Sheets and a wreath

My mother-in-law came up with a good set of secondhand sheets from somewhere, which were very welcome here. 

She also brought a box of very nice natural-fiber fabrics and clothing for my eldest child to repurpose.  Child is currently disinterested in any clothing styles less than 200 years old.

Child also went through dozens and dozens of balls of yarn and took samples for burn testing to determine fiber content.  Acrylic and other synthetics melt and drip and curl up while burning, and some of them burn like a cartoon fuse.  

It certainly made me reconsider allowing my family to wear synthetic fibers around open flames.

Cotton, linen, and wool burn much more slowly.  Wool smells like burnt hair.  Cotton sometimes has a small ember still burning at the end when it is blown out.  Linen tends to leave a tiny gray string of ash still hanging

Other children have been busily and ingeniously constructing role-play items from cardboard.

We were given some sweet corn, and my corn huskers left the husks strewn all over outside.  After a couple of days, I separated the leaves and braided them up into a wreath, letting the ends stick out.  The braid was long enough to make two full turns around the wreath; I tied them together with string, and wove a twig through across the top for support.

I still have a little cornhusk wreath that I made last year.  That is now on the back door.

Putting things together again

No curfew in Minneapolis or St. Paul last night, only continuing violent crimes.

Coronavirus numbers in tests, hospitalizations, and deaths in Minnesota have held quite steady since mid-June. I suppose an uptick should be expected in early fall, once school and other fall activities get going a bit. Summer is very much the off season for most organized social activities around here, because the people who do the organizing go out of town to their families' cabins.

I made progress on many things last week.  I mended more clothing, and some knitted dishcloths, and a mitten. I aligned the reel mower. I moved two bags of toys out of the living room, back down to the basement where they belong. I established a better workflow for a refinishing project that I am working on, and am finally making progress on it. I found my what-to-do-next cards, which I had completely forgotten about, and am getting back into a routine. I am also easing into exercising with hand weights again.

I've been gradually moving some pieces of decor around, trying things in different places.

Boom

We had a crabapple tree come down in last weekend's big storm.  It had started falling down a few days before that, with one branch resting on the roof. Now when I see media images of storm damage, I look for the rotten places in the trees.

We also lost power, which put some of our preparations to the test. We did well on lighting, having lots of little LED lights.  My husband the electronics tinkerer has many LED bulbs (random internet image); these can be powered simply by putting a button battery between the two wires.

[If you add a magnet to that, you have a "throwie".  Much more about throwies here, including discussion about whether or not it is really safe to power LEDs that way, and how to add a resistor to improve battery life.]

One LED will put out enough light to read by, at close range, but LEDs also put out some ultraviolet light, which isn't good for eyes, so I limit my LED reading time, and I don't shine them directly into my eyes.

Our power was restored the next morning, saving us the trouble of canning up the contents of our refrigerator. We have the Jackie Clay canning book, which includes instructions for canning dairy products, with a caveat that this goes against modern canning recommendations.

What went not so well for us was not being able to whisk the car into the garage, because of an overpopulation of bicycles. A branch came down right next to the car.

Punching up plain carpeting

I've been reading a series of magazines from a nearby sidewalk library, and I noticed that many of the rugs pictured were two-color designs, with one color predominating.

That got me thinking about how to take a solid-color rug, and add yarn to it to make a design. Eventually, I remembered that I have a punch needle (which pushes loops of yarn through a fabric from the back), and I wondered if it could be used on commercially-made carpet.

I tried it on two different carpet remnants. I found with the first one that the carpet backing was too strong to push the needle through; I would need to pre-punch each hole with an awl.

With the second, the needle went through more easily, and I was able to punch in a line of loops all the way down the length in only a few minutes. My hand was tired at the end.

I found that I had to set the needle at almost the longest loop length setting to get the loops to show in the carpet pile. (Longer loops than that would require pulling by hand, and it would probably be better to work from the front with a rug hook.) Putting a loop through every other square of the backing mesh made a line that looks just like a line of paint drips. For a more solid color, I would have to punch every square, and more than one row, and even then the original pile would still be mixed in.

Recycled child's bog jacket

A year ago, I made a lap blanket. But since then, we were given a number of quilts and other blankets, and it ended up in the closet.

Meanwhile, one of our smaller children began to need another winter sweater. I thought of using the lap blanket to make a little "bog jacket" or "bog coat", which is a simple and ancient jacket pattern that can be made from a single square of fabric, using the entire square. It is best known to weavers, but is called a "bog jacket" because one of those bodies found years ago very well-preserved in a peat bog was wearing one made of leather.

Knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann adapted the design for knitting, and put it in her book Knitting Around. At one point I knitted a baby-sized version, which has worked out well and was not quickly outgrown.  I might as well add here that I accidentally mixed in a little wool yarn with the acrylics in this project; the wool felted and shrank, while the acrylics didn't, but I was able to give the shrunken areas a good pull and restore some of the lost width. The lost length didn't matter, because the design runs long on the baby.

There's an example photo here, without the extra fullness in the lower part that Zimmermann added to make room for a thick diaper.

Anyway, in her design the vertical slit that needs to be made is accomplished by dividing the knitting onto separate needles and balls of yarn at that point, while the horizontal slits are made by knitting in a strand of contrasting yarn, which is removed later, with the loose stitches being grafted elsewhere to make the seams for the sleeves and across the chest.

Since I was working with a finished piece of knitting, and I was in a hurry, I decided not to unravel and graft, but to sew and cut, and then sew again.

Knitters really hate cutting into their knitting, because they have a great fear of unraveling stitches, but if you sew in a line of short stitches along every edge that you want to preserve, before you cut, then it is safe to do.  Some of my washcloths are portions of sweaters that I have sewn and cut in this way. I've had no problems with them unraveling. I've also altered sweaters.

In this case, because I wanted to keep the edges a little stretchy, I chose to use a short zigzag stitch. Be warned that this tends to make a curly "lettuce" edge, especially if you stretch it out while sewing, which is sometimes a desirable effect. After sewing around each cut I was going to make, I carefully did the cutting.

The final sewing was a little tricky, in making the right parts go to the right places, but it also went quickly.

To finish it, I found two old coat buttons, and crocheted yarn chains long enough to loop around them. I sewed on the buttons and loops, and it was finished--except for picking off a number of little bits of yarn, the loops that were severed when I did the cutting.

It came out a nice size for the child, with lots of room to grow.

Holiday interlude

I spent a bit of time thinking about how to spend my Christmas money, and ended up at the used book store.

Most of the time, I buy books from a thrift store or from the little book sale area at the library, so going into a real bookstore is like a trip to the candy store--except better, because you can read a book more than once.

Within the wider selection of books, I found a number of books that related to areas that I want to branch out into more.

My second stop was the craft store. I don't visit these very often either, because so many of the things in them, I could make for myself, if I wanted to put in the time and effort. What I did buy was basic materials:  leather remnants, wool roving, and fabric paint.

My third stop was for the really mundane things:  socks and a new toilet brush. I've had a remarkably hard time buying socks in the past, either because they weren't quite what I was looking for or needed, or because they were beyond my budget. I've settled on buying ankle socks a few pairs at a time, and using them as the feet for homemade knee-high tights.

I decided not to buy a new dish drying rack yet, but to just turn the old one around, so that the more worn-looking parts are at the back.

Also, I received a box of garage sale fabric from a visiting relative. There is a large piece of fleece that should be good for one or two pairs of child-sized pants, one and a half bedsheets, and more than enough upholstery fabric to cover the chair that I brought home from vacation. While I was busy with holiday preparations, my mending pile outgrew the small amount of cupboard space that I allotted for it, so I'm going to have to get to work on that again sometime soon.

The usual

My life lately has mostly consisted of maintenance:  the usual cleaning, tightening loose screws, and troubleshooting appliances.

I also finished knitting the hat I am giving for a Christmas present, and I looked up how to make the pompom for it. I have an additional little knitting project going on with the leftover yarn.

I cut another jar's worth of kitchen wipes, from fabric that I have no other use for, with the assistance of a tiny human who was happy to have the job of putting them into the jar.

The older children have been taking on some of the snackmaking work; wacky cake and popcorn, so far this week.

Wacky cake is very easy to make, and doesn't require milk or eggs, although we do use milk in ours, instead of water.  The recipe I use is in this post.

My husband's work had some kind of a catered lunch, and he brought home quite a bit of leftover pasta and salad and bread from it, easily enough for two meals.

One of his co-workers has the interest, time, ability, tools, and space to work on cars, and has been helping him do some of the work that needs to be done on our aging vehicle.

Finds

I got some of my Christmas shopping done at the thrift store, but I also found a couple of other things while I was there.

The first was four spools of cotton carpet warp thread. I can definitely use these, since I have found that crochet cotton thread is a bit weak for the warp of the things I am trying to weave.

The other was a copy of The Brothers Lionheart, a children's book by Astrid Lindgren, originally written in Swedish. Last year, in a different thrift store, I bought a Norwegian translation of it. With a little help from the pictures and a Norwegian dictionary, I read it all the way through, over and over, and basically worked it out like a hundred-page puzzle. Norwegian has a lot of similarities to English, although there is a twist to them, and that helped a lot. By the sixth time through the book, I could understand most of it, or at least I thought I could.

So it is exciting to have the English translation now, and see how well I did in figuring out the Norwegian. So far, it looks like I got most of it right.

A pot scrubber and a new knitting project

My homemade pot scrubber was wearing out, and it was time to make a new one. I have some plastic mesh produce bags tucked away in my craft drawer, but I also had a few narrow lengths of tulle, salvaged from gift wrapping. I chose to use the tulle this time.

I didn't follow my pattern from before, but instead did a chain ring, followed by a round of half double stitches, followed by a round of slip stitches, increasing as necessary to keep it flat. The result is denser than what I usually do. I probably would have been better off doing a single round of double stitches; I don't think there was enough tulle to do triples.

For the knitting project, I've started knitting a hat to give as a Christmas present. I bought the yarn a while back, and did a gauge swatch, and figured out how many stitches around it would need to be. I also decided to make it double-layered, as I did for my own hat.  Today I actually cast on and knitted the first inch or so. With my recently improved knitting speed, I should easily be able to finish it before Christmas.

I've also been selectively cutting down the dead plants in the flower beds. Some I am leaving there until spring, because I like to look at them. Since I learned this year that you can get usable fiber from nettle plants, I've been looking forward to harvesting the patch of nettles that is well-established in one of our flower beds, but by the time I got to them, there were only a few of them still standing, and the rest were down and mixed in with some other tall plants.

A poncho and a headband

I did a very quick and very simple sewing project:  a child-sized poncho out of remnant fabric. I knew that you can make a poncho by joining two rectangles of fabric; the geometry is a little awkward, but I figured out how to do it.

There's a diagram here, third image in the post.

The recipient of the poncho looks very cute in it.

I also did a relatively quick knitting project:  a headband in garter stitch, to go under the hat I made. Sometimes I want a bit more over my ears than I am getting from the hat. I had enough yarn left from the hat for two-thirds of the headband, and then I found a similar color in my stash to finish it off. Once again, I'm glad that I taught myself how to knit in the continental style, which is much faster; I was able to start and finish the headband on the same day.

Punch needles

I've had the book Hooking Rugs:  New materials, new techniques, by Gloria E. Crouse for a while. It is an older book,  and it is interesting not only for the punch needle techniques that she used, but also for the ways that she used adhesives and other materials to make mixed-media rugs and wall hangings--she's tried everything--and for her tips on how to design, start, and finish a project.

There are basically two ways to make a hooked rug.  One is to use some sort of a hook to pull yarn or fabric strips up through the backing material.  The other is to use a tool to push the yarn or fabric strips down through the backing (from the back to the front)...usually this tool is a punch needle.  This needle is a slit tube with a hole near the pointy end, set in a handle. The speed needle version is mounted on a set-up like a non-electric egg beater, which moves the needle up and down as the handle is turned.

I went to an estate sale recently, and I found a little box of punch needles for $3. When I got it home, I found that it contained three:

First, an inexpensive basic needle, non-adjustable. I had one of these once, but it didn't last long before it broke, because of how the needle and handle were joined.

Second, a similar needle with several depth-of-loop adjustment notches. The needle is mounted inside the handle instead of outside, which makes it much sturdier.

Third, a Columbia Minerva needle just like the one in the book (besides her trusty speed needle), with two sizes of needle tip. It has ten depth settings and a little slide to keep the needle where it has been set. In the book, she tells how she modified hers to get three more possible settings out of it.

I've been playing with it a bit--with something like one hundred hours of work left to do on my other rug projects, I'm not starting another right now--and it is indeed fun to stab through the fabric over and over to lay down lines of loops. The needle is a little tricky to thread, but there are some hints in the book. I used a small embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut; for a rug, I'd want to build a frame.

Felted winter hat

I found two books on felting in the library to use as references for this project.
The books said that it was absolutely essential to do some test swatches with your yarn, in your washer.

Front-loading washers aren't nearly as good as top-loaders for felting, because you can't just stop them in the middle of a cycle, but that is what I have.

From felting my test swatches, I learned that it would take two full wash cycles to get the yarn to felt enough, that its Kool-Aid overdyeing would not be affected by this, and that I was going to have to knit two layers to get the thickness of hat that I wanted.

I measured my swatches before and after to see how much they shrunk; the result was very near what I was told to expect in the books:  forty percent loss in the length, and about twenty percent in the width.

I combined two different hat patterns from the books to come up with a simple hat shape to knit:  knit a straight tube starting at the bottom edge, and then at the top, do ten evenly spaced decreases around, but only do the decreases on every other row. When done, part of the bottom edge is turned up, and part is left down.

At this point, I had a bunch of math to do to see how many stitches I actually needed to knit, and how many inches long, allowing for both my normal knitting gauge as well as how it would shrink.

To get the second layer, I elected to pick up stitches along the brim, and knit essentially a second hat attached to the first, in sort of a long football shape, pushing one end inside the other when I was done.

I decided to loosely tie these two ends together for felting, because I thought that my washer was likely to find some ugly way to distort the hat's shape if I didn't. The hat still came out looking like a squashed pancake, and has some puckers on the top that maybe wouldn't have been there if I hadn't tied it.

After blocking and drying, the hat is serviceable, although not photogenic. It's a bit heavy on my head, as there are almost eight whole ounces of yarn in it.

Rug repairs continue, and some knitting

I'm a bit more than halfway through the twelve or so feet of rug edges that need reinforcement. It is tedious...but not as tedious as weaving new rugs would be.

I did a quick knitting project, a simple headband in garter stitch.

I also bought some yarn to make a new winter hat for myself, since I shrunk the old one in the wash. The yarn was a brown with yellow undertones, rather than the red ones that work better for me, so I overdyed it with cherry Kool-Aid--just one packet was enough for eight ounces of yarn. The yarn took up the artificial color almost completely, and held onto it.  Now it is drying.

Kool-Aid dyeing instructions are here; I used slightly different ones, which called for 2 ounces of vinegar per ounce of yarn.

I had already knitted up a little sample piece and sent it through the laundry with hot water...it felted very nicely. I was careful during dyeing and rinsing to avoid sudden changes of water temperature; I didn't need the yarn felting too soon.

What midlife is for

Five or six years ago, I started learning continental-style knitting, where the yarn is held in the hand that holds the needle that is being knitted from. It only works for the knit stitch, not for purl (don't ask me what they do on the Continent for purling), but it is much more efficient than the way that is usually taught (which I also taught myself at that time, having had up until then a let-go-of-the-needle-and-move-the-whole-hand-around technique; effective but very slow).

I am now working on a lap blanket, all in garter stitch (knit stitch only), and it is a good project for practicing my continental knitting. Now I have acquired some muscle memory in making the stitch. I've also been working on moving more efficiently from one stitch and the next, and from one row to the next.

With those skills, I can now knit more than twice as fast as I could just a few years ago, and probably more like three times the speed that I was knitting at ten years ago. It is very exciting to see my blanket being completed so quickly. And when I estimate the dwindling number of years that I have left to knit in, I think I'm going to need that ability.

Homemade socks

I retired a few pairs of my socks recently, and for some reason I don't feel that buying new socks at this time is the right answer. So this is what I have been doing instead:

1.  Repairing holes in socks by darning. Way back when, I tried darning cotton socks with wool yarn, and didn't like how the results felt on my feet. This time around, I have been using wool yarn on wool socks, and crochet cotton on cotton socks. The basic idea of darning is simple:  replace the missing material with a woven-in-place mesh that is anchored all around to non-deteriorated material.

I don't much like weaving, but weaving on a scale as small as this is tolerable.

2.  Knitting new socks. We had almost a pound of fine, matching wool yarn in our stash, which apparently cost my husband 50 cents altogether at a garage sale or something. I have started knitting a pair of socks from this yarn, but it will take a while, probably until fall (at least).

3.  Sewing socklike leggings or tights. It occurred to me, out of the blue, that perhaps some of the excess kids' clothes that are sitting in our garage waiting to be donated would work for making longer stockings. I looked and found a sweatshirt that had enough fabric. From past experience I knew how to cut and sew stockings quickly:  I don't bother doing anything fancy at the heel, I just make a long, tapered tube that has the right circumference at the right points (and that is closed at the small end. the toe), and finish it with some elastic at the top.

The heels do wear out first, but that would have happened anyway. With my feet, the circumferences at the ankle, heel, and widest part of the foot are all about the same, so I just get the width right and let it sort itself out in the wearing. (It does leave a wrinkle at the front ankle, which I am not fussy about.)

I have also used T-shirt fabrics, including some with spandex, for these before. Their lifespan, I would say, is "slightly better than pantyhose."

4.  Learning from experience. The socks I knitted from the nice wool yarn, last time around, ended up accidentally being shrunk into kid-size socks (very thick and warm ones). The socks I made out of recycled wool blanket yarn did not felt at all, and also stretched out a fair amount, and they have needed darning at various times.  The latest yarn I am using now will felt, I know, so I am knitting them slightly large.

Size 3 knitting needles from bamboo skewers

I needed some knitting needles small enough (in diameter) to handle fine yarn.

At first I worked on making some from a piece of heavy steel wire that we had; cut to length with a hacksaw, shape the ends with a metalworking file, and sand smooth. But they are weightier than I want to deal with while knitting thinner yarn.

Then I went looking through our bucket-of-dowels-and-such, to see if we had any very thin dowels left; no luck.

So I ended up in the kitchen, raiding my husband's supply of bamboo skewers. They just needed a little sanding (220 grit) to smooth them and blunt the tips a little. They appear to be about a size three.

Cheap round chopsticks are around a size 8 knitting needle, and 1/4 inch dowels are size 10.

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.

A pregnancy project: Making things stay put

Making room for a new baby mostly means making time for a new baby...with an emptier schedule, fewer commitments, and simpler housekeeping.   I did some work on the last point, to fix some things that seemed to never stay where I had put them.

One rocker had a seat cushion that ended up on the floor at least six times a day.  I used scrap pieces of denim to make ties for it, which I sewed onto the cushion by hand.  That was several months ago, and I haven't had to put it back even once.

Our bath towels were frequently sliding off their pegs. So I crocheted a loop onto a corner of each towel, using sturdy cotton yarn. The yarn has been in our stash for years, but the colors coordinated well with the bathroom colors. Now the towels stay put. I should note, though, that the pegs for the towels used by the younger children are horizontal, and they can easily get their towels down without ripping the loops off; in other situations, that might be a problem.

I have a crate that we are using for a piano bench, with a seat pad made of several layers of fabric, tied together quilt-fashion. This seat pad was also frequently found on the floor.  I used linen yarn to tie it directly to the crate, through the hand-hole. Now it sometimes is flipped down, but it is easy to flip back.

One of the children's winter coats did not have a loop inside the collar for hanging it up; I made one out of a scrap of bias tape, and sewed it in.

Pajama pants and halfway through the second sock

I received a few pieces of fabric from a big fabric stash clean-out. I used some flannel to make pajama pants. Another piece I will use to make another blouse. The other piece I will probably make into clothing too, but I'm not sure what. There was also a vest with some suede that I will reuse somehow.

I also turned the heel on the second sock of the most recent pair.

A while back, I gave my armchair frame a light coat of spray-on clear finish. I have decided that as a general policy I am not going to paint carved wood. The clear finish gives it some shine so it looks somewhat updated. (In my trend-spotting I am seeing more shiny and geometric finishes and forms.)

I've been playing the Everything in its Place game recently in my home, and also the Give it a Good Scrub game. I will say (again) that just wiping things down can make a remarkable difference in how my home feels.

Current projects

I have two more pairs of socks to knit; one more pair from the wool blanket, and another from some turquoise cotton yarn that I bought. (There are some very nice turquoise and aqua colors in style now.) The weather was too hot for knitting, but now it is cooling off a bit.

Reupholstering the armchair:  I have the chair stripped down, and I have started gathering materials to reupholster it. After considering some repurposing options, I bought some new upholstery fabric, and now I have to decide whether to refinish or paint the exposed wood.

Dining room chairs:  These are mostly stripped down, and I am waiting for a week or so until vinyl goes on sale at the fabric store. I have decided not to repaint the metal frames.

Footwear:  I took a pair of cheap sandals that had been handed down to me, and replaced the upper parts (with upholstery fabric scraps from the footstool) to make scuffy slippers, for indoors. I am also plotting how to replace my dress shoes, which are nearly worn out.

Produce:  We are getting plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash from the garden now. The challenge is to actually prepare and eat them.