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.

Accordion and cardboard

Before Christmas, we were doing some post-dentist shopping at a new-to-us thrift store.  They had two vintage accordions in the store.  I was able to go back to the store in January with Christmas money and some savings.  The brown accordion I was thinking of buying was no longer there, but the other one was.  So now I have a pearly-blue accordion, in good-enough condition.  It is both easy and challenging to play.  Previous musical experience with piano and school band is helping, along with a couple of beginner videos.

My husband around that time brought home very large cardboard boxes from work; enough for each of the children to have one of their own.  It was hard to traverse the living room for a while.  Some of the cardboard became cardboard armor and airplanes and rockets.  The armorer has developed some rather advanced techniques for making helmets and workable elbow joints.

We also made an excursion to the Axman Surplus store.  Some of the kids wanted motors, one wanted plastic clips, and I was pleased to find that they still had some airline china, as I wanted a couple of mini-plates.

I was reluctantly beginning to sew new cushion covers for our glider rocker when several of its joints came unglued and I found that a bushing? was missing.  I found the bushing later, and for now we are enjoying having some extra space in the living room.

Not irrelevant

There were a couple of points here in notes on a book about vagabondage that related to sabbaticals; one about negotiating for a sabbatical from work in order to have extended time for travel, and another about making work almost completely subordinate to one's travel-oriented lifestyle.

The Biblical pattern is Six On, One Off, with an extra One Year Off every 50th year.  As I pointed out in my book on sabbatical rest, Israel's 70-year exile in Babylon was to make up for the sabbatical and jubilee years they had failed to observe over the centuries.  

A timely table

I have been thinking for a long time about replacing our kitchen table with a larger, less decrepit, and more washable one, and I had gotten so far as to reject the idea of building a table, and to save up funds for a new used table, and even to write a time to go shopping for it on the calendar.

Then we all got sick, and there were a lot of church activities and things going on, and around the time we were mostly recovered, my husband called and said his boss had a table he was giving away.

He gave me the measurements over the phone, and it was just the size I was looking for.

After various exertions, he got it home and we got it into the house.  The chairs came with it, but they are definitely oversize for the room and I am mostly using our old chairs with it.  

The table itself is just about as big as will fit there.  When fully opened, the fridge door comes within an inch of the table. I am not above taking my drawknife and shaving some wood off the table legs and the bench I made before, to gain an inch or two. The fridge could be moved back a couple of inches also.  Happily, none of those things are necessary.

Theoretically, we can all squeeze in around it, if enough of the smaller children sit on the bench--which hasn't happened yet.  

Another thing I did recently was to unravel a finger-crocheted chenille scarf that I had been given some years back, and re-crochet it into a little mat for a chair seat.  The colors go well with our living room, and it is good to have the scarf being used more.

I have been somewhat surprised to notice that I have not been doing much crafting at all during this sabbatical.  Just more music, more puzzles, and more reading.  I did get a bunch of mending done as I've been watching movies with the elder children.

At one of the church activities, I was talking with an older couple from another church, and it turns out that they were homeschoolers back in the Eighties, before homeschooling was explicitly allowed by law in Minnesota.  They said they had to keep a low profile, and that friends of theirs were investigated by the state.  Later on, one of the larger homeschool co-ops started up, and they were involved in that.  

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.

A new line of sight

I discovered only recently that if you sit in exactly the right place in my house, at the right time of day and the right time of year, you can just see a local landmark through the trees.

Serendipity:  finding something that you weren't even looking for.


(My second book:  The Serendipitous Sabbatical:  Rest in Unexpected Places)

Sabbatical observation: Hair refractions

One day during my sabbatical, I was looking at how strands of my hair refracted direct sunlight.  (Being careful to not look directly at the sun, of course, as everyone should have learned by last summer.) Refraction means that the rays of white daylight were bent slightly by the strands of hair, and so the hair acted like a miniature prism and smeared the light out into little rainbows. 

I am very nearsighted, and for me small or narrow light sources blur out quite widely, so I had no problem seeing the colors in them.

What I noticed is that the most direct sunlight gave me purer rainbow colors, but light that was not quite so direct gave me rainbow colors that were blended with my hair color (brown), and these resulting colors were ones that were familiar to me....

...Because they are exactly the same colors that were recommended for women of my coloring by the Color Me Beautiful method (a "dress by your color season" book from the 1980's).

I don't know how well this can be seen with other people's eyes, or other people's hair, but for me it was quite interesting.

If you want more on the science of hair refraction, here is an older paper from Stanford on modeling the optical effects of hair.

Art journaling

I learned a bit about art journaling last year from a library book, and did a one-month daily art journaling challenge. This year, I read another book about art journaling, and started doing it more regularly.

The technique takes a bit of time, a bit at a time, with periods of paint drying and glue drying in between. So I have been intentionally doing only one page per week, and making it part of my Sabbath rest.

Generally speaking, the procedure is to start with a page--not necessarily a blank page--and do some arty stuff to it, then some more arty stuff, and then some more and some more, until it all hangs together (more or less). Mistakes can be torn out or painted over, or papered over. Unconnected bits can be overlapped by another layer, to visually relate them to each other.

For materials I mostly use pens, pencils, acrylic paints, the children's markers and crayons, old magazines, and decoupage medium.

As I said in the previous post, after a bit of playing around, often a theme starts to emerge, and can be reinforced, to build a meaningful artwork. Or, the theme can be chosen beforehand.

I have been incorporating some visual images from my life into my pages, like how the neighbor's lighted window shines out into the darkness after dusk.

Sabbatical project: Crocheted owl

Decorative owls have been a trend for a while, which seems to be on the wane now. I was willing to wait until they started appearing in the thrift stores, until last year. What happened was that I started being interested in owls and some other things, and eventually realized that I was commemorating my grandma, who died ten years ago. She was a huge influence on me, need I say; growing up next door to her was an enormous blessing.

Artistically speaking, when a theme starts to emerge from seeming randomness, then there is the possibility of intentionally encouraging and reinforcing it, to pull everything together into a coherent and meaningful whole.

Grandma had a number of owls in her house, probably many of them gifts from others. But Grandma and owls definitely go together in my mind. So I went on an owl hunt. Because of limited funds, this mostly meant crafting owls. I have a tub of plaster of Paris, and thought about casting an owl. I thought about painting owls, and carving owls out of wood, and making seed art owls. The owl that I actually made and finished, though, was crocheted from yarn out of our stash.

The yarn was brown, orange, and yellow, and looked like it was left over from some crewel embroidery kit from the Seventies. I added in some other scraps of acrylic yarn.

Crochet hints:

1.  Start from the center of the piece. and work outward.

2.  Shaping is accomplished by using stitches of different heights. From shortest to tallest, in crochet this is: slip stitch, single crochet, half double, double crochet, and triple crochet.*  (Below slip stitch you might put just doing an embroidery whip stitch along the edge of the piece.) I found it helpful to think of lines of stitching that I was working across an area, and varying the stitches within each line to vary its height as needed.

The other element of shaping is choosing where to put the stitches; choosing which stitches to hook into, for more or less density and fullness.

3.  Finer details (such as stripes on feathers) can be achieved by embroidery, using yarn to stitch on the surface.

4.  Some subtlety of color can be given by using multiple strands of yarn at a time, where all the strands are not of the same color. For most of the owl, I used two or three strands of the crewel yarn at a time.

5.  Some mistakes can be covered by embroidery; I originally made the owl's pupils much too large, but was able to cover the excess pupils by embroidering over them carefully with the iris color.

6.  Crochet lends itself well to three-dimensional work, such as for the beak of the owl, and to incorporating other materials...such as a stick for the owl's "perch".

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* These are in American terminology; I have seen European terminology where everything is moved up by one: their single crochet is our slip stitch, and their double crochet is our single, and so on.

Sabbatical project: Useful tinkering

The latches on our first-aid kit's plastic case broke off when it was dropped. I got tired of not being able to close it securely, and worked out a solution one day for new latches of a sort.

For simplicity, I'll describe how I did one side, but actually I did one of these on each side, for secure closure.

I used an elastic hair tie to make a loop. I drilled a hole, fed one end of the loop into the case through it, and secured that end with a paper clip. Then, on the other half of the case, aligned with it, I drilled another hole and put a short bolt through it, securing it loosely with a nut on the inside.

The end of the hair tie loops over the head of the bolt, holding the case closed. I may have done some fiddling before drilling to make sure the lengths worked out well.

Sabbatical project: Shower curtain from remnants

A lady at church had some decorating fabric left over from making new curtains, and handed it down to me.

I had to think about where in the house I might use it; different rooms in this house are rooted in different decades, and some of them don't accommodate modern decor very well.

Then I realized that the most modern room in the house is the bathroom, which was redone just before we moved in.

So I ended up sewing the remnants together into a shower curtain:

You can see where I overlapped the selvage edges.

I had been wanted something a little better than the shower curtain we had, anyway, because its colors didn't quite coordinate with the bathroom colors.

The new curtain is a bit short, and is almost too heavy for the tension rod. But it looks nice.

There were also smaller scraps of a similar but brighter fabric, which I hemmed and made into curtains for one of the windows in the downstairs bathroom.

The year of the puff pancake

Last year, I learned how to make puff pancakes:  faster, easier, and higher-protein than regular pancakes. I found the recipe in an old issue of Quick Cooking; here it is, converted to my recipe formatting:

Puff Pancake

Oven temperature 425 degrees.

1/4 Cup butter (no substitutions)
1 Cup flour
4 eggs
1 Cup milk
a pinch of sugar (optional)

Put butter in a 10-inch ovenproof skillet [I use my cast iron skillet], and put it in the preheating oven to melt the butter. Mix the remaining ingredients until smooth; pour into skillet. Bake 22-25 minutes, or until puffed and golden brown.

Sabbatical project: rustic step stool

For a long time, we had a plastic step stool in the bathroom for the children to use. But its upper surface was a sort of corrugated, impossible-to-clean plastic, and one day I gave up on it and threw it out.

For a replacement that was easier to maintain and more in line with the aesthetics of our home, I used some scraps of planks that we had, and built a new step stool.

The planks were originally part of a waterbed frame, which we picked up for free (for the lumber) early in our marriage.  Most of it I built into a child's loft a few years later, but the two longest planks I had to shorten, and it was one of these leftover pieces that I used for the stool, along with two other pieces of scrap wood.

I wanted curved, organic shapes for both the top and the legs.  Easy enough to draw and lay out on the wood, but not quite so easy to cut. I read the manual for our scroll saw, and found that the two-inch (actual, not nominal) thickness of the waterbed wood was right at the limit of what the saw could cut, and would require buying a different blade.

So instead I did all the sawing by hand, by making a number of straight cuts to approximate the curved shape. Then I did the rest of the shaping over time by hand with rasps and files.  This took a fair amount of time, but I was spending a fair amount of time outdoors watching the youngest children, and it was a good carry-along project.

After a lot of hand sanding, I was ready for the joinery. Somewhere along the way, I was browsing in one of our woodworking books, and I learned about a joint that was rather like a biscuit joint, but that used a rectangle of plywood, rather than a thin wood "biscuit", to slot into both of the pieces and connect them. Much stronger than a doweled joint, and I had plenty of thickness in my wood pieces for the slots needed.

To make the slots, I drilled holes to the right depth (you can put a piece of tape around a drill bit to tell you where to stop), and then I used a sharp chisel to remove the rest of the wood. When I was mostly there, I started test-fitting my pieces of plywood, to make sure that I took out just enough wood in the right places. When I was finished, I found that there was a little too much play in the joints. The stool was quite solid when I wedged a short piece of wood between the two leg pieces, so I made that part of it as well.

I glued everything together with carpenter's glue, let it dry, gave it a quick final sanding and wipedown, and then finished it with two coats of polyurethane.

With a power saw, drill, and sander, this would be a very quick project.

Just doing the work this year

I'm going to have to make a tag on this blog for George MacDonald, I think, if I'm going to keep quoting from him.  Anyway, one of the things that he was adamant about was the importance of being obedient in the smaller tasks that God sets before us, throughout each day.  That is where faith and love are (or are not) made manifest in action.

Elisabeth Elliot, also, taught "Do the next thing." (And then the next, and the next....)

Sometimes it is hard to think of what to do, while at other times it is hard to decide what to do first. In either case, one can ask God for direction and wisdom.

Once you get moving in the little things, bigger things mysteriously start to happen. There are testimonies of this all over the place, from MacDonald to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I had an example or two of it in my sabbatical book, even. A family member, who felt creatively stuck, recently started sorting through old boxes of stuff, and found in them enough of what he needed to get going again.  "Shop at home", Myquillyn Smith says; you may already have everything you need.

A secular book, The Lemming Conspiracy, said there were basically four methods by which one could succeed:  manage the details of your work well, manage the big picture well, be good at brainstorming new solutions, or copy someone else's successful work.  MacDonald said that if you do your daily work (the details), God will take care of the grand plans (the big picture), and provide solutions to the problems that arise.

My work at the moment, besides the usual routine, is to work with a box of fabric that I received for Christmas. It's from some old lady's fabric stash, and contains mostly polyester fabrics, in one- or two-yard pieces. It's a challenge, because usually I strongly prefer natural fibers. But some of it would work well for recovering the couch cushion--the old quilt that I have been using as a cover has worn right through in the middle. I've been doing some sketches and studies of how to put a pattern on the fabric, since it is plain woven. I am also trying to not hurry, but to take the time needed to do it well. (Not perfectly, just well.)

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Edited to add:  Sometimes the Next Thing is to rest...!!!

More window than I wanted

I did a sabbatical project/experiment with colored glass pebbles, but to get all the colors that I wanted, I ended up buying a lot more pebbles than I needed.

I had the idea of finding an old window, and gluing the extra pebbles to the glass.  Some time later, I did find a free-by-the-side-of-the-road window, but it was rather large and heavy...five feet long and double-paned.  I hauled it home anyway, and thought about it for a while.

Then I looked at it again, and realized that the glass was framed with wood, covered with metal on the outside face, and that I could drill through the wood at one end, and drop pebbles down between the panes.

So I drilled a hole, carefully aiming between the panes, and enlarged and shaped it with a keyhole saw and small files.  The hole was close to the corner of the interior cavity, which was helpful for shaking out the sawdust that fell down inside the window.

Then some children helped me put the pebbles in.  I put the window on enough of a slant for the pebbles to slide down to the bottom, but not anywhere near vertical...I didn't want a falling pebble to break the window glass.

I also didn't fill up the entire space between the panes...between one-quarter and one-third full was as much weight as I felt comfortable putting between the panes.

Then there was the question of where to display it when it was done...it was far too heavy to hang easily, and I didn't want it falling down anywhere.  (In the previous year, I had already cleaned up broken glass from a large picture frame and a clock.) I finally leaned it against the bedroom wall, horizontally, until I could find a better home for it.

In the end, I donated it to a charity rummage sale, and someone bought it--whether only for the pebbles or for the piece as a whole, I can't say.

Sabbatical 3: Lessons learned

Having just completed my third one-year sabbatical, there were a couple of things about it that surprised me.

The first is how much of this sabbatical I spent just catching up on maintenance and unfinished projects. When you take a break from "getting ahead", there is time to do those sorts of things.

The second is that even though our income was the same as the previous year, we had a number of financial challenges over the year that left us needing to make do and do without, much more than usual. Last sabbatical, I put some money toward a special crafting project--a homemade fiddle from a kit.  This time, I did another special sabbatical project (which I will post about later), but for the most part I crafted and created using only materials that I already had, or ones that showed up unbidden on my doorstep.  I made lots and lots and lots of things, but I never ran out of supplies.

For part of the year, I set my never-ending to-do list aside, and just did what needed to be done, or what I wanted to do.  Other times, I went back to making lists, and went full speed ahead on Getting Things Done. I have a new baby coming very soon, and there was a lot that needed to be done beforehand.

Spiritually, I have spent a lot of time reading George MacDonald novels, and I have been learning a lot from him. (He has been a significant influence on C. S. Lewis and other Christian writers).

I also put some effort into making wish lists this time...sometimes I get so used to using what I have and doing without, that I forget to think about what I would actually like to get. What is remarkable, looking back, is how many of those things that I listed actually showed up, one way or another.  Some things I was able to buy, some things I was able to make or improvise, other things I realized that I didn't really want after all, and a number of things were handed down to me, unasked-for. It sounds like The Secret's "law of attraction" at work, but I don't believe in that; I believe in a God who loving and gracious. George said, in one of his books, that no desire is too small to set before God, who will purify it.

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The book I wrote after my second sabbatical year, The Serendipitous Sabbatical:  Rest in Unexpected Places, can still be found here.

Findings

This sabbatical, I am learning about using sabbatical time for deferred maintenance and for just catching up on things. (Or, I Fought the Drain and the Drain Won. Until the plumber came.)

On Thanksgiving, we experimented with using our apple peeler contraption (the cast iron kind, which is manufactured under several different brands now) to peel potatoes. The part that does the coring can be loosened and moved out of the way. I found that it worked well on the parts of the potato that were smooth and of an apple-ish diameter, but not on the ends, bumps, or overly large sections. So we hand-peeled the parts that the peeler missed.

I finally sewed a pillow cover that had been waiting for a couple of months to be assembled; one more project off the pile.

I am working on finishing the cushion cover for the upholstered chair, but need to go back and rip a seam, because I didn't line things up carefully and it came out all askew. The pillow cover was good practice for sewing the cushion cording, though.

Yesterday I needed a business size envelope, and didn't want to walk all the way down the hallway and rummage through a box for one. So I made one, out of a single sheet of paper.  The front of the envelope is a rectangle, about the size of a sheet of paper folded from top to bottom into thirds, and this rectangle needs a rounded flap or "ear" on each edge. The ears need to overlap a little when they are folded in. There are some sketches here of envelope shapes. We are low on tape, so I used stickers to fasten it closed.

Also, to wrap presents without tape, I went back to the old practice of tying packages with string:  inherited crochet cotton.

I had some ribbon and some wired ribbon, from which I contrived a small wreath. It was a bit too garish to be in the house, so I hung it on the front door. Later, I added some yarn that turned up.