Fiddling around

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawn chair, lawn chair, chairs, armchair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorts

I used some of the yard sale fabric--a thin cotton throw and a 25-cent flouncy linen skirt--to make a couple of pairs of shorts for myself, to wear under skirts.  I also shortened a pair of pajama pants into shorts.  Partly by hand sewing, partly by machine; hand sewing is much easier to take outside.

I also made a small beginning on the skirt I am planning to make out of cotton T-shirt scraps.  Just two pieces of fabric, backstitched together with a couple of outlined shapes, and then cut out the top layer within the stitching (reverse applique, a la Alabama Chanin).  I need to go back and re-stitch with buttonhole thread, which is much more durable.

Branching out

I set up the big willow basket, found an old smoker lid to turn upside down for a planter inside it, and then I set up a stack of hardwood pieces from old armchair innards as a base for the smoker lid.  I ended up filling it with water toys, and not dirt, though.  

We had a yard sale, and did poorly money-wise, besides my mother-in-law buying two willow wreaths that I had made, and one child running a lemonade stand that did well.  Child charges 25 cents per cup, but many people pay with paper money and say to keep the change.  With the yard sale, the problem was mostly that we didn't have a lot of stuff to draw people in.

We went to a number of yard sales ourselves, and found some useful items.  Children bought fishing equipment and a large vintage crank-driven ice-cream maker.  I bought an oak table, boxes of nails, and some tools.  At free piles we found some fabrics, greeting cards, and books. 

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.

Willow branches

My husband came home with a small load of fresh willow branches.  The thinnest branches are flexible enough to tie in a simple knot.  I'm not good at basketweaving yet, but I know enough to get started, and I've been experimenting as I go.  I started making a bike basket, and got it two-thirds done.  It is really three basket weavings, front, back, and sides/bottom, which I am joining together. 

Twining--weaving with two strands which are twisted between each spoke--is working well.  Braiding three twigs produces a fairly strong strand.

Some branches may end up in a homemade broom.  I think I may try bending and drying a couple of handbag handles.

Setting up

It was time to enlarge the top of the improvised living room table to make it usable for board games.  I spent some time thinking about building out the cable spool end further, got stuck on how to support the new part from underneath considering the structure of the base, and then remembered that we had some boards that were the right length, and I could just build a whole new table top.  Putting the boards together went quickly; I only had to saw the cross pieces.  The surface is partially varnished from before, and I will probably throw a tablecloth over it when company comes over.

A while back I finished hemming a set of cloth diapers I had cut from a flannel sheet.  The sheet is from a set I bought at a garage sale for $3, and I think I got something like 13 or 14 diapers out of it altogether, including using the pillowcase for a cloth diaper as-is.

I also sewed a pillowcase to actually be used as a pillowcase, from fabric in my stash, and used up most of the thread that kept tangling up in my sewing machine.  It got better-behaved toward the end of the spool.

We had several chairs that needed gluing.  Happily, we have bar clamps now.  When I was done, I had leftover glue, and a pile of sticky bits of fabric I had been wiping up glue with, a wooden skewer that I had been spreading the glue with, and a sheet of paper I had been using to catch drips.  I kneaded the fabric in the glue, arranged it slightly on the paper, stuck the skewer into the center, let it dry, and now I have a fake flower that I can stick out in the window box in the spring.  I'm not sure how the glue will do outdoors, but it should be okay for a while.   

There was a story from one of the local news stations recently about a group that was teaching people how to turn milk jugs into mini-greenhouses:  cut horizontally most of the way around the center, punch a few drainage holes in the bottom, put in soil, plant seeds in it, then close it back up.  My husband has done this before.

Chugging along

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrunk wool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat loom

Never saw one like this before. 

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.

Tying up loose ends

I finished the coat.  The recipient reports that it feels like a life jacket.  I tried it on myself, and it's not quite that bad.

After that, I moved on to getting a number of things around the house into better order, and getting some deep cleaning done.

That was interrupted by a domestic crisis, which the landlord promptly dealt with.  He mentioned that the first floor layout was different when he bought the house, which explains some of its quirks around the dining area. 

Now I'm back to getting things done.  Today I mended an old kitchen towel, and then boiled it in water and baking soda to see what would come off it.

The water turned brown, I couldn't see the bottom of the saucepan, and I only boiled it a couple of minutes. 

A few years ago I tried something similar with washed bath towels in the bathtub, and the results were the same.

I think I need a laundry stove.

Braided rug repairs

Both of my braided rugs had spots where the lacing was breaking.  Not surprising in the larger one, which spent most of winter outdoors a few years ago, while I was deciding if I wanted to keep it.  The wool in the braids came through that fine, but the cotton rug warp yarn that I used to lace them together didn't.

The repairs were simple, but tedious:  pull out the lacing back to where it is good enough, tie on a new piece, thread the other end into a blunt yarn needle, and re-lace until the other end can be tied.

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We have a door where the doorknob assembly has a loose plate that won't stay up against the door like it is supposed to.  There are no screw holes, just two tiny spikes on the back, which won't hold at all, unless I pound on it.  I figured out a way of winding leather lacing around the doorknob shaft so the plate can't slide.

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I also began working on the edge of the living room rug.  I'm doing a row of whip stitches along the worn edge, using crewel-weight wool yarn, to cover and protect the bare threads. I happened to have yarn that goes well with the rug.  A lot of our things are survivors from the '80s when country blue was a trend, and they coordinate well.

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We had a good Thanksgiving, just ourselves, and then on Saturday Grandma came in with ten dozen homemade sugar cookies and everything needed to decorate them in a well-planned operation. Those cookies are in her garage in tins now, waiting for Christmas. It will be fun to see them again and recognize who decorated what. She also brought some cookies just for eating on the spot--store-bought cookies that she mostly bought for the tins.

Easy bird feeder, breadsticks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Laundry soap again, and a dustpan

I made another batch of laundry soap.  This is the second batch since my last post about it, and one batch makes two gallons, so we use about one gallon every two and a half months.  I use normal laundry detergent for cloth diapers and my husband's work clothes. 

Elder Child and I were out looking for a broom and dustpan.  We both prefer metal dustpans, and ended up going in together on a cookie sheet, which I cut in half with tin snips, and smoothed with files and sandpaper.  I was planning to make wooden handles, but the ends of the cookie sheet are handle-like enough.

Cutting the metal with vintage giant-scissors-type tin snips was difficult, and required bending the metal a little to give the snips room to move along, so I had to straighten the cut edges afterward.  I believe modern tin snips make better use of leverage and are easier to use.

I also found out that a needle with the tip broken off can be re-sharpened.  I used the narrow side of a small sharpening stone of medium coarseness.  The needle was leaving little grooves in it, so this is not something I would want to do on the broad face.  

Marking time

Both of the governor candidates here want to allow expansion of sports gambling to mobile devices, for the tax revenue.  The city government has put a pause on the sale of marijuana-derived products, probably so they can figure out how to tax it.

I've continued to make small improvements around the house.  For two shelves in shallow cupboards, I put a board across the front of the shelf to turn it into a built-in bin.  The board just rests against the inside of the cupboard's face frame.  The shelves hold small towels and washcloths, which I don't take the time to fold and stack neatly.

I sewed up ripped leather on a child's shoe with dental floss. Needed my leather thimble to push the big needle through the leather.  I also finally got around to mending a few items of clothing.  Still have some slippers and braided rugs and I don't know what else to repair.  Neighbors handed a very nice large rug down to us; it is in good condition except for wear at the edges, which I think I can deal with with some turkey stitch (tufted) embroidery.

I gave up on my bedroom closet office plans, and started using the space for craft supply storage.  I finally found my misplaced bedsheet, which I had cleverly stored among some spare pillowcases.

The weather has been very dry, but I saw that rain was finally coming, and got most of the rest of the leaves raked up before it hit.

The children have been doing good work.  It's been fun to see the older ones teaching the younger ones.

From chair to table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recycling around the house

I got an idea from magazine photos for replacing our collapsed family coatrack with a bench with a row of hooks above.   I used our former entry bench plus some planks that were waterbed salvage, plus some wood from our former couch, plus some hooks we already had.  After some crappier-than-usual carpentry--I was out of practice--it all came together.  It would almost look nice if I painted it, but paint doesn't hold up at my house.

It ended up being almost a double win, because the following week the laundry drain clogged and water went across the basement floor where all the coats had been piled before.

I used more of the pallet wood from the couch to make new seats for a pair of outdoor cafe chairs.  The seats will need some more Danish oil or something for a finish next spring, especially on the sawn edges.

I also de-upholstered a rocking chair seat.  There turned out to be two layers of fabric tacked over the original upholstery, plus a layer of something in between them that maybe used to be vinyl, but that had turned into slightly crumbly tar.  The springs were in poor condition, and I used more pallet wood to convert the rocker to a hard-bottom seat, with plans to find or make a decent cushion for it. 

I finished a lingering display shelf project.  The frame is from a wooden door screen we picked up for free, the shelves are tongue-and-groove scraps used as bed slats for a bed we were given, and I cut the shelf supports from more of the couch wood.  It came out looking fairly good; the screen frame had been painted in a nice color. 

We've also been dehydrating cabbage, onions, and celery.

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.