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.

------------------------

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.

Doing and undoing

I pushed through repairs on several items from my mending pile, and I have also been going through a much larger pile of handed-down clothing and fabric.

I sorted T-shirts, found the all-cotton ones that we don't want to wear as T-shirts, and cut them up for re-use in an Alabama Chanin-style project, which I can work on outdoors this spring while watching children.

Some of the less worthy fabrics went into the kitchen wipe and baby wipe pipelines.

Other have been butchered down to the re-usable parts, and put away until I get to them.

There were some shorts, which my children don't wear, which are going to be short pants for my youngest when the weather is a little warmer.  No alterations needed, because of the diaper.

The big thing remaining is a wool suit that my mother-in-law shrunk for a project, and then gave up on.  Wool jackets and coats are challenging to disassemble, because there is usually a lot of interfacing and inner structure going on.  It's very educational to see all the work that goes into one, though.  I am thinking of using the wool for a bog jacket, much smaller and simpler than the ones pictured at the link.

I was reading in an older book about how having prints and pictures hung up in a house made it more comfortable, and I had recently come across my set of small classroom butterfly posters and was planning to put them up anyway, so I found a place to string up some crocheted wire, and I hung them up with clothespins.  Only four small nail holes in the wall.

Not too late to buy seeds

My order at Seed Treasures took only a week to get here, USPS both ways.  They have a lot of tomato and bean varieties, many heirloom varieties of seeds, and also many varieties that can handle the shorter northern growing season. 

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.

--------------------------

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.

--------------------------

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.