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.

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.

Towel hangers

A household problem I've been chewing on for a while is where to hang all the bath towels.  I didn't want to attach anything to the wall, and we don't really have bathroom wall space anyway.  There is one corner where something like a coat tree could fit--if the towels were the length of hand towels.

I have thought of cutting all the bath towels across the middle and hemming them; that would be a little hard to sew and still wouldn't really address the problem of quantity hanging space.

What I finally came up with was to pull some spare plastic shower curtain rings out of storage, and put them on the shower rod between the rings holding the shower curtains up, without snapping them closed.

Most of our towels still have homemade loops on them from when I was hanging them in the previous house.  So now I can hang them outside the shower curtains.

The landlord's shower curtain rods are moderately cheap ones, so I limited the number of added rings to a usable minimum.

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We went to a yard sale today, where they were charging $5 per grocery bag.  I found some books and fabric, a sewing pattern, and a single shoe last, four sizes too small for me, but it is interesting to see how it was made to come apart so it could be taken out of the finished shoe.

The children also found several things, including useful household items for their future homes.

Temporary deck table

The small table we had been using on the deck has gotten wobbly and weather-beaten, and is now out in the playhouse.

To replace it, I started with the cable spool end that I've used in the living room before, and then I thought about how to make a base for it.  The spool end still has half of the spool shaft on it, so the base would have to be hollow in the middle.

The easiest option was to pull some chunks of 6x6 redwood deck beam out of the garage, and stack them log-cabin-style.

These chunks I had originally cut up to stand on end and tie together as sort of a piered chair, and they were individually painted.  There were also some redwood deck stiles, which I had used as table legs some years back, which I used for one layer in the stack.

The final result looks good enough, and better than it ought to.

It's that time of year again...

 ...when the school district requests that I submit Form ED-01650, "STUDENT REPORT FOR AIDS TO NONPUBLIC STUDENTS", so they can make budget estimates.

This form is actually only required in the fall, required by the Minnesota Department of Education to be submitted to the school district, and I put in some effort last year to confirm that it is only actually required for the nonpublic schools who are requesting certain services:  partial reimbursements for textbooks and materials; health services; guidance/counseling.

The Department of Education and the school districts find Minnesota's homeschool laws somewhat confining, and as usual the bureaucracies demand as much information as they can get away with getting, the better to manage you with.  Birth certificate applications practically want what the mother ate for breakfast now.

In other, more productive activities, I've put up a clothesline, after getting unstuck about where to put it.  I got the idea of tying one end to one of the weed trees in the berry patch, but then I found a better spot.

The weather this month has gone from big snowstorm to 88 degrees back to cool spring weather, with occasional thunderstorms and two rounds of small hail.  I have several warm-weather projects lined up, and have been chugging through indoor spring cleaning and organizing while waiting for the right conditions.  

The children and I have been spring cleaning in the bedrooms.  For me, I got my closet tidied up and brought out the back-up sewing machine, now that cabin fever season is ending and I don't have to be so protective of open floor space.  I'm also in the middle of re-tidying my main fabric drawer.  The older children very competently dealt with their rooms, and the middle children assisted me in getting their room done--in the process, we came up with some good ideas for making it work better.

I saved myself some time by deciding not to do a couple of projects.  A reupholstered armchair was stored in the garage, and I thought I would have to de-upholster and de-critter it, but I looked it over and it is okay as is.

A green hardwood branch came down in the snowstorm, and I've been harvesting pieces of it for various purposes with my pocket knife, which has a saw:  some straight sticks, some pegs, and maybe later some knobs.

We've made a couple of expeditions to the thrift store, and I spent some time reading labels on clothing.  They had a lot more natural-fiber clothing than I expected, but you had to really seek for it.

Hard at work

Lots of projects going on around here.  I built a long, rustic bench for kitchen table seating.  I planned it down to the last inch to fit the space and the things I wanted to store under it, then had to root around in the depths of the garage to find all of the wood and hardware that I needed.  The seat is a plank from a waterbed frame.  Several of the other long boards were previously salvaged, attached to stakes, and used as flower bed edging at our old house.  Those needed washing, and were somewhat warped. 

I never did find the box of nails that I was planning to use.  I improvised with bolts and screws that we already had.

I used our drill press to drill some of the bolt holes, and used hand tools for everything else.  There was a pause of about a week with pieces of wood stored under the kitchen table while I thought about how to make a back for the bench.

In the process of building the bench I learned, or re-learned, that I could use nails as easily-removable probes and alignment pins when I was having trouble lining up the pilot holes for screws.

The bench still needs some kind of a finish, particularly on the seat, but I am waiting for warm weather and good ventilation.

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I have also been doing a lot of mending of pants' knees, still have two or three more pairs to go.  Some of the pants are lined, so I can't do my usual method of attaching the patch to the leg seams on the inside, and then stitching the ripped area to the patch.

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I made a belt for a child, complete with a buckle made from coat hanger wire and some sort of a legged spring that I salvaged at some point.  That involved some work with a metal file, not just rounding off the sharp ends, but also filing a deep groove into the wire as a way of cutting it.  I like file work a lot, and I should find an excuse to do more of it.

After I finished the belt, I picked up a leatherworking book from the library.  It turns out there are specialized punches for cutting the slot for the tongue of the buckle, and for rounding the end of the belt, and for making the other holes.  I used kitchen scissors and knives that I had, along with a nail for an awl, and an old preschool-level workbook as a surface that could be nailed into.  I also used waxed thread instead of rivets.

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.

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.

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.

Achievement

I finished building another elevated "loft" bed for a child.  This time I took a slower pace and had more assistance from children in sawing, gluing, and assembly. 

For some reason the 2x6 lumber that my husband bought for it earlier this month was of much better quality than the wood for the previous loft in the fall.  I don't exactly know the cost, but it was reasonable enough for a piece of furniture that is needed now and will be used for years and years to come, and possibly recycled into something else after that.

I made some improvements in loft-building workflow this time around.  It is important in my loft design to have accurately-drilled holes, especially where I have to drill into a 2x6 from each side and meet in the middle. I gave up trying to use our heavy-duty electric drills (discarded by an electrical contractor), and set up three hand-powered drills:  small bit in the eggbeater-type drill for a pilot hole, and then medium and large bits in two bit braces.  Tightening the bit braces is a Process, at least for me, that involves using large vise grips around the chuck, with an additional pair of pliers to tighten the vise grips just enough (without cracking the chuck). I try to avoid changing the bits in those.

So I was drilling each hole three times with three different drills, but each one was easy to do, aside from the largest (3/8") bit, which tends to dig in too quickly.  I often had to pull up on the bit brace while drilling downward.

When it was was all finished, I discovered that the box spring I intended to put up there was a few inches too long for it, so I had to dig around in the garage for a different support for the mattress.  The seat frame of our futon couch, which doesn't fit in this house, turned out to be a good size for the little Ikea mattress, which must be about a decade old by now.  On top of that I put a doubled memory foam mattress topper that had been handed down to us.

Snowy and cold

I'm not sure hot glue is the best material for sealing gaps around a window frame, but I had a small below-zero breeze coming into my bedroom, and it was worth a try.  I expect that it will be easier to remove than caulk.

My most recent hot glue craft project was gluing white cardboard leaves onto a cardboard rectangle.  It turned out okay, but proved a little harder to hang up than the effort I wanted to put into it.

I've also been carving two little wooden goblets for toys, using a well-seasoned section of maple branch.  I've decided to not put a finish on them, or even to sand them.  I used a Swedish slojd (don't know how to do the umlauts; aka sloyd) knife from Rockler that I got for Christmas last year.  It is a bit large for most of the woodcarving that I do, but worked well in this case.  My husband has one too, and somehow managed to break the tip of the blade off.

It's as good as it gets here...

 ...in terms of getting the house organized and decluttered in between the busiest seasons.  I washed many of the windows before the weather turned cold, and have been able to conquer most of the messy areas.

I started an embroidery project for a Christmas gift.  I bought an embroidery hoop for it, but already had everything else.

I also have a couple of woodcarving projects in mind.  My husband brought home a woodburner, and we've been trying it out.  From looking at comic series art, I think the way to go with that is to do the shading first, and then add the fine lines and details.

The Twin Cities had some protests following the Rittenhouse verdict, but nothing near us.

We are well-supplied for Thanksgiving, and are thankful for what we have.  

The children have requested six different kinds of pie.

Yes, we have no black walnuts

The squirrels chewed through them all over the summer, and there are absolutely none left.

The kitchen is overflowing, though, with garden harvest:  tomatoes, peppers, and beans.  It was already super-tight on space before.

I built a sleeping loft for one of the children, and there are others in line for lofts of their own.  I ended up using hand tools a lot more than I had planned to, so I am still in recovery mode.  I was many years younger when I made the original loft, which is still in use.  Which reminds me that we bought extra bolts this time to replace the ones in that loft that have broken.

I've also been working on spiffying up our library room, which is my favorite room in the house.  The new rug ended up in there, and I made progress on cleaning the wood blinds that had years of dust on them.

We made an excursion out of town to see the northern lights, but at this latitude it was mostly a glow along the horizon.  Did have a nice view of the stars, and some constellations that I haven't seen for a long time.

Settling in

The interesting features of this house include handmade doors in the basement, including wooden hinges.  

They look very nice on one side, but quite rough and rustic on the other, because the craftsman used long nails, pounded them in, and then "clinched" (bent over) the projecting points on the back side.

I've seen that technique used before, within the heels of old shoes.  Those doors aren't coming apart anytime soon.

There are other signs that the house was previously inhabited by a woodworker.  There's a room in the basement that has enough outlets for a decent number of power tools and a special vent for a dust collection system.

There are also many jar lids attached overhead, for someone's one-time convenient storage of small hardware items. 

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As to the size of this house, it is a bit smaller than the previous house, and must be under 2000 square feet.  The previous house had a somewhat ridiculous amount of space devoted to living rooms.  This one is generous in terms of bedroom space, but tight elsewhere, most severely in the entry and eating spaces.

A relative told us that their family's solution to the entry problem growing up was to set up a coatroom in the basement, and to march the entire family straight down to it when they came home.  I've started setting up something along those lines, but so far it isn't much more than a pile of boots that have been thrown to the bottom of the stairs.

Preparations

The little papier-mache birds that I made took a day or two to dry.  Then I took the two best of them, drew eyes on them, and left the rest in a primitive, unfinished style.  I put them up on the wreath and I like how they look there.

Jackie Clay's Pantry Cookbook has a recipe for dipping chocolate made of chocolate chips and food-grade paraffin that I am going to try out before the holidays.

I whittled another cedar branch coat hook, but haven't put it up anywhere. It only took a few minutes to make.

Things around my house are coming together in various ways, and it has been nice to see things looking pretty.

Coat hook

I took a joint of one of the cedar branches, removed the bark, and whittled it into a coat hook, one long enough that I could attach it to its support with two screws put through pilot holes that I drilled.

I was wondering if the green cedar wood would be oozing sap or oil to any extent; it doesn't seem to be.  It does have a light cedar scent.

I put it on the side of one of our wooden shelves, in a place where my husband frequently leaves his coat on the floor.  Given the weight of things that he often carries in his pockets, I didn't want to attach the hook directly to the wall.  So far it is holding with no cracking.

Messing around

I finally caught up enough on housework and big projects that I had time to do more creative things.

Family dropped off some cedar branches over the weekend, and I experimented and made a few wreaths out of them.

Then one of the wreaths seemed like it needed a little bird, so I experimented with papier mache and made three.  One has a little cedar stick in its neck to connect a head and a body of wadded paper (with papier mache over all), and the other two are more two-dimensional, built up around pieces of cardboard.

The paper I used was notebook paper from the school supplies, which just falls apart when it gets wet, so it wasn't the easiest material to work with.  For glue, I just whisked some flour and water together.

Another recent experiment was putting sliced apples and brown sugar (or white sugar plus molasses; same thing, nowadays) in aluminum foil and baking them in the oven.  The juice from the apples steams the apples and combines with the sugar to make a sort of apple syrup.  The result was only a moderate success, though; it came across to the family as a poor attempt at making applesauce.  The apple juice -> apple syrup angle is worth pursuing in the future, though. That part of it was delicious.