The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

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.

First things first

"This seems to be axiomatic--going ahead with the work makes the tools show up.  They also seem to come in threes....Determination is a magnet."  -- Roy Underhill, The Woodwright's Shop:  A Practical Guide to Traditional Woodcraft

I have been lacking determination to finish any projects, except for building a toy bin to go under a play kitchen.  The bin helps get the toys off the floor, but since it is mostly open on the front, they still look like clutter.  I might put a little curtain on it.  I'm planning to put a finish on the bin to visually unite it with the play kitchen.  They are joined with leather straps on the back, and I should anchor the whole thing to the wall when I'm done.

After that, aside from being sick and reading through a stack of free Christian historical novels from the library, I began working through deep-cleaning various household biohazards.  In particular, my eldest child and I cleaned the refrigerator.  It is an early-90's model that is extremely simple and reliable compared to the dysfunctional 2010's fridge at our previous rented house.  

I discovered, through the advanced-level technique of reading the owner's manual that the previous owners thoughtfully left for our landlord, that the drain tray underneath is supposed to be cleaned monthly, instead of never.  There was a whole ecosystem in there.

I also cleared out some rotten onion "mush bombs" in the basement, and cleaned out the utility sink and both of the bathroom sink drains.  I have a length of wire with a little loop at one end like a fishing pole, and a handle at the other which keeps it from falling down the drain, for fishing out clogs.

Next on the deep cleaning list is the second fridge, which is a stupid little apartment fridge that frosts up badly; simple, but not in a good way.

George Floyd Square

I passed through George Floyd Square earlier this summer, serendipitously.  I didn't realize before that there isn't just the one Black power fist at the intersection, but also one in each of the neighboring intersections, which define the "Square".

It still looks a lot like the photo here.  You can drive through the Square, but the north-south traffic is squeezed over to accommodate the memorial.

The city wants the memorial out of the street.  The activists want to close off the street to traffic and build a memorial plaza.  Business owners have unsuccessfully sued the city for not providing law enforcement, and now are going to mediation.

When I was there, in the evening, there were only a few people around, and the mood was subdued, aside from someone yelling about a block away.

"The People's Way" former gas station across the street is--I think--where the city had their surveillance camera feed that the 911 dispatcher was watching in real time.

The general trend of the big cities going cashless has pushed many of the homeless out into the suburbs.  I saw a uniformed security guard at one of the mid-range grocery stores, and there were loiterers around the HarMar Mall last year and keycodes for the restrooms.

Upgrades

I was able to repair a sink strainer that wouldn't stay in the open position by taking a piece of plastic tube from a marker, the fatter kind of children's marker, and cutting a slit down the side so I could snap it onto the stem of the sink strainer to hold it up.  It would have been easier if I had cut it to the right length before making the slit.

I also experimented with making a simple dust jacket for a book out of quilting fabric.  It looks nice on the shelf with the normal books, although the fabric sticks out a bit at the top and bottom of the spine.  I expect that it will collect dust and need to be washed and ironed at some point.  I perhaps should have pre-shrunk the fabric.

Yesterday I used a handed-down upholstery remnant to replace the seat on a freebie metal patio chair.  The chair uses splines in channels at the sides to hold the fabric in place.  The original plastic mesh didn't have hems or channels sewn at the sides, but I put them in the replacement, for strength.  It took a considerable amount of work to put the new fabric on, with the splines in and with tension across the width.  I am sore today, but not nearly as sore as I should be, thanks to milk.   I had sore muscles before I started.  I'm somewhat doubtful about the strength of the fabric, but it supported an adult's weight, cautiously applied.

During my break I painted new letters on my keyboard.  It's not that old, but almost half of the alphabet had disappeared.  I used a contrasting color of nail polish to paint the missing letters on--in Morse code.  I didn't get all of them on very clearly, but it has helped me learn some more.

Preliminary results

I came across a little tiny online mention of a connection between Vitamin A deficiency and bleeding, and I realized that there was a possible recent correlation in my own life, memorable because of jury duty.

Here's the abstract of a medical paper on using Vitamin A to treat menorrhagia, from 1977:  "menorrhagia was alleviated in more than 92% of patients".

Sources of Vitamin A include carrots, eggs, and butter.

George MacDonald's Lilith

John C. Wright reviews Lilith also, after previously writing two posts about MacDonald's Phantastes. 

Lilith is indeed a very difficult book to understand--I've only read it two or three times, and I no longer own a copy--but at the same time the Lilith character is astonishingly modern in her pride and violence, and one of MacDonald's core messages that runs throughout his writings--obedience to God--is made very clear.

Most of the book is set within a highly-symbolic metaphysical landscape.  Within this landscape are a number of scenes that seem to be intended to express spiritual truths.  One scene that has stuck with me ever since reading the book is a never-ending furious battle between two factions, both of which claim they are on the side of Truth.  This battle has no effect at all on the rest of that world.  The protagonist does not engage in it, goes off on a foolish crusade of his own, and eventually has to simply obey instructions about one small rock, which when properly placed brings a great deal of healing.

My understanding of the Lona character is that she appeared to be about fifteen years old, which in MacDonald's time was sometimes considered a marriageable age.  The two very similar white leopards are also difficult to sort out.  One is Lilith, and I believe the other is the daughter of Adam and Eve who also appeared as the masked lady at the house.

For the Little Ones and the Bags, it is helpful to consider The Princess and Curdie, where Curdie is given the gift of being able to discern a person's moral nature.  A wicked person's hand feels to him like the foot of the beast they are morally descending toward; Curdie's good mother's work-hardened hands feel human, and soft and lovely.  MacDonald was showing how a person could descend into brutishness and a very thorough spiritual dullness. 

Addendum to The Fall of Minneapolis

Earlier post here.  [Edit:  I have added to it a bit.]

Derek Chauvin's wife Kellie entered (and won) the Mrs. Minnesota America pageant in 2018 with the encouragement of her friend and earlier Mrs. Minnesota Andrea Bennett Xiong, whose husband was Tou Ger Xiong, Twin Cities Hmong celebrity.

It has been reported that Tou Ger Xiong was kidnapped, stabbed a dozen times, and thrown down a hill in Columbia; multiple Minnesota Congresspersons have issued statements.

It's very odd that this came only a few weeks after Derek Chauvin was stabbed in prison.

Christmas stuffed

Every year I start to get the house into reasonably-decluttered order in the fall...and then the holidays hit.

This year, I had the idea of filling up the Christmas decoration boxes with regular decor and other stuff, once the Christmas decorations were up.

It's only two small boxes, and within a few minutes I had found enough items to fill them both.  This was not just swapping regular displays for Christmas decor, but also making some areas downright austere to compensate for ornamental elaboration elsewhere.  

There were a couple of small items that I just put up on the Christmas tree.  A few days ago, I moved a wall hanging to the undecorated back entry, to make room for my Christmas sign.

Another idea I had was to put a tray on top of our toaster oven.  We don't use it often for toasting, but it always has lots of smaller things on top of it because we have very little counter space.  Now it can be cleared off and used much more easily.

Similarly, I put a tray on top of the painted crate we hold to hold tea and teacups, which will make it much easier to plug in the toaster oven when we want to use it.  

The Fall of Minneapolis

An alt-news documentary on George Floyd's death and its aftermath is out now:  The Fall of Minneapolis.  It blows the mainstream narrative right out of the water.

Many of the places in it are recognizable.  Fortunately--or Providentially--we moved out of the Third Precinct before 2020 hit.  The government center where Chauvin's trial was, was where I had had jury duty years earlier.  I've been to the bookstore where Keith Ellison found the Antifa handbook.

The documentary is missing some important context:  most importantly, a disclosure that the producer and host, Liz Collin, is married to Bob Kroll, who was head of the Minneapolis police union in 2020.  The protest led by John Thompson that is shown was outside their house.  [Edit:  Thompson's son Derek crashed into and killed a carload of Somali young women earlier this year.]

The portrayal of the police is very positive, but you can see that there is long-standing antagonism between the police and multiple segments of the city's population.

Also there is no city surveillance video from across the street, which was visible in real time to the 911 dispatcher; the camera was at the gas station I guess.  That business with Floyd being kneeled on for 7 minutes 46 seconds, then 8 minutes 46 seconds, and then 9 minutes 29 seconds, was caused by the City of Minneapolis sitting on that video good and hard until Chauvin's trial the following year, and it has never been released to the public.

Later on, after that gas station was closed down, a kidnapped guy was held there for a night or two, in between being driven around to ATMs to withdraw cash.  I'm not sure how to correlate that against the protest/occupation activity in that area.  There's a Minneapolis teacher who has been very dedicated to being right there and being seen and heard.  [Edit:  Marcia Howard]

Darnella Frazier, the black teenager standing on the sidewalk taking the video of Floyd, received a special Pulitzer prize for it.  Later on, her uncle got killed in someone else's police chase while sitting in his car.  As far as I know, that was an accident.

George Floyd's girlfriend worked at the school Daunte Wright attended, and she was back in the media after he was accidentally shot and killed by police.

George Floyd's family, including his mother Larcenia and brother Philonise, received a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis, but for some reason Floyd's roommates were saying months later that his family never came over to get his Bible or other belongings.  [Edit:  I believe Floyd's aunt lives or lived in the Twin Cities metro area.] 

Chauvin's mother Carolyn Pawlenty is a cousin-in-law of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.  Chauvin's now ex-wife Kelly was a Mrs. Minnesota beauty pageant winner.  [Edit:  a little more about that here, including death of Tou Ger Xiong] Chauvin and Floyd used to work security at the same club, which burned down in the riots.

John Thompson's son was recently in big trouble for fleeing police at high speeds in a rented car and T-boning a car full of Somali young women, killing them all.

Liz Collin was interviewed by Candace Owen after being fired from the local CBS station, I think that was later in 2020.

Umbrella Man, who kicked off the window-smashing at the Autozone (more-or-less kitty-corner from the 3rd Precinct police station) was at one point identified as a white supremacist who had previously been in a group harassing a Muslim convert in nearby tourist destination Stillwater, but I haven't heard that he was ever arrested.

Donald Williams, visible among the bystanders on the sidewalk with the boxing club hoodie, was caught on video hitting a police car with a shopping cart, I think it was, during the rioting at the St. Paul Midway Target store.  He's been in legal trouble a couple of times since then:  alleged domestic violence against his girlfriend near the Minnesota State Fair, and recently a disturbance at a suburban school when they wouldn't let him come inside to pick up his kid.

Finally fall...

 ...after almost five months of August:  May was August, June was August, July was August, August was August, most of September was August, and even some of October has been August.

We didn't have the air conditioning on at all this year, so fall weather is a reprieve and a chance to really get moving on projects again.

In particular, dealing with all the things that have piled up all over the house.

I don't even have a craft project going on at the moment, except that I delegated one experiment to some bored children by having them draw on fabric with scraps of soap.  I will iron the fabric, wash it, and see if any grease stains from the soap survive the washing.  I'm looking for a way to give plain fabric a subtle pattern.

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Myquillyn Smith, "The Nester", is putting up transcripts with her podcasts now; an example.

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Locally, I'm watching the school board election and the referendums for funding that they have on the ballot.  The school board candidates are unimpressive.  The information from the school board on the referendums managed to outdo our last school district, by putting a lie on the first page instead of the second:  "This publication is not circulated on behalf of any candidate or ballot question."  That was at the bottom of the page, but it says "IT'S TIME TO RENEW" at the top, in much larger letters, and then they go on to do everything but fill in the "YES" ovals in the sample ballot questions.

They're trying to push through a big increase in their operating levy and have it increase with inflation.  Also, they're trying to trying to renew the technology levy, which is actually larger than the current operating levy.

A school district in one of the Twin Cities inner-ring suburbs recently called off in-person school for a day for the upper grades with only two hours notice, after some sort of threat.  I expect there will be much more of that in the future.

Sabbatical revelation

In my book on sabbaticals, I showed how God had on several Biblical occasions used times of rest to establish covenants with people:  Noah after the Flood, Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai after their liberation from the Egyptians, and Nehemiah and the Israelites after the Exile.

I was shown another one today:  God's covenant with David in II Samuel 7--also mentioned in Psalm 89--after "the LORD had given him rest round about from all his enemies".

  

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.

Lawn chair webbing, and other maintenance

I was experimenting this morning with ironing layers of milk jug plastic together--with a layer of baking parchment paper to protect the iron--in the hopes of making a solid enough material for a lawn chair seat.

I gave up after a while.  The plastic bonded poorly, tended to warp and wrinkle, and was rather brittle after it cooled down.

Next idea:  use a big piece of synthetic upholstery fabric to make "giant bias tape"--bands of folded fabric, only with the fabric cut with the grain instead of diagonally as done with real bias tape--and then to use the bands as webbing.

I figured a triple thickness of the fabric would be enough.  I now have the bands cut and the "raw" edges secured with stitching.

The next step, and the hardest one, will be to attach these to the chair frame so that the connectors don't tear out.

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In other work, I managed to pull off the hot glue that I had used to winterize my bedroom window.  Last summer it was on there very firmly, but a second year of temperature changes weakened the bond a lot.  So now I can open the window.

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We've been around to a number of neighborhood yard sales, and we found many useful items, in particular jeans and work pants for teenage boys, and several pairs of shoes that fit me and a child.  I had been in a mall shoe store not long before, where there were practically no acceptable shoes, so it was very timely to find the yard sale shoes.

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I finally got to a leather store, and bought some utility leather for re-covering indoor chair seats.  I've learned from a previous attempt that fabric store vinyl is much less durable than the original vinyl.  If the leather doesn't survive, I'm going to use steel plate.

Putting the leather on took a while, mostly in trying to wrap it gracefully around the corners, given that the leather was too thick to have more than two layers of it on the underside of the seat.  I used carpet tacks from the home improvement store, which worked fine.

Rather a surprise

 One of the washcloths that I made from an old skirt is now threadbare to the point of developing holes.  What I noticed is that the areas that happened to be embroidered from when it was a skirt are not nearly as threadbare; the fabric density there is about double that of the undecorated portions, not including the embroidery yarn and thread--which were stitched as a yarn embroidery "couched" or stitched down with buttonhole thread.

So the embroidery has done a lot to protect the fabric from abrasion, mostly during washing, and has also helped to contain the fibers so they don't work their way out of the fabric.

Willow planter basket

My husband brought home another load of willow branches, and I used about half of it to make a large, bottomless basket as an enclosure for plant pots.

The whole thing took over six hours:  stripping leaves off branches, braiding all of the sufficiently flexible branches into a very long, one-inch-wide braid, loosely coiling and stacking the braid around a two-foot-diameter stump table into a basket form, and then weaving stiffer branches down between the braids--first a few branches, and then taking the semi-structured basket off the stump and putting in the rest.  A hammer would have helped toward the end as the coiled braids tightened up.

It helped that all the branches and I were out in the rain for some of that process, so they didn't dry out while I was working.  The basket is now drying, will need trimming, and definitely has what decorators call "presence".  I will make some kind of a liner for it, later on.

The thinnest willow branches resemble wicker, but are not nearly as strong.  I peeled bark from some of the thicker branches, experimentally, and the bark is not very strong either.

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.

Where's the beans??

I don't know when the cheaper brands of baked beans started being canned as a big lump of beans swimming in a sea of liquid, but now I have encountered it twice, once in a store brand, and once in a brand from one of the largest ag companies.

In the latter case, I pulled out a strainer and measured:  just about exactly half of the can's contents by volume were pourable liquid.

I hate washing strainers.

This reminds me of early in the pandemic, when dried pasta suddenly started taking much longer to cook for some reason.

In other activities, I was able to repair watchbands for two children.  I took a toy apart and pulled some dust out of it that was getting in the way of the mechanism.  I altered a swimsuit so that it would fit for another season.

I knit a dishcloth from acrylic yarn rejected by a child, who also went through a substantial fabric stash and burn-tested samples to separate out the ones with synthetic fibers.

I finished one section of crochet for my curtain project.

Several pairs of pants were retired for being too far gone in the seat, and there is at least one more that needs to be retired, now that I think of it.

My husband dehydrated some cabbage.  I learned that you can freeze tomatoes whole.  Children have been growing mint.

My husband also brought home a vintage metal-frame chair similar to three that we already own.  They are very child-resistant, except for the vinyl seats.  My longer-term plan is to redo them in sturdy leather.

A family from church is making big changes to their diet, and they gave us several boxes of food from their pantry that they could no longer eat.  It was good to get a change from our usual and somewhat tedious simple foods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independence Day

We took some popcorn and lemonade and went to see fireworks last night.

I've been progressing with the old-lady-style crochet, but not so far as to want to practice holding the thread properly.

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I took a short barrel-style upholstered chair from the fifties that I patched up a while back, and stripped all of the upholstery off it.  The most recent potty-trainee had frequently used it as a place to quietly go without immediate detection, and I am not in favor of unwashables in the home.

As usual, it was a messy and somewhat hazardous process, but very satisfying in its own way.

The chair turned out to have two sets of springs in the seat and cushion, which explained the chair's other popularity as a trampoline.

The looseness in the frame turned out to be from two bolts, easy to deal with.  Beyond that, the structure is fine except for the beginnings of a crack along the top.

I am thinking of building the bare frame out a bit with wood, doing some shaping and sanding, and then finishing it simply with Danish oil (fast) or linseed oil (slower).  For the seat, I am replacing the springy cushion with a washable pillow, and keeping the bottom springs.  Some amount of new padding and cover will have to go over those.

I saved all of the tacks that I pulled out of the chair while stripping it down, which will be useful for other chair projects, especially since our main staple gun is currently nonfunctional in some non-obvious way.

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As a research project, I tried mixing acrylic paint with dryer lint, to see what I could do with it.  I found that the lint, mostly cotton, absorbed a lot of the water from the paint, so it dried very quickly and was different to even mix through the lint.  Kneading the two together (wearing rubber gloves) was unpleasantly like handling freshly-vomited cat hairballs, and the dried result is very much like painted hairball.