Why modern clothing doesn't fit: Hat edition

I just learned that modern one-size-fits-most women's hats are made for 22-inch heads.  (There is some good hat sizing information here.)  My head circumference is 23 inches, which is on the larger end of Large.

I had noticed that the few hats I tried were always too small--one of them, made of fabric, I did significant alterations to, to give myself head room--but I didn't realize that it was a generalized sort of not-fitting-ness.

The book that I learned this tidbit from is The Lost Art of Dress (I am not an Amazon affiliate), by Linda Przybyszewski. It is an interesting look at some of the history of professional home economists in this country, and, as the title says, also conveys some inklings of just what has been lost to common knowledge in the area of dress, in the last few decades.  Well worth reading.

No-sew soft fabric box

I had a pile of old magazines and papers that I am keeping for collage and art journaling, sitting in a corner and needing a container to look Organized. I was thinking of making a shallow box from cardboard, but I got tired of waiting for cardboard to show up, and made a box out of fabric instead...a double layer of green twill from my fabric stash--which I had just looked through.

The box is shaped like this parchment paper pan liner, and is held together at the corners by safety pins. I shaped it around a magazine so that it would be wide enough and long enough.

I bent one of the pins, trying to force it through the layers of fabric, but I have plenty; Grandma sent me off to college with a good supply of them.

Places for wet things

I got tired of being perpetually short of places to hang up wet clothing, and set up a foldable drying rack in my bathtub. Then I put up a wire clothesline in the back yard. These were both things that I already had, but hadn't figured out the right place for, yet.

Investing in knowledge

One simple idea has come up several times recently in various books that I've been reading:  if you understand the principles of good design and good taste, you can make better choices from the set of material goods that is currently available, and can put them to more effective use...thus being much more efficient with your resources in the long run.

Fixing a toilet that runs too long

One of our toilets went from running a rather long time after a flush, to running a very long time.... Time to look in the tank and see what is going on.

In my experience, there are several reasons a toilet might run too long:  the flapper or cup that closes the hole at the bottom doesn't sit right, or the float (a cup or a ball) needs to be adjusted, or the inlet valve is bad and needs to be replaced.  (Remember:  I am not a plumber.  Nor a handyman.)

The first is easy to check:  flush and watch, maybe give it a nudge to see if it is in place.  For the third, a bad inlet valve will, I believe, leave the toilet running continuously.  At least that was the case the one time that I've seen.

For the second reason, a float that is too low will let water start spilling down the upright overflow tube before the float gets high enough to mechanically turn off the water.  Again, flush, and watch.

This was the case this time, fortunately; no need to do more internet research or go out to buy parts.

This particular toilet is a fairly common brand, not high-quality, and the plastic innards look rather chintzy. The float cup is connected to the shut-off lever by a plastic rod.  It took me some fiddling and careful disassembly (not wanting to snap the plastic) to figure out how to adjust the rod to raise the float cup.  But once I more or less understood how it worked, it was easy to put back together, and, voila!

Now the toilet tank refills much more quickly.

Before I started, I consulted both of our DIY fix-everything-around-the-house books.  The Reader's Digest Fix It Yourself book I like a lot, but it does zip through the topic of plumbing quite rapidly.  The Black and Decker book is also occasionally useful.

Enjoying the outdoors

With the (finally) warmer weather, we've been able to eat some of our lunches outdoors, and it is a whole different experience from eating inside. A large tray or cookie sheet to carry things on, and a place to set it outside, help a lot.

I've also been outside to catch a sunset or two; our house isn't well-situated to see them from indoors--which is one of its greatest flaws.

Planters for cheap

Our deck has several built-in planters. Each one of these has a shallow rectangular plastic box that holds a few inches of potting soil. These boxes are so old that they are simply disintegrating. Our budget for replacements was Not Much.

My solution is to replace them with plastic five-gallon buckets, cut to the right height. Our meat market sells empty, clean condensed milk buckets for a nominal cost (fifty cents each, last time I heard). Each planter has space for two buckets.

The plastic boxes were resting on some 2x4 supports to elevate them to the right height; underneath the 2x4s were a solid shelf, so I took those out, and then measured how tall the buckets needed to be. The height came to eleven inches, which is, conveniently, not on the thickened part of the bucket that the handle hooks into.

To cut each bucket, I started with a regular wood handsaw to start a slot through, and then continued cutting with a narrower saw with fairly large teeth, which I think is actually for drywall. After cutting, I used a sharp knife to trim and scrape and clean up the rough edges.

Then I drilled a few drainage holes in the bottom of each bucket, and threw in some flattened plastic bottles to loosely cover the holes and provide some internal drainage space, before filling the buckets with potting soil from the old planter box liners.

So far I've made four of these; two planters' worth.

The cut-off buckets still look like cut-off buckets, and not anything fancy, but they are only visible from above, and I'm planning on planting something with a bit of bushiness to it in them.