Off day; small fake fireplace

I took a day off between two big projects and messed around with making a little hearth under my sewing machine table.  It's the same table I put an oak chair back into two years ago, to connect and stabilize the legs.

The leather chair seat that I mentioned in that post, by the way, has gone from dull green suede to an impressive polished brown, to dull green rougher suede, under heavy wear from children.

Anyway, I had recently moved a large wooden tray from the top of my dresser onto the oak part, and had put a few awkwardly-shaped things in it, including a half-log that separates to reveal a hidden drawer.

I also recently picked up a small box of veneer bricks from a neighbor's spring clean-out; just the bricks' faces.  I knew that I wanted to use them somewhere soon, and that they wouldn't cover a large area.

In the midst of puttering around the house, I was thinking about making a fake fireplace, along the lines of a scrap wood fireplace in the Wary Meyers' Tossed and Found book I reviewed in 2018.

I realized that I had the brick floor, and the log, and the place for it....

The bricks were just enough to line the wooden tray, after breaking a few to fit, with just one tiny piece left over.  Some of them were fake-singed, and I put those toward the front.

For a back, I immediately thought of a long metal sign I had picked up from another neighbor's curbside.  It has a warm, dark copper color.  I bent it into a U shape with the help of an old atlas, by putting one end into the atlas, standing on them, and pulling up on the other end; probably the first time I've ever used a book as a bending brake for metal.  It gave me good, straight, rounded bends.

Putting everything together under the table, the sign-back was too tall to fit under the sewing machine compartment, so I rotated the sign forward 90 degrees and made it into a hood instead--which makes more sense, anyway.

I found a few warm-colored firelike objects to go around the log, including some copper and a glass candle holder--which I lined with an upside-down picture of autumn leaves--and a curly piece of birch bark.

There is even a modest amount of warm air coming out of it when the furnace is on, because it's right in front of a vent.

Not out of the weeds yet, and still pouring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even worse, but less worse that it could have been

We discovered that an ambulance ride costs more than rent now.  In Millennial terms, around 400 Starbucks coffees and 150 avocado toasts.  I need to start making friends with drug dealers.

By the gymnastic grace of God, there was same-day treatment and no permanent damage.

ICE has been in our area, but I haven't seen any personally--that I know of.

One thing in my home that I've been appreciating lately is a tall narrow garden trellis that we picked up for free from a neighbor who was moving.  Similar to these curved ones, but with four top spikes that each end in a small ball.

It fits very well in an awkward gap next to an awkward corner in the bathroom, we can hang towels off the spikes, and the trellis keeps them away from the wall.

The Goodwill doesn't really take garden furniture, so it is often given away.  I switched to a metal flower pot stand for my nightstand, and set a wrought-iron-style napkin weight? for picnics? upside-down in it to keep small items from falling through so easily, while still allowing most of the dust through.  I don't put water glasses there because the mattress is frequently used as a trampoline; small house, long winters.

I managed to paint a large picture frame and an office stand that we had picked up at other times, using old toothbrushes as brushes.  Uneven paint coverage, but I think that could be an advantage when trying to simulate marble.  A clear varnish of similar reflectance to polished stone would make it more convincing.

Storms it is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should have worn a respirator

I took a look at a free-by-the-side-of-the-road upright bagless vacuum that I picked up a while back.

It had very weak suction, and with a little investigation it was easy to see why:  the filters were caked and choked with dust.  Someone decided to buy a new vacuum rather than spend a few minutes dealing with them.

The filters are washable, so I washed them, and they're drying now.  I think the belts are okay.

If it's good to go, this will be the basement vacuum.  My canister vacuum from a German manufacturer is about twelve years old, and still works fine.

I've gotten more interested in free appliances like this since I learned how much metal can be salvaged out of them.  And hardware.

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There's a Popular Science book from the World War II years that I've been leafing through:  the "Second Giant Home Workshop Manual".  It's a frenetic mix of home science demonstrations, home improvement projects, and DIY wartime preparedness, punctuated by instructions on how to electroplate with various metals.

It reminds me in some ways of the early years of the pandemic.

Laundry bags and mattresses

Last year, I turned two skirts into laundry bags, by sewing the bottom edges closed.  One was a skirt I didn't like the feel of, and the other just needed to be retired from my wardrobe.  The fabric is strong enough.  One bag has a drawstring and the other has a zipper, which is nice because otherwise it is rather difficult to get the laundry out.

Another project from a couple months ago was to turn a double-sized mattress into a twin size.  It's an inner-spring mattress that's two or more decades old.  The innards turned out to be very similar to the twin box spring I took apart one time; just no wood and less steel, and more padding.  

I cut through the fabric and padding, and used a small screwdriver and pliers to pry off the metal clips holding the springs to the edge, and then wire cutters to cut the spiral wires connecting the springs.

The heavier steel edging was a little harder to deal with.  I didn't want to cut it and then be left with no way to reconnect it.  I came up with a scheme for bending each edge over to the other side--which didn't work because the width I removed from the mattress was greater than the thickness of the mattress, so they stuck out too far.  I let it sit for a few days, and eventually figured out how to take up the extra with additional bends.

Then I started clipping things back together, crimping the clips I had removed back on with pliers.  This went okay for the springs, and less okay with the rings that had to poke through the padding.  They probably have a special tool for that at the factory.

I finished by sewing up the fabric with sturdy buttonhole thread.  The mattress is a spare for now, and is currently on a free-by-the-side-of-the-road metal daybed frame, under another mattress.

I also, roughly a year ago, repaired a seam on my own mattress.  I was thinking about replacing the mattress entirely, until I realized that it would be silly to replace the most popular bed in the house.  I sleep well enough on it.

Set

I found several Georgette Heyer books at the thrift store, and remembering Practical Conservative's love of the author bought them.  Not my usual genre, so we'll see.

My life this fall has been apples, election, and hospital.  An acquaintance with a backyard orchard had a bumper crop this year, and we easily picked thirty bags' worth.  I learned how to make apple butter, and that is what I'm doing with most of them now.  It turns out to not be so easy to dispose of quantities of apple scraps in the city when you are stubbornly refusing to order and use the organics bin that you are being forced to pay for.

The hospital was for my oldest child, who is doing well despite taking a Grand Tour of the medical system across seven different sites this month, for a congenital issue that suddenly became a problem.  There is some lingering non-obvious aftermath, but she is chugging through most of the functional tests faster than I would. 

A neighbor gave me an old table leaf that is more or less the right size for our round living room table, and I put two coats of polyurethane on it.  I plan to have Thanksgiving dinner in the living room again; the house has no dining room and it is much more memorable than crowding into the kitchen as usual.  The next challenge is the table base:  it is a pedestal base--for an oak top that can be six feet long.  Someone in the past tried to reinforce the weak point by pounding in a lot of nails.  I think I can repurpose the frame of my old homemade dinner table, if I shorten the legs.  The hard part will be getting it into place around the pedestal and up under the table top's rails, but it shouldn't be too bad because the frame's legs are attached with removable pegs.

That took long enough

I'm on sabbatical, and working as hard as ever.  I discovered that circumstances are no longer hindering me from doing housework at a fast pace:  "Housercize".

I finally figured out how to semi-stabilize the cabinet of my spare sewing machine.  The cabinet is large and nice, but its support structure was absurdly inadequate.  The legs insert into the cabinet, and are supposed to be steadied by laminated wood arcs, connected by a wood rail.  The layers had begun to separate after years of being stored in a barn, and wouldn't hold the pegs from the legs.  At one point, the whole thing collapsed.  I shoved the legs under it horizontally so the plywood protecting the sewing machine compartment wouldn't be crushed, and left it that way for months, while thinking vaguely of making a pair of short bookshelves to support the cabinet at the ends.

I eventually noticed, in my excavations in the garage, that an oak chair back I had saved from a broken roadside freebie would be just about the right size to replace the underframe.  It turned out to be exactly the right size, more exactly-right than needed because the legs have lots of wobble in them.  I had no trouble in drilling peg holes into the sides of the chair back.

The worst of it was having to set it all back up.  I enlisted two of the sturdier children to lift the cabinet while I connected everything together.  It is still wobbly, but it will do until I find or make the right little bookshelves.

Another project is a computer chair mat, using leather scraps from the surplus store.  These scraps are very thick leather in several different colors, and I bought two boxes' worth.  I am following the same modular-width/free-length design as I did in my last quilt, for efficient re-use of materials.  Three pattern pieces, for width only:  full-strip-width, half-strip-width, quarter-strip-width.  The problem of how to connect them is yet to be solved.

I also covered another chair seat with utility leather.  The first one I did went from a suede-y dull green to a very polished brown after a few months of use.  It shows some scratches.

Put-together

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

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

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

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

Fiddling around

I've been chugging through a bunch of projects.  I converted a glider rocker with a broken mechanism to a normal rocker, using runners (?) saved from a handed-down family rocker that my children did in, complete with chewed-up ends from the family dog of the time.  I took off the lower level of the glider rocker, and bolted on the runners, after some shaping with a drawknife to remove projecting corners--which was complicated by the discovery of brads that were securing the rocker's cross pieces.  I worked around the brads until I could pull them out, pulled them, and then put them back in when I was done.

The finished rocker sits low and mostly rocks forward.  The runners are worn almost flat in the middle, and the rocking action is clunky.  It occurs to me that some more draw knife work might help there a lot.

Out in the yard, I put down some free leftover ceramic tiles interspersed with a set of marble coasters from a yard sale along a path in the garden, and then made a endpoint by putting down a slice of tree trunk.  The kids brought home three bins of these from a woodworker.

I started turning another tree trunk slice into a stool that can be shoved under the kitchen table, and found that all my drill bits of the right size for drilling pilot holes are getting very dull.

At that point, the family illness-of-the-week caught up with me, and I had to switch to less-strenuous projects:  finishing the embroidery on a tea towel, making more towel loops for the bath towels, taking the lace and worn spots off a vintage linen towel to make it usable, and stitching around the edges of my favorite bath towels so they don't fray.

I've also been enjoying my recent garage sale purchases, which include a little tin xylophone with brass bars that resound for several seconds when struck, and a student-grade violin, which I bought for $20 without even really looking at it, because I knew I still had my violin set-up CD from my previous sabbatical, when I made a fiddle from a kit.  The violin turned out to be in decent condition, just some scratches and stickers.  My husband found a guitar tuner, and I got it tuned up.  Then of course, I had to compare it with the fiddle.  The fiddle sounds better, part of which may be that it is just larger.  I found out that I need my bifocals to see where I'm bowing and fingering at the same time.

Lawn chair, lawn chair, chairs, armchair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temporary deck table

The small table we had been using on the deck has gotten wobbly and weather-beaten, and is now out in the playhouse.

To replace it, I started with the cable spool end that I've used in the living room before, and then I thought about how to make a base for it.  The spool end still has half of the spool shaft on it, so the base would have to be hollow in the middle.

The easiest option was to pull some chunks of 6x6 redwood deck beam out of the garage, and stack them log-cabin-style.

These chunks I had originally cut up to stand on end and tie together as sort of a piered chair, and they were individually painted.  There were also some redwood deck stiles, which I had used as table legs some years back, which I used for one layer in the stack.

The final result looks good enough, and better than it ought to.

Doing and undoing

I pushed through repairs on several items from my mending pile, and I have also been going through a much larger pile of handed-down clothing and fabric.

I sorted T-shirts, found the all-cotton ones that we don't want to wear as T-shirts, and cut them up for re-use in an Alabama Chanin-style project, which I can work on outdoors this spring while watching children.

Some of the less worthy fabrics went into the kitchen wipe and baby wipe pipelines.

Other have been butchered down to the re-usable parts, and put away until I get to them.

There were some shorts, which my children don't wear, which are going to be short pants for my youngest when the weather is a little warmer.  No alterations needed, because of the diaper.

The big thing remaining is a wool suit that my mother-in-law shrunk for a project, and then gave up on.  Wool jackets and coats are challenging to disassemble, because there is usually a lot of interfacing and inner structure going on.  It's very educational to see all the work that goes into one, though.  I am thinking of using the wool for a bog jacket, much smaller and simpler than the ones pictured at the link.

I was reading in an older book about how having prints and pictures hung up in a house made it more comfortable, and I had recently come across my set of small classroom butterfly posters and was planning to put them up anyway, so I found a place to string up some crocheted wire, and I hung them up with clothespins.  Only four small nail holes in the wall.

Chugging along

I've been doing a lot of organizing and cleaning, and also a little decorating.

The plastic blinds in the kitchen were very bad when we moved in, and I just took them down and bagged them up--I hate mini-blinds too much to spend money on buying new ones.

I finally got around to washing them in the bathtub.  Hot water, dish soap, and spray cleaner had little effect on the thick, tenacious goo that was on them except to soften it a little.  What did work was to scrub with a drippy mixture of baking soda and water.  They came out looking almost new.

To dry the blinds before storing them again, I figured out a way to suspend them from the shower curtain rod by hanging two clothes hangers on it first, and then slipping each end of the top of the blinds into a hanger.

I came out only a little ahead in the end, though, because some little child decided to break one slat, and then another, of the bathroom blinds. I will splint them back together.

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I did a quick decorating project of covering a half-painted canvas--that my husband picked up from some curbside a while back--with fabric, and hanging it on the wall.  I used tacks salvaged from one of my de-upholstery projects.  I put the nail into the wall a little too low, and then compensated by putting a small wooden spool onto the nail before hanging the panel back up.

I used to cover pieces of plywood with fabric, stapled on, and lean them against the wall to hide electrical outlets from the baby, or put them under crates that would otherwise scratch the floor.

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I looked through the mending bag, and found that I have an even dozen pairs of children's pants waiting to be mended.  I'm going to have to switch thread on the sewing machine.  The thread in it now is very prone to jumping free of the thread guides and creating slack that then tangles down inside the machine.  I was making a quick pillowcase for a seat cushion, and had to pause every few stitches to make sure the thread was behaving itself decently.

The seat cushion was for the deconstructed chair in the library.  I also added one piece of the wood to the back, with short drywall screws, and worked out a way to semi-attach the chunks of redwood beam that it is sitting on to each other, so they're not shifting and letting the chair fall over.

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In other tinkering, we replaced the light bulbs in a bedroom with ones of a warm color temperature, and found out why the glass shade was on upside-down--it is too small to accommodate full-size light bulbs.  I worked out a way of suspending it a little lower using a bolt, a nut, and a couple of washers, with the bolt running up through the center of the original hanger, and being secured from falling back out with the nut.  It was a three-handed job, and I might go back and add a short tube as a spacer to steady the shade.

Shrunk wool

I have been saving any and all woolen items that shrunk in the wash, for mittens and maybe for a rug.  I did need new mittens, my old ones were from a shrunken lambswool sweater and were wearing right out.

The sweater I used this time had been shrunk three times, two when I first got it to de-oversize it, and then the one unintentional time.  I did the usual--tracing my hand, adding width for seams and for the thickness of my hand and wrist, sewing a zigzag stitch on the line with extra reinforcement at the thumb joint, and then cutting them out.

I found out that they were a little too thick to sew together on the sewing machine, and had to be sewed by hand.  There was about a week where I was wearing mismatched mittens because I hadn't yet sewn the second one.

I also found that it would be better and much easier to leave the seam edges on the outside, and just wear the mittens inside out.  

So, as usual, they came out looking odd, but they are very warm.

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I also went through my smaller and less usable odds and ends of wool, and made a quick mat for boots and shoes.

My idea, based on an entry rug in the store that I almost bought some time ago, was to attach wool "rocks" to a backing.  For the backing, I used some synthetic felt that I had.  It was black, so I was looking for something to go over it.

Having my fabrics sorted by size turned out to be a good idea.  I quickly found several in my medium-size drawer that could be used for a sort of shoreline, and quilted them over the backing.

Since it was to be a mat, I allowed some of the cut "raw" edges of the fabrics to show, and only made the mat's edges neat.  I also allowed the fabrics to not always lie flat on the backing, to simulate shallow water.

Cutting out the "rocks" from the different wools was fun.  Many of them looked a lot like rocks that I've collected.

For attaching them, I used some old craft glue I had.  It is water-based, but also fairly water-resistant when dry.  If it is not enough, I can sew things together later.

It seemed best to brush a layer of glue over the back of each "rock", and then add a few more dabs of glue to engage with the backing.

It turned out well enough, aside from me not noticing until it was finished that I had forgotten to cut the backing to the width I wanted--!!  The glue stiffened the mat a lot, but it bends enough to fit on the shelf I made it for.

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I have a running question in my head about how long I can go before my household starts to be afflicted with wool-eating moths, as seems to have been usual before synthetic fibers.

Thread goes fast

I used up half a dozen spools of thread in making the coat, and almost three more since then in other sewing.

I cut fabric for two corduroy skirts, one of which is ready to assemble, once I finish doing some embroidery along the hem.  The handwork is delaying the skirt by only two days, and is visually striking.

I also turned a pile of old clothes into kitchen wipes and baby wipes and a pair of fitted leg warmers for me.  The leg warmers would have been easier if I had sewed the seams first, and then cut the fabric, because the edges of the knit fabric curled up a lot.  I use a zigzag stitch with knits.

I've been transitioning sock styles recently, from homemade knee-high tights with ankle sock feet, to wool blend hiking socks, because I'm not happy with the ankle socks.  The leg warmers are working well in conjunction with the hiking socks, and I will probably make more.  They are just tapered tubes with casings for elastic around the top.

I've also been transitioning my sleepwear toward clothes that resemble my daytime clothes, and I altered a few of my older skirts so they have just elastic at the waist, and not ties that are knotted, and they can be used for either purpose.

A few weeks ago we had a big snowfall of fluffy snow, just what I was waiting for for cleaning my old living room rug, since I never quite had the energy in the warm weather to haul it out and scrub it on a tarp.

Supposedly fluffy snow is best for rug cleaning.  I've read that if you spread a cold rug over the snow, and sweep snow across it, and perhaps dance on it, that the snow will melt slightly and release just enough water and ammonia into the rug to loosen soil.

In practice, I've found that the rug will not get clean, but it will get a little less dirty.  In this case, the rug started out fully dirty, because I didn't clean it at all before I put it in the garage.  Lots of sand came off, and the snow underneath it definitely got dirty.  I moved the rug to fresh snow to do the other side.

We made two large bowls of clean snow into snow ice cream, by adding sugar, cream, and vanilla, and they didn't last long.  I noticed just a slight ammonia taste, so it seems the source of my rug cleaning information was correct.

Cutting up, and weaving

I went through my mending basket, and decided which items were worth repairing.  The remainder I cut up, and filled the kitchen wipes jar, and a bag with more wipes, plus I filled a drawer with larger rags that I can cut up as needed, or just use as back-up towels.

I also unearthed my homemade loom and got the project on it going again.  I'm going to have to build up some muscles in my arms and upper back before I can weave for very long at a time.  There is a lot of reaching involved.

I have a plan to make a couple of little Christmas ornaments from juice can ends.  I try to make some kind of ornament every year, in sufficient quantity so each child has one of their own.

We made room for our Christmas tree, somewhat complicated by the fact that my improvised living room table will not fit through any of the interior doorways.  It is going into the back corner, which is a popular napping place because of the heating vent there.

   

Easy bird feeder, breadsticks

I was looking for DIY bird feeder ideas, and found lots of cute ones.  Then I had an idea for re-purposing a plastic hanging lantern that I've had for some years.

It looked very suitable, which turned out to be because it actually was a bird feeder.

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A child and I have developed a tag-team approach to making cheese-topped breadsticks:  I make the dough, and the child puts it onto the pan, does the toppings, and bakes it.

The dough is very simple, 6 cups flour, 3 cups very warm water, 2 tablespoons yeast--I usually use 1 and 1/2 tablespoons.  This covers a large cookie sheet thickly.  Halving the recipe or doing one-third of it is advisable.  

The lack of salt in the recipe and the relatively high proportion of yeast (best bought in bulk) helps the dough to rise more quickly than most bread doughs.  The recipe's source recommended 10 minutes of rising time.

We've been topping it with melted butter, mozzarella cheese, and garlic powder, and maybe also Parmesan cheese, and then baking it for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees.  It's good hot out of the oven, not so good cold.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

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.  

From chair to table

While the rocking chair was out for repairs, I brought my heavily-reconstructed armchair in to take its place. 

I'd been thinking about getting a table for the living room.  Then I got the idea of taking the back off the armchair, and putting a table top on.

That provided motivation to get the rocker back to a usable state, and the table followed not long after.

I did have to take the boards off the chair arms to get the back off.

For a table top, I used a cable spool end that my husband found a while back.  Someone had sawn one face off a cable spool, and then had thrown the rest of it out.

The cable spool is on the small side for the chair/base, but it is large enough to set a few things on, or to do a little project.  The chair seat provides a place to park a few of the larger toys.

My husband picked up a nearly-full bottle of Danish oil from the free shelf at the hazardous waste drop-off site.  Danish oil dries very quickly, and I should be able to do a bunch of things at once, if the weather cooperates.