art and Science of Keeping House* for ideas on materials. She mentioned parchment, which made me think of kitchen parchment paper...but it was too fragile. I also experimented with freezer paper a bit, but soon got tired of wrestling with it and decided to just use fabric.

I had the outer fabric picked out already. After many false starts, it became clear that the best way to proceed for both the inner and outer fabrics was to machine sew them into tubes, hemmed at the lower edge, and hand sew that end to the frame. Then I could trim the top edge neatly, and sew that down, gathering or tucking as needed, since the top of the frame is narrower than the bottom.

I did all that for the lining first, since it made sense to work from the inside out. At the top, I gathered it to fit. For the outer fabric, tucks looked better.

Where I needed to sew them together, I used the “Frankenstein stitch”/antique seam mentioned in this post.

I was careful at all stages to keep the edges very neat, and to remove all stray threads and lint from the fabrics, because as Mendelson warns in her book, when you turn on the light, you can see everything that’s in the lampshade.

Still, I could have done better with that; out of the four sides, only one came out as the “good” side. But one is enough, and there is always the possibility of adding some opaque trim.

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* A book which is a good reference, but exhausting to read, unless you replace every instance of “should” in it with”could”. The claim in the beginning that she is describing ideal housekeeping, and not prescribing it, are insufficient against the bulk and sense of the text.

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.

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 fake bowl for the fake flowers

 I finished the coffee filter hydrangeas that I was making. Since I was using paper and paint instead of coffee filters and food coloring, I found that I had to paint each side of each cutout separately. And I air-dried them, instead of using an oven at low heat.

When I bundled them together, I just used a paper clip at the bottom of each bunch, and left the leaves loose. I have some spools of fine wire, but I didn’t need them.

With the flowers finished, I looked around the house for a good bowl to put them, but didn’t find anything suitable. So I ended up taking paperboard from a saltine box, and using strips from it to make a “bowl”.  The quotation marks are because it has no bottom, and is actually only a ring.

I made it by taking two long sides from the box, and making interlocking slots at each end. Putting them together made a shape that was more like an eye than a ring, so I did the same thing with the other two long sides of the box, and slipped the second eye inside the first, rotating it so that the whole thing was reasonably round.

I glued on some scrap paper to cover and hold down the protruding tabs, then I painted the outside with craft paint. The unprinted side of the paperboard soaked up most of the water in the paint, so I did the second coat right away, and from there went straight into applying white puff paint in a geometric design.

The puff paint dried with a shine, while the craft paint didn’t, and the shine contrasts with the non-shiny flowers, so I’m glad I used the puff paint, even though it did run downward a little on the vertical surface. Otherwise, I would have added a coat of something clear like Mod Podge for shine, since the bookshelf the bowl is going on has almost nothing shiny on it, and could use a little sparkle.

More deliveries

Another week of having people grocery shop for us, because of Symptoms. Again they were more or less able to get everything on our list. People from church dropped off some additional things, which were welcome.

I have been learning how to make artificial flowers from coffee filters. Except that I don’t have coffee filters. What I do have is several boxes of unused letterhead paper, which is harder to cut, so I’ve been making one less fold than in the video. I also don’t have food coloring, only paints.

I’m also planning on covering another cardboard box with fabric, for prettier storage.

The trend of confirmed cases in my state remains more or less linear, with gradual increases in the numbers currently hospitalized and in the ICU. The state has a summary of available medical resources up now.

The state is also publishing a list of the larger senior living places that have confirmed cases, which is now over forty, and scattered over many counties. The median age of confirmed cases has increased slightly, as expected.

I made a mask, and some children made pinatas

I used the instructions from the link that I gave a few posts back for the mask.

More ideas for elastic substitutes:  T-shirt yarn—cut a strip about three-quarters of an inch wide, and pull it to make the edges curl in.  These have a nice amount of stretchiness for ties. Another idea I saw is to use elastic hair ties for ear loops. Those might require making the mask wider, since they are shorter than the listed elastic length. I used the T-shirt yarn this time.

Based on other designs I saw online, I decided to add a little channel at the top edge for wire from a small paper clip, to allow for a better fit around the nose. I used needlenose pliers to bend over the ends of the wire, to help keep them from poking through the fabric.

The mask turned out all right, but I find it a bit short, and will add half an inch or so if I make any more of them. It also makes my glasses fog up a bit, so I don’t see myself wearing it while driving.

I foresee a trend in a few years, of making quilts out of all these masks that are being sewn. The question is, how much wear the masks will have gotten before being recycled.

The children with birthdays coming up have planned ahead and made themselves papier-mâché  piñatas. The paste used is just water with some flour whisked in, so they were able to carry the whole thing out very nearly independently.

It was neat to see how the older ones have learned from watching me in the past, and how now the younger ones are learning from watching the older ones.

Grocery report

My trip for groceries went better than expected; there were several guys restocking as I was there, a few hours before the new, earlier closing time.

Some items that had been cleaned out last week were at least partially restocked:  pasta, a pallet of large bags of rice, a pallet of paper towels, the large jars of peanut butter that we buy, 2-pound bags of shredded cheese.

One lady was buying a lot of bottled water, so apparently it was there for her to find.

Still very low:  bread, dried beans, flour.  There was still some of the more expensive brands of flour left, as well as--for some reason--unbleached flour. Unbleached flour works just like regular flour in recipes, they just skip the processing step that would make it look whiter. I don't notice any difference in it.

Toilet paper is now limited to one package per customer, but it was long gone before I got there, including the single rolls in the $1 section.

New shortages:  carrots were entirely gone, and either all the whole milk was sent to other stores, or they're sending it all to be processed into lower-fat milks and cream now. Normally, the store charges the same price for whole milk as for the other kinds; whole milk has 320 more calories per gallon than 2% does. The large packages of eggs that we were buying had also disappeared, although regular egg prices were not too bad. I had been buying a large package or two of eggs ahead even before the pandemic, in anticipation of the prices rising, as they were quite low relative to past years.

Whole grains such as wheat berries were also cleaned out; I did get some barley flour.

Since a lot of the nation's food supply is stuck in the restaurant and commercial supply lines, and a lot of these businesses are in economic jeopardy, we are planning to get take-out on our usual eating-out schedule for the time being.

Shutting down, and a simple craft

The local schools are closing tomorrow, the governor has banned restaurants and similar establishments from offering dining-in services, and the library is maybe closed--their website has conflicting information. My husband's employer is having everyone start working from home soon, which is going to force us to upgrade to faster internet.

No one seems to have a plan beyond the next couple of weeks. The present measures are not so much "flattening the curve" as they are just delaying it a few weeks. From this post by The Silicon Graybeard, it appears that we had better be increasing our medical system's capacity to cope with coronavirus cases as quickly as possible. That is possible, with a focused mobilization of resources.

I am viewing this season as something like an unplanned sabbatical on a large scale. The difficulty is that our society is not at all set up for it, and instead requires a regular income to pay for debt and all the other services that people and businesses are now dependent on.

Being reasonably well-supplied on food and toilet paper, I spent a very small amount over the weekend to stock up on intellectual stimulation for the coming weeks. I went to the library's book sale area, which I had all to myself, and bought a German-English dictionary and the only other book in German that they had, which appears to be a collection of articles by Sigmund Freud on the unconscious mind. I've never gotten very far with German; we have one book on the language, but it's from the 1940's, with Gothic-like type that is difficult to decipher.

I also looked at craft and decorating books, but didn't buy any. I did pick up some ideas for projects, both from the books that I looked at, and the thrift store that I visited next. It was also sparsely populated, with one cashier in a mask and gloves.

Yesterday, I mixed a little red craft paint with some shaving cream that we had, and we made marbled shaving cream prints. We learned that the technique works even when the paint is mixed evenly into the shaving cream; you just have to swirl the shaving cream around, and the paper picks up irregular amounts of color from the irregular surface.

Mostly we printed onto sheets of paper, but I also tried printing directly onto a white cardboard box that I had, and a piece of white fabric. These prints came out, but they were affected by the surface textures:  the paper surface of the box is slightly coarser than office paper, and the fabric's woven texture visually competes with the marbling.

When the toddler wants to paint

My husband bought a "Buddha board" recently. It is a flat, square surface on a stand; the stand also has a reservoir for water and a place to rest a paintbrush. The idea is to paint on the surface with plain water, which will dry within a few minutes, leaving it ready to "paint" again.

This gave me the idea of letting the toddler paint with water on construction paper on a tray. The paper can be dried and reused a time or two, if it doesn't get too crumpled.

This is an idea I should have had a few years ago, though, when the arboretum put in a new nature play area, including a bare-wood playhouse, a water source, and lots of paintbrushes. Every time we were there, there were a half-dozen or more little children industriously painting the playhouse with water, over and over, as the water dried quite quickly.

The health insurance post

For years, I avoided comparing our current health insurance premiums with those from the years before the Affordable Care Act went into effect.  I knew I wasn't going to be happy with what I found.

Finally, I dug out some numbers, and indeed I am not very happy with them.  Our premiums in 2018 were double those of 2012.  Our income rose during that time, but it certainly did not double.

Remember, the ACA was passed in early 2010, with most of it not going into effect until 2014--after the 2012 election.  Plus, my husband's employer did what they could with the renewal dates to delay adoption of ACA-compliant plans for their employees until very late in 2014.

This doubling of premiums was not for the same plan or coverage.  In 2012, we had a high-deductible plan (HDHP), which had the nice feature of a very high level of coverage once the high deductible was met, up to the lifetime limit.  There was a health savings account (HSA) offered, which we signed on for and used, and it worked out well for us to have that money saved, because we did meet the deductible that year.

Our plan in 2018 had somewhat lower deductibles, much higher premiums (doubled), along with much higher co-pays and co-insurance.  We had the option of a moderate reduction in premiums by going with a much smaller network of providers, but we ended up not doing that; snafu story omitted. We were a few years older, which added a bit to the cost.  Because of the ACA, there is no lifetime limit, but that requires that at least one of us can stay healthy enough to work and keep paying the premiums through an expensive and possibly medical scenario.

That has left us with theoretically "better" health insurance, but in a much worse position financially for actually using it and getting health care. Let alone all the other things that our very frugal family could be doing with an additional several thousand dollars a year; the ACA carries an enormous opportunity cost for our family.

Of the current crop of presidential candidates, Senators Warren and Gillibrand were in office when the ACA was up for vote, and both of them voted for it.  Neither of them is saying anything about the affordability of health insurance on their campaign website now. I find this a disappointment in the case of Warren, who co-authored The Two-Income Trap, and who knows a bit about the strained finances of American families.  She has chosen to focus her presidential campaign more toward other demographics.

As I have written before, my response to the passage of the ACA was to stop buying paper towels.  I figured that the passage of the ACA had cut ten years from my expected lifespan.  A couple of years ago, from a newspaper article I learned that the number of people buying insurance on the exchanges was about half the number of people who were going without insurance and paying the penalty instead.  (The individual mandate penalty has since been reduced to zero.) With a bit of mental extrapolating, I guessed that you could extend this 1:2 ratio to a 1:2:10 ratio:  for every person benefitted by buying health insurance on an exchange, there were about ten people who wanted to see Obamacare nuked from orbit.

That the Republicans, once they regained Congress, failed to repeal Obamacare was quite stunning to me, and is probably the primary reason for their losses of House seats in 2018.

In my research for this post, I learned that there is a phrase for our situation:  the "family glitch".  My husband's premiums with his employer-based coverage are "affordable" by ACA definitions, therefore we as a family are not eligible for subsidies in the exchange, even though our total cost is well above the "affordable" threshold.  Supposedly there are 2-6 million families in the same situation. That number looks a bit low to me, and probably there are millions of couples also affected.

I no longer bother complaining about these sorts of things, because I'm fairly sure that They are Doing Them On Purpose. If you remember, the ACA was shoved through to President Obama's signature quite rapidly, leaving little time for public comment or in-depth analysis. A law that long and complex is almost certainly bad somehow. It has been my opinion all along that the Democrats' intention with the Affordable Care Act was for it to pave the way for universal government-based health care. Their plan seemed to be that people with unaffordable health insurance would beg their employers to discontinue coverage, so they could then get affordable subsidized insurance on the exchanges. Edited to add:  Another piece of the plan was that the ACA mandated that people applying to buy insurance through an exchange would be funneled into a government health program if they qualified. Also, under the ACA, some hospitals can determine likely eligibility for government health programs, and sign uninsured patients up on the spot. From there, it would be a short step to universal health care.

What actually happened is that many people just tightened their belts elsewhere and made do, and then went out and voted Republican. Democrats have since proposed fixing the family glitch, but the fact is, that they have lost too many elections and no longer have the ability to do so. The Republicans in Congress certainly aren't going to help them; the ACA gave them back control of Congress...gift-wrapped.

I see in my analysis here further reason to doubt the long strings of stories in the media from 2016 to 2019 about how the election of Donald Trump to President definitely, for sure, had to be because of "Russian interference!".  After the Mueller report was released, the preferred explanation became "Racism!", now pivoting into "White Supremacy!". The idea that making millions of voters' health insurance even more unaffordable was a large factor in the Democrats losing the presidency is completely verboten.

Our other options for health insurance coverage are also unattractive. Buying insurance on the exchange without subsidies would cost more than we are paying with the employer's plan.  Medical sharing ministries are another possibility, but I have always felt hindered in my spirit from them; I don't know why, but possibly cheats and scammers are working their way into that field. We have avoided government insurance programs, for reasons that people who support the Right to Privacy and Right to Choose should understand. Also, in some cases some of these programs (Medicare, notably) can claim a share of a person's estate after they die, so they are not necessarily free money, but function more as an extended, no-interest loan for life.

I don't want government health care. I don't even want government subsidies for health insurance. What I want is to be able to buy the level of insurance that we can afford, and that best meets our family's needs. The government's job is to make sure that the insurance companies and health care providers play fair.

An art

I made "an art" to put on the wall in our school room.  Because the room is full of varnished wood furniture, I decided it would be a painted piece.  The chair below it set the scale for the size. The rest of the room is very organized and regimented and visually weighty, so I wanted to do something in a looser sort of style, and much lighter, in a textured sort of way.

These considerations led me to playing around with string and paint left over from my wall doily project.

I got out rubber gloves and a piece of giant graph paper, turned the ball of string into a looser ball of string, and kneaded paint into it. It would have been better to make a looser coil of the string, tying it in a couple of places, and to make the end more findable; it ended up rather tangled, and untangling gooey string was a challenge, although I was able to get it mostly straightened out.

Then I started laying the string out on the paper in a big oval shape, in a loopy sort of way, around and around. At this point the toddler woke up, so I pushed through the rest quickly, ending by patting the string down hard onto the paper to make it all cohere.

When it was dry, I tore the paper away from the outside edges, but not from the center, which shows some interesting marks from being touched by the painted string.

I hung it up in its place, and it does all right there as a prototype--it has given me some additional and better ideas.