Too little, too late

By far, the most-viewed post on this blog is my Health Insurance post.  Mostly viewed by bots, I presume, but still.

Biden and Obama just had their little Obamacare celebration at the White House, which I saw variously described beforehand as "promoting" and "pushing" the Affordable Care Act, which is an odd way to talk about an epic piece of legislation that was passed en masse twelve years ago, and that supposedly is very popular, and that is also supposedly politically impossible to repeal.

There have been a number of articles recently about finally doing something about the "family glitch" that I described--where health insurance is deemed affordable if the cost of employer-based coverage for a single worker is within 9.5% of their income, and never mind if they are buying family coverage also--because they are not eligible to purchase coverage on the exchanges at all, on account of the coverage available through the employer.

Apparently Biden is about to solve this problem by executive order [Edit: here], and there may be legislative action later on. 

From what I've seen so far, the executive order would allow family members affected by the glitch to buy subsidized insurance on the exchanges, beginning with January 2023 coverage.  They anticipate that about one million of the several million glitched families would do so, along with maybe 200,000 people who are presently uninsured.

I'm sure that the administration will manage to mess up the implementation of this somehow.  This is especially likely when calculating subsidy amounts, since the exact amount ought to depend on how much the breadwinner is paying through their employer in premiums--which can change mid-year as the employee hits a birthday and moves up a price bracket. 

One feature of our present coverage is that after we pay the premiums for the first three children, the rest are included at no additional cost.  This has been the case across various plans from various insurance companies, but I don't know where it came from and I don't believe that it will necessarily be the case with the plans on the exchanges.

I'm not very happy about the idea of having different health insurance for different family members, and having to learn to deal with the exchange, and then perhaps actually having to do so.  It is complex enough when everyone is on the same plan, and when the employer's HR drone is handling the annual health plan shopping and application process.

People have been complaining a lot about the recent inflation, but the truth is that there is still a lot of slack in most people's finances that goes to things beyond the austere basics.  The Biden administration has to deal with the family glitch soon, though, because many of these families have had much less slack for almost seven years now.  The increases in the standard deduction and in child tax credits have only partially offset the premium costs in absolute terms, and the uneven distribution of subsidies created a substantial relative differential in disposable income.

Finally, this fix to the family glitch would only return our out-of-pocket premium costs to roughly the pre-Affordable Care Act level.  Obama promised that premiums would be lower by $2500 per year, remember?

Well???

There are ways that could be accomplished, but you can be sure that that is how it will not be done.

Soap and sewing

A quantity of soap shavings came home with children after an activity.  I melted down the soap to make new bars.

How I should have started was to heat up a little water in the bottom of my laundry soap pan, and then to slowly add soap shavings and dissolve them.  Most of the time, what I had was a softened, gooey mass of soap.  Not as bad as the time I was melting old, dry, hard bits of soap, but not good.  The laundry soap pan does not have a handle, and it took some time to incorporate all of the shavings.

Near the end, I found that turning the heat up from Low to the lower side of Medium was helpful.  The soap was still not anywhere near liquid, but it was at least moldable.  

I packed it into a pan, let it cool, cut it into small bars, and have put them up to dry and harden for a few months.

I suspect they will end up a bit crumbly, but hopefully they will be usable in bar form.  If they aren't, they can go into a future batch of laundry soap.

In other projects, I have been sewing toddler pants, using fabric from old adult clothes and elastic from worn-out kids' pants.  So far I have made four pairs.  The process is a bit time-consuming when I have to pick out multiple rows of stitching to liberate the elastic, and when I have to piece fabric together to make it wide enough.

It was easier to draw up a quick pattern than to dig out an old one.  So these pants look a little goofy, too, but in a slightly different way than previous versions did.

I also worked through several items that needed mending; still have a bag full.

Yesterday I dyed some fabrics in the washer in preparation for making three skirts.  This morning I was able to sketch out a pattern and cut out two of them.  The sewing for these should be straightforward.  The third will be a circle skirt, from a circular tablecloth.

Mending and melding

I finally took a stab at my mending pile, and was able to adequately repair several items of clothing, one of which required serious darning/re-weaving where a button's stitching had ripped right out.

One of the things I did a while ago, and then forgot about, was to overdye a skirt and shirt in the washer.  The skirt had colors that were too bright, and the shirt was much too pale.  The skirt came out very nicely, and the shirt came out in a dull but tolerable shade.

I did a quick experiment with cutting a milk jug into narrow strips and then crocheting them.  Crochet uses up length very quickly, and it was difficult to cut very much of it because the scissors I was using tended to slide on the plastic.

Then I messed around with ironing the result, in between sheets of kitchen parchment paper. The plastic fused in some places and not in others.

I also tried ironing flat pieces of milk jug together to fuse them, again using parchment paper to protect the iron and working surface.  This worked, but since the plastic shrinks a bit when heated, you can't butt two edges together and expect them to stay there.  It also doesn't come out entirely flat.

At the playground, I found some stringy dead weeds that could probably be made into a rustic basket, if one reliably had their hands free for working.

I counted diapers going into the washer, and indeed as described in The Tightwad Gazette, twenty diapers equals one load of diaper laundry.  Cloth wipes are included in that, and really it is twenty diaperings rather than diapers, because I am putting a newborn-size diaper inside a larger-baby diaper at each diaper change.

And onward

I made a simple cover/sheath for a meat cleaver, from a piece of suede and some waxed thread.  The thread is extra-heavy-duty, and there was no particular need for a strong seam, so I made very large (one inch) stitches, and the sewing went very quickly:  place leather on an old phone book, poke hole with awl, make stitch, repeat.  I used my last glover's needle for the sewing, but an embroidery needle would have worked fine.

I also took up my quilt project from more than a year ago.  The quilt just needed a few more blocks made, and then to be assembled.  The last step is sewing down the edge binding by hand, and that is half done now.

My most-used quilt was waiting for a replacement back, when I looked at the cotton batting that was hanging out of it, and realized that it would need new innards as well.  The top needs more repairs besides the ones I did a few years ago, but it is worth re-using.

I read about a woman making sleeping bags for the homeless from ironed-together chip bags, and old coats, and I thought of doing something similar for making diaper covers for cloth diapers.  Then I found a laminated woven plastic rice bag that I had saved, which is much sturdier than the chip bags I ironed, and I used that instead.  I encased it in fabric in about the right shape, and added snaps. It came out looking good, but it is very much too small in the waist, so I will have to add extensions.  I hang diaper covers up to dry after washing them, so I'm not worried that the plastic might melt in the dryer.

Other things I have used the rice bags for:  wet bags for the diaper bag and for swimming stuff, and a sewing machine cover.

A child and I watched a YouTube video of a guy attempting to make bulletproof armor from milk jugs.  He had a laborious process involving cutting the plastic up with scissors, shredding it in a blender, baking it in a pan in the oven, and taking it out frequently to try to knead it smooth.  Even then, he had air pockets in his block of plastic, and it certainly wasn't bulletproof when he tested it.  From our one experiment here last year, we found that an iron generates sufficient heat to laminate flat pieces of milk jug plastic together, one layer at a time.  That was a small piece, though, and I don't know how hard it would be to keep a larger one flat as it is built up.

Place-making

A neighbor was giving away some pieces of furniture, and gave us a small table.  I cleaned out a neglected corner of the laundry room, and made a quiet little place to sit and work on something. There were also two small shelves that were claimed by family members.

A child was working on making a face shield for sledding, and decided to use the side of a 2-liter bottle.  Since it was curved, the child decided to iron it under a piece of kitchen parchment paper..  Turns out that what this plastic does when heated is to immediately shrink and make large, smooth blisters.  But this worked out in the child's favor, because three of the blisters were placed just right for the eyes and nose of a pair of goggles.  Child went on to build a full face mask off of that.

Later on I did my own experiment with another cut-up 2-liter bottle.  What came out was a smoothly pebbled (with bumps up to about 2 inches across) otherwise flat surface that is about five inches by seven.  It looks very nice, but it would take a lot of bottles to cover a surface of any size.

I also did an experiment into making flatbread.  Cooking it on the griddle and in the oven had very similar results, except that the griddle was better for browning it.

One small step at a time

We finally have matching light bulbs in each bathroom light fixture.

I glued a broken chair and drawer (not to each other), and put them back into service.

The dress project is nearly complete.  The directions had me sew in each sleeve inside-out for fitting, and then disassemble the seams and re-sew the right way.  I also managed at one point to sew one side of the zipper half an inch higher than the other side, which took some time to correct.

I've also been looking at my homemade armchair, which is more comfortable than it looks, at least for me, and thinking about giving it a wider back and seat to make it a couch.  The couch that it originally went with it is unusable until the sides are rebuilt, and it is too large for the living room here.

Really what I need here is a sort of freestanding window seat, with storage both above and below.

I've started saving dryer lint and chip bags for future projects.

There was a household hint in a recent Reader's Digest to put a ball of aluminum foil in the dryer to cut the static electricity.  I didn't really notice any difference in the static cling, but after a number of loads, the ball of foil is much smoother and denser, and looks a lot less like aluminum foil.

Excursions

I happened to be near a discount grocery recently, which has dented and slightly outdated and discontinued groceries, and I found some good deals.  They had a sign up explaining the differences between Best By, Use By, and Sell By dates.

The regular grocery store has a few shelves here and there with similar deals.  They took down their signs about supply issues, and seemed better stocked this week.

I turned the thermostat down two degrees, but I'm not sure the savings in natural gas is worth the cost of the extra food my family will be eating to keep warm.

I recycled an old memory foam mattress topper into cushions for a rocker.  It has a temporary cover made from velvet curtains safety-pinned and sewn with long stitches (basted), until I find the fabric I want to use for it.

My husband has been playing with tin can camping stoves.  One design could hold a beer can stove like I made some years ago.