Porch chair

A project that I planned last year, but didn't do, was to create some kind of a seat for the front porch.

I started thinking about it again, and looked at a couple of broken chairs that I was thinking of combining and re-making.

It turned out that a wood folding chair just needed one small piece of wood replaced--and that piece was held on only by screws.

Replacing the piece--with wood from an armchair that I de-constructed some time ago--actually went as well as expected.

Then I painted the whole thing, after washing it.  That did not go as well as expected; I gave it three coats of paint and it really needs another.  

I also replaced the hinges of an old suitcase that we use for toy storage, with strips of leather, attached with screws and washers.

Thicker, vegetable-tanned leather would have been better, but I used what I had, and I expect that it will stretch and possibly tear at some point.  The leather wanted to twist and spin as I was driving in the screws. 

The other thing I've been working on is teaching myself needle tatting, using shuttle tatting instructions as a reference, but mostly just figuring it out as I go.

I'm not having the tension problems that I was with a shuttle.  The downside of using a needle is that it keeps running out of thread.

Speaking of thread, I find that when I am doing much sewing, the handed-down spools of thread that I am using run out of thread almost regularly.

What looks like an ample supply of thread, may not be.

Odd ends

 My family is working on a variety of woodworking and other projects.  I've been in a decluttering phase and haven't been making much myself, although I did use a little free time to play around with tatting.

I tried once or twice to learn tatting with a shuttle, but didn't get very far with it.  Then some years ago I heard about needle tatting, but I never actually tried it until now.

I was following my needlework book's instructions for shuttle tatting, though, and didn't know about forming the stitches on the needle itself until I looked up this comparison of the two methods.

One attraction of tatting is that it produces a very sturdy lace, because every stitch is a knot.

The thing that makes it somewhat hard to learn is that the path that the thread needs to take to make a half-stitch is not the same as it takes in the finished stitch (except topologically, if you want to bring mathematics into it), because it needs to be pulled to "flip" the knot to the other thread, as they say in the link.