Gov. Walz adds more dials

After directing all school districts to construct plans for scenarios of in-person, distance, and hybrid (a mix of both to reduce student density to 50% school capacity) schooling, Governor Walz finally unveiled his executive order for how schools can re-open in the fall.

It is based on the 14-day number of new cases per 10,000 in population, by county--which is very much a moving target.  It separates the older and younger students, so that the lower grades shift to hybrid or distance learning a step behind the higher grades, thus helping somewhat with the issue of parents needing school-provided child care.

There has already been a lot of confusion among adults about that 14-day number:  is it the total number of new cases over the 14 days, or the daily average?  The low numbers of the thresholds (in the few tens of cases per 10,000) imply that it's the daily average, but in the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they mean the total number. This article has a graphic showing where the counties currently fall in this scheme.

The devil is in the details, as usual.  The executive order allows school districts some discretion, but really only in the direction of being more restrictive, as it threatens intervention by state officials in schools that stay open where the numbers of new cases are too high. State officials may graciously allow schools to continue in-person instruction if a local outbreak happens but is concentrated outside the school.

Parents are allowed to choose distance learning for the entire school year, and teachers may request to work from home.

According to a FAQ, if a student tests positive, then they will contact trace, and request that all close contacts found stay home for 14 days.  Their definition of close contacts:

Close contact is when someone is within 6 feet of the ill person for at least 15 minutes.

From the Safe Learning Plan:

Close contacts are defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset until the time the patient is isolated

More than fifty close contacts from one individual may trigger a Testing Event, which is apparently a gathering for mass testing, with help from the state. Universal testing within a school community is also mentioned, if there's a big outbreak.

In the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they are thinking of sending the entire classroom home for distance learning if exposed. 

Minneapolis has already decided to go to all-distance learning for the year.  St. Paul is likely to follow.  The suburbs seem to be leaning toward trying the hybrid model.

Walz is a former teacher, by the way.

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.

Sent outside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Progress

I've started putting the chair that I'm reupholstering back together. I am trying to use what I have for it, and not buy anything.

It is remarkable how much materials and labor go into a piece of upholstered furniture.

For a layer of seat padding, I decided to take strips of fabric and crochet them, just like a rug. I used several old skirts that I had retired; there's a lot of fabric of them, but it is too worn to use for just anything. Crocheted, they become dense and a bit lumpy, so there will need to be another layer of padding above that. I am going to use the pillow that my grandma made for the chair seat.

Underneath the crocheted layer, there is supposed to be a layer of burlap. I have a piece that's large enough-- which I have sometimes used as a Christmas tree skirt--and it is older stuff, about twice as substantial as the burlap being sold in the craft stores now, so it will work well.

I have plenty of the outer fabric, given to me at Christmas, and I have fabric paint for making some sort of a pattern on it. I am thinking of doing block printing with carved potatoes, and I have a couple of potatoes set aside for that, but they are getting shriveled and old. I may have to switch to some other vegetable.

I salvaged some of the tacks when I stripped the old upholstery off the chair, and I also have some tacks left over from an earlier project. I am going to use a staple gun for some parts, because one of the pieces of the frame is starting to split. It is still strong and doesn't need repair yet, but I don't want to be driving tacks into it.

I still need a couple of things:  some kind of stiffener for the back of the chair, originally this was a large piece of paperboard; and some paperboard tacking strips. For the padding on the back, I will either crochet up some more of my scrap fabric, or use foam from a couple of spare cushions.

Aspirations

When I started this blog, I planned on leaving politics out of it, but it turned out that politics doesn't plan on leaving me alone, and is having serious effects on my household's finances.  In today's example, Minnesota is working hard to transform itself into the California of the Midwest.

It's all kind of intertwined, but at the foundation are a solid belief in climate change*, and a steadfast faith in the power of collective, government-led effort to get things done.  There is a law on Minnesota's books, the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which mandates a 30% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, and a 80% reduction by 2050.  The state is not on track to meet those goals, but by golly, they're trying.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is considering adopting California's ZEV and LEV standards, as several other states have already done. The initial public comment period on this effort closed yesterday; fortunately I was working on some of these things yesterday morning, and I noticed the deadline in time to get my comments prepared and submitted.

The LEV (Low Emissions Vehicle) standard would require that most new vehicles sold in Minnesota meet California emission standards. Apparently, federal law requires that states wanting to set more stringent emissions standards must either use the California standards, or do nothing.  The MPCA may take Colorado's LEV standard (which basically incorporates the California standard by reference) as a model for Minnesota's version.

I don't see how letting another state write your state's laws can end well.  Population of Los Angeles metro area:  4 million.  Population of the entire state of Minnesota:  5.7 million.

The ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) standard would set delivery quotas for electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles for car manufacturers wishing to sell new cars in Minnesota. From a news report, it appears that people wanting to buy ZEV vehicles in Minnesota at present are having a bit of a hard time finding them, though most of them manage to purchase one in the end.

It turns out that this slight shortage in ZEV supply is because California and several others states have adopted ZEV standards, so the manufacturers are delivering these vehicles first to the states where they are required to deliver them.  In my comments, I pointed out that the economic forces at play will sort this situation out over time, without any government intervention at all. And that if government intervention sets the ZEV quotas above demand, then the manufacturers and dealers may start having to subsidize ZEV sales by charging more for higher-emissions vehicles.

This is another of those "unintended consequences" that keep popping up. They're never in my favor, either.

The MPCA claims that the LEV and ZEV standards would only affect manufacturers and dealers.  That is baloney; new car buyers would also be affected, as well as used car buyers in a few years as these vehicles trickle into the used car market.

Colorado's LEV standard exempts passenger vehicles over twelve passengers; I see a fifteen-passenger high-emissions van in my future.  Our family is large, but not that large. It's not a gain on the climate change front, either.

On the utility front, our utility is proposing to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, and to get to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050; not only meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement**, but exceeding them. They are asking for permission from the Public Utilities Commission to retire all of their coal-powered plants ten years early, and to build a lot more wind and solar power generation capacity.

The problems, of course, are that wind and solar electricity generation often don't track with electricity demand, and that it is very hard and expensive to store excess electricity in large quantities for the times when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining--which could be for days or even weeks.

Their solution is *waving the magic Technology wand* to use the power of technology to manage demand rather than supply. That looks to me like it is going to involve some kind of real-time pricing:  very cheap electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and very expensive electricity when they aren't.

Minnesota does have a nuclear power plant, but from what I've read, it sounds like they are working only on keeping it open, and not on building another one. The environment lobby Force is very strong in Minnesota, and it does not always act coherently.

Buried deep within the bowels of the utility's Carbon Report, I have found an implied wish list:  1.  Substantial tax subsidies for their "de-carbonization".  2.  That Minnesota be converted to a "high-electrification state, requiring that electricity be used for cooking, water heating, space heating, and passenger vehicles.  3.  That private generation of electricity (at least at the level of large businesses, etc.) be banned.

So, their brilliant plan to stop climate change and save the world is to use my tax money to force me to use electricity for everything, and then, when their zero-carbon-emissions electricity proves unreliable, to bar me from making my own electricity.

I just finished reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which makes a strong case that socialism always requires some sort of a common cause, and always ends up using coercion by force. I am also in the middle of a book about the history of the Baptist church in Russia.  Under the Soviet Union the Communists found it politically convenient to set the Church up as the internal enemy of all good Communists--as opposed to creating an external enemy that they might end up having to fight a war with, if passions ran too high.

More and more, I am starting to see climate change as the modern unifying cause of the socialists, the justification that they are using to take over control over more and more of the world's physical economic activity. Climate change cannot be separated from economic activity, because in their view economic activity causes climate change. The climate modelers are having to incorporate manufacturing and land use and so on into their models, and they already are showing a distinct tendency to want to control those activities in order to control climate change. This will not end well; it doesn't even end well when the economists are in charge.


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*The short version of my opinion of climate change is that we are working very hard to solve a problem that may not even exist.

**I read the Paris Agreement. It's only sixteen pages, but it has already spawned a complex of committees busily generating large quantities of documents written in bureaucrat-ese.  The character of the Paris Agreement can be seen clearly in its practice of calling a regular international assessment of progress toward reducing carbon emissions a "global stocktake"--overt Newspeak, in an Orwellian global program. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but the process will take some time.

Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.

Nearly there

A few things remain to be done in our school room, but it is almost done.  My to-do list:

1.  Find or make a runner to replace the carpet remnants. I've found fabrics around the house with approximately the color I want, and have spread them out there to test it, and it does work well there. The challenge is that our budget is still basically zero. I have some materials that I could use to make a rug, but it would take a lot of dye to get the color I want.

2.  One of the lamps is a bit puny for the place it is in.  Also, its shade is beginning to fall apart.

3.  Make "an art" to go in that last empty piece of wall.

While I've been thinking about or waiting on these things, I've been getting back into some other projects, mostly sewing; the point of having the room "done" is so that the business of living can go on without having to think about it too much. I sewed some summer toddler clothes from my mother-in-law's leftover quilt fabrics, and turned an old knit skirt into a T-shirt for me.

Finally, some sewing

I was able to get some sewing done after getting the garden harvest stored:

1.  Mending:  Several items of family clothing received minor or moderate repairs.

2.  Clothing:  I finally got around to sewing one of the skirts I had planned to make for my "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing sprint in the spring. After it was sewn, I overdyed it, and the color turned out well.
Notable for this project was that the fabric shower curtain I was using for fabric wasn't quite large enough to cut all of the skirt pieces out whole, so I had to do some careful piecing and pattern matching to get all the fabric I needed. It adds a subtle but interesting custom detail to the finished skirt. (I did a flat seam by overlapping the pieces by an inch, and then sewing two lines of zigzag stitches down the overlapped part. The exposed raw edge has frayed down to the stitching, making a short fringe.)

3.  Curtains:  I was given several yards of cotton upholstery-weight velvet, and curtains seemed like the best place to use it; I have been thinking about how to bootstrap my way into a somewhat more mature style of decorating. I sewed up a set of curtains from the fabric, put them up, and then realized that the stiffness of the material made them almost impossible to open. And when they were closed, they were overwhelming the room. I took them down, and cut half of them in half lengthwise, stabilizing the cut edges with a quick zigzag stitch. Then I put them back up, and made some quick curtain ties from selvedge edges that were left over.  Now they make a style statement, but not too much of one.

4.  High chair cover:  Months ago, I threw out the cover to the high chair; I had gotten tired of it, and it had seen more than a decade of use anyway. I finally began putting together some bits and pieces of someone's abandoned wall hanging project from the 90's, and have a basic cover sewn together now. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go in finishing it nicely.

A solution for a leaning drying rack

Folding drying racks are very useful, but they always seem to start leaning over, after just a little use.

My husband came up with a simple fix, though:  get a stick that is about as tall as the drying rack, and tie it (upright and a bit off-center), to the rack's diagonal pieces, to support the end of the drying rack.

I will add a picture when I can, but right now my drying rack is in use!

I think if you make the ties for the stick just a little loose, you'll be able to slide the stick out and fold the rack.

Raw materials!

Family members handed down to me a bag or two of some quilter's old fabric and thread stash...dating from the early '90s, by the look of the fabric patterns.

Some of the fabric I simply cut up and put in the kitchen wipes jar.

The rest I sorted out and started thinking about using.

One piece was just about enough for a blouse, minus the sleeves, but there was also a coordinating piece of fabric that was just big enough for the sleeves.

With the homemade blouse pattern that I have, it now takes me roughly three hours of working time to sew a blouse.  (Or, in real time, about three days.)  I finished sewing it yesterday, and I'm wearing it now.

The collar is a little goofy (as usual), and it's a bit too long, but otherwise it turned out well.

There are two smaller pieces of fabric in the stash that I started putting together into a hat.

Also there are three or four smaller pieces that I think would work well for a baby garment.

I'm going to have to look at the other larger pieces again, to see what other possibilities there might be.

What I've been up to

Resting after Wardrobe in a Week.

Mopping up a few last things from that week.

Being sick.

And finishing these:

Which are a kind of slipper or light shoe (flat heel and very thin sole), based mostly on the method of Mary Wales Loomis.

I don't have her book, although I'm sure it is marvelous and well worth the money, if you want to make your own shoes.  I have gone off the information she has helpfully provided on her site, paying back with prayers for her well-being.

Her method is to make a pair of plaster casts using shoes you already have, then build up the inner parts of the shoes with stiffened buckram and structural pieces scavenged from old shoes, then sew up the uppers (around the top edge), stretch them around the forms, hand sew back and forth across the bottoms to hold them in place, then glue on the soles and heels, and put in the insoles.

Here are my forms (plaster plus some papier mache filling out gaps; I didn't have quite enough plaster, and not enough got down into the toes), with my stiffened buckram drying around it:

I was in a no-buy mood at that stage, so I used burlap scraps for buckram at the sides, heel stiffening from an old pair of shoes that I pulled apart (very educational, deconstructing a higher-quality shoe; highly recommended), and for the toes I handwove crochet cotton--something that is worthy of a post of its own.

After this step, I set all this aside to work on WiaW, and to be sick with a nasty summer cold.  During that time, we had very humid weather, and my plaster/papier mache forms started growing mold inside their loose plastic bags.

When I got back to them, I found the mold, taped the bags completely closed, and tried to get the shoes finished off quickly, so I could throw the forms away.

The hardest part in making shoes is actually fiddling around and thinking about the next step.

Cutting leather is not that hard; I use kitchen shears, and occasionally a steak knife.

It is indeed a wonderful thing to have accurate models, to build up your shoes around.  Note that these shouldn't be shaped exactly like your feet, but instead like the space that your feet will need inside the shoe. So the better fitting the shoes that you make your forms from, the better the final result will fit.  That was what held me back when I was trying to start making shoes, several years ago:  I didn't own any shoes that fit me well enough to be worth duplicating.

There were several points in the shoemaking process where actually buying the book would have been helpful.  This was certainly a very challenging project for me, and I was tempted at times to give up.

One point where I had a lot of problems was how to keep the edge of the upper from sliding around or stretching out of shape while stitching across the bottom.  I did run a few long stitches across the hole to help hold the shape, but it wasn't enough to keep the entire top edge from ending up about 3/8 to 1/2 inch lower than I had intended--which is a lot, for a shoe.

Another is that the cotton upholstery velvet that I was using is thick, and was hard to gather up underneath the foot neatly.  I decided that the underside was too bumpy to glue to directly, so I elected to do a two-needle saddle stitch around the edges of the sole, making holes with an awl (which could be improvised from a nail and a small chunk of wood, if necessary, but I happen to have one).

(Sometimes people cut a little groove in the leather for the stitches to sit down in, but in this case the leather was too thin.)

Still, the slippers are wearable for the intended purpose, and I learned a lot that may be helpful in the future.

Costs:  $13 (at full retail) for vegetable-tanned leather for the sole, cotton velvet was handed down to me (and dyed with some leftover dye during WiaW), inner lining is from an old skirt, sole was stitched with about $3 of waxed braided cord left over from an earlier project, inner sole is about $1 worth of scrap leather from surplus store, buckram was handmade from hand-me-down materials and scraps, fabric stiffener fluid was handed down to me, a pair of teardown shoes for potential parts (only heel stiffening used) and assembly hints was $7 at Goodwill, and the thread was a Christmas gift.

Barge Cement (available at Hobby Lobby) was $8, but I ended up not using any for this project.

The shoes I disassembled did give me one valuable hint about how to make the shoe bend in the right place:  put a pattern of little slits into the inner sole at that point, enough to make it more flexible there, while not reducing the strength of the leather by too much.  In these shoes, the inner sole was not even leather, but a high-quality paperboard--no wonder modern shoes start falling apart when they get wet!

WiaW: Day 5

Tomorrow will be my last working day of my "Wardrobe in a Week".  Today I:

put my homemade interfacing (painted fabric) into a collar--by basting it onto the top edge, and covering it with another layer of the shirt fabric (left over from when I made the shirt last year); the interfacing seems to have about the right amount of stiffness, and the collar looks much better

ironed (!) two skirts that are cut on the bias, which have a problem with the hem rolling up about three times over, making the skirts a bit too short; this needs a more permanent solution

made another working-around-home skirt from start to finish, after realizing that the one I started before (of coarse woven polyester) will be much too heavy and hot for summer wear; this one from cotton from a handed-down duvet cover

sewed up a small hole in a T-shirt

made a minor alteration to a homemade nursing bra

did an experiment with joining the legs of homemade tights (which had holes in the heels) to the feet of socks that I really didn't like that much as socks


I also had some accomplishments in deciding what not to do as I finish up this week:

not sewing the polyester skirt, as already mentioned

not sewing two blouses that I had planned on making; they can wait until fall

not sewing a full set of new underwear, only repairing what I already have

WiaW: Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WiaW: Day 1

My first day of actual sewing, for my "Wardrobe in a Week" effort. Today I focused on getting a number of small repairs and alterations done, which moved seven items of clothing out of my to-do pile and back into my closet:

2 bras repaired; mended a rip and replaced a missing hook and (with needlenose pliers) bent one of the other hooks back to something like its original shape

replaced a button on a pajama top

did a line of simple embroidery around the neckline of a (previously homemade) T-shirt

repaired some embroidery on the neckline of a different (also homemade) T-shirt

made over a skirt to be shorter and narrower, to serve as an underskirt for my two wrap skirts

took out a goofy-looking side seam on another skirt, and sewed it back up


I also got a few other things done:

soaked an older T-shirt in Oxyclean (I am not an affiliate of anything) to see if it helped...it did, a little

washed and dried the quilting fabric I bought, to preshrink it before sewing

drew up a quick pattern for a camisole, and cut the fabric; started sewing, but doubt that it is going to go well with this particular fabric (very thin)

again looked over several of the remaining items of clothing to be dealt with, and decided what to do with them

WiaW: Final preparations

I did not get done all of the things that I wanted to, but I got enough done...I think.

I made a trip to the fabric store, and after much deliberation spent my $25 budget on enough quilting cotton to make a skirt, plus elastic for making underwear, and dye. (I have plenty of fabric at home, just in the wrong weaves, fibers, and colors...one of those attributes I can change, although I consider dyes to be too toxic for me to use more than occasionally.)

The cheaper fabrics for sale at the store make more sense if you realize that their true purpose is not to be sewn up and enjoyed, but to drive you to pay more to buy the fabrics that are tastefully designed and useful.

I also spent some time digging through my baskets of fabric just looking, and in making decisions about what I am going to sew this week--including making some more rectangle color sketches to see how various tops and skirts work together.

WiaW: Planning Session 1

This is my week of planning before doing a "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing blitz next week (for my summer wardrobe only).

I started by making a blank book for this project by stapling several sheets of white paper together along the top, and then turning it sideways. (Using the paper sideways gives more room for ideas to spread out and blossom, I recently learned.)

I began my analysis by figuring out how many waking hours in a week I have--about 119 hours out of 168--and how I typically spend my time during the week...the idea being that I will need more outfits for the activities that I do most often.

I found that I spend 95% of my waking hours working at home (on various things), running errands, or on informal outings. The other 5% is mainly spent at church and church events, along with errands in less informal settings, such as going to the bank. There is also the possibility of having weddings and funerals to attend, or of having unusually messy work to do somewhere.

Next, I made a chart of how many outfits I estimate will need this summer, based on the above activities, and a laundry schedule of one laundry day per week. I temporarily filled this chart in with outfits consisting of clothing I already have; this is to expose some of the more obvious gaps in my wardrobe. More will appear as I choose to retire or repurpose some items.

I also started making a list of repairs and alterations and new sewing that I want to do next week. Since I will need to be very efficient with my time next to accomplish everything I want to do, I am thinking now about how to minimize sewing machine set-up time, such as time spent changing needles or thread, or winding bobbins. So I'm going to be sorting and batching these tasks by the needle and the thread that are required.

The secret formula behind modern life...

...the compound interest formula:

A = P * (1 + (r/n))^^nt, where A is the total amount that will be paid, P is the principal of the loan, r is the interest rate per year (as a decimal), n is the number of times the interest is compounded during a year, and t is the number of years of the loan.

 ^^ means exponent; the Advanced or Scientific versions of a computer's Calculator can handle those.

I call it a secret formula, because I don't have it memorized, and I couldn't even find it in our home library. I ended up having to look it up online. Nor was it part of my high school education. I'm not sure I even saw it in a college class.

But it does have a huge impact on modern life. My husband recently sent me a "I got $90,000 into student loan debt and now my life sucks" online article.

The writer mentioned that she had split a $10 per month Netflix bill with her college roommate.

I dug up the compound interest formula, and figured out just how much that Netflix really cost her:

$5 per month = $60 dollars per year; that's P here.

Her highest interest rate loan was 9.25%, so let r = 0.0925.

Student loan interest is compounded monthly, I believe, so n = 12.

For the time period t, I chose 20 years, because it will take her at least that long to pay off all those loans, unless she marries unusually well. She is only now beginning to realize that she'll be paying on those loans for the rest of her life if she only pays the interest due, and never pays down the principal.

The result came out to almost $387 a year; more than five times what she thought it cost her. For Netflix alone. Now run a similar calculation for her new clothing from the mall and similar non-necessities.

There's a reason that the Bible contains many admonitions to avoid debt, if at all possible, and also, for ancient Israel, laws for limiting how far Israelites could get into financial bondage on the one hand, or could enslave their countrymen and capture all the wealth, on the other.

No-sew soft fabric box

I had a pile of old magazines and papers that I am keeping for collage and art journaling, sitting in a corner and needing a container to look Organized. I was thinking of making a shallow box from cardboard, but I got tired of waiting for cardboard to show up, and made a box out of fabric instead...a double layer of green twill from my fabric stash--which I had just looked through.

The box is shaped like this parchment paper pan liner, and is held together at the corners by safety pins. I shaped it around a magazine so that it would be wide enough and long enough.

I bent one of the pins, trying to force it through the layers of fabric, but I have plenty; Grandma sent me off to college with a good supply of them.

Fixing a toilet that runs too long

One of our toilets went from running a rather long time after a flush, to running a very long time.... Time to look in the tank and see what is going on.

In my experience, there are several reasons a toilet might run too long:  the flapper or cup that closes the hole at the bottom doesn't sit right, or the float (a cup or a ball) needs to be adjusted, or the inlet valve is bad and needs to be replaced.  (Remember:  I am not a plumber.  Nor a handyman.)

The first is easy to check:  flush and watch, maybe give it a nudge to see if it is in place.  For the third, a bad inlet valve will, I believe, leave the toilet running continuously.  At least that was the case the one time that I've seen.

For the second reason, a float that is too low will let water start spilling down the upright overflow tube before the float gets high enough to mechanically turn off the water.  Again, flush, and watch.

This was the case this time, fortunately; no need to do more internet research or go out to buy parts.

This particular toilet is a fairly common brand, not high-quality, and the plastic innards look rather chintzy. The float cup is connected to the shut-off lever by a plastic rod.  It took me some fiddling and careful disassembly (not wanting to snap the plastic) to figure out how to adjust the rod to raise the float cup.  But once I more or less understood how it worked, it was easy to put back together, and, voila!

Now the toilet tank refills much more quickly.

Before I started, I consulted both of our DIY fix-everything-around-the-house books.  The Reader's Digest Fix It Yourself book I like a lot, but it does zip through the topic of plumbing quite rapidly.  The Black and Decker book is also occasionally useful.