Curtain twine

The curtains for the bedroom have buttonholes across their tops. I've been thinking about what to use for rings or ties.  Yesterday, while looking for something else, I came across some natural-fiber twine, dyed green, that I picked up at a rummage sale years and years ago, and then never found a good use for. I cut the twine into identical lengths quickly by wrapping it around a book of the right height, and then cutting across. I strung each length through a buttonhole and knotted it. I discovered that the curtain rods would extend a good distance wider than the windows, which I wanted. The curtains are also much longer than the windows, and are now a dominant feature in the room. I am now thinking about whether or not to line the curtains, which are somewhat loosely woven. I have a spare white sheet, but it is not opaque enough, so I think I will use that (in a double layer) for a clothing project instead...I've reached the stage of pregnancy where I'm getting tired of wearing my clothes that still fit.

Keeping busy

Recent projects:

Mailbox flag:  a piece of aluminum from an old baking pan, cut with tin snips, smoothed with a file, punched with a hammer and an old nail, then buffed with sandpaper.  A few old screws to attach it to the wood that sheathes the mailbox and restrict its rotation. It mostly works, just a little prone to putting itself in the down position.

Curtains:  cutting the fabric into panels and hemming them by hand. This is where it pays to have chosen fabric that you like; it takes a little time to hem multiple yards, even at two hem stitches per inch.

Baby fence for laundry room:  the opening is more than five feet wide, and what I opted to do was to buy an old oak door from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and place it on its side across the opening. The door was $35, although there were crappy old doors with layers and layers of old paint (lead paint??) for as little as $5. This particular door had a swinging mechanism at the top that I took off and was able to use to secure one end of the door to the wall. The other end is held in place by boxes for now.

Furniture reassembly:  much of my furniture was inspired by the book Nomadic Furniture, and either breaks down or folds up for moving. I finally got the last piece of furniture (a kid loft) assembled. Note to self: LABEL the pieces of this loft next time, to make this process go faster.

Things on walls: I hung up a length of thin rope in the room that seems destined to be our homeschool room (despite our very informal homeschooling approach), across the wall so that I can hang up the children's artwork with clothespins.  Fast, easy, and cheap.

Next up: figuring out how to actually hang the curtains, at the moments some are just draped over the rods, and the rest are held up by clothespins hiding in the background.

About the bedroom curtains

Why I made a mad splurge of $12 on second-hand curtains:

First of all, you have to understand that I loathe the color beige, which I strongly associate with dentists' offices and other unpleasantly grown-up spaces. And that the interior of this house is mostly beige.

Once upon a time, someone at a household textiles company told their designer, "Design a fabric for a woman living in a Fifties rambler that has been updated in neutral colors, who wants a more organic feel to the home."  The designer came back with a pattern that had goofy modernistic rectangles in beige, off-white, and white in the background, and greenery with purple flowers in the foreground.  The curtains fit very well into the bedroom, and really help to tie it together, even though the pattern seems cynically over-deliberate.

There is a principle here that I am trying to work out, which I call "Accept and Transcend". The curtains accept the basic beige room color, but transcend it by going beyond it into floral colors. I've been experimenting with this in several other rooms with the artwork that we have, two paintings and a photograph of natural subjects. Each picture has a little beige in it somewhere, so it accepts the wall color, but then each picture goes off into a different and much richer palette of colors from nature. I hung up a piece of birch bark in the bathroom that accomplishes the same thing.

I've since added a couple of pieces of wood furniture to the bedroom that seem to really glow against the beige carpet and walls and the very pale bleached woodwork.  I salvaged an IKEA floor lamp that my husband was going to scrap and made a quick shade for it with thin sheet copper.  The rest of the lamp is gray, and I am thinking of decoupaging over it with jungle green paper from magazine pages, since I am low on paint at the moment, and deep emerald green is a color that I would like more of in my home.

Shopping list

This is where my startup decorating money went:

Thrift store:

$12 pair of curtains
$4 twin sheet that matched one we already have

Second thrift store:

$2 folding chair for guest seating
$2 stool for child
$1.50 two bowls to replace ones broken during move
$3 sheet that matched the previous sheet

ArtScraps store:

$4 upholstery scraps to make new chair cushion cover, and small things for children

Antique store:

$12 glass washboard for hand washing diaper covers (since the fancy-shmancy HE washer won't)

Fabric store:

$10.50 two yards of clearance fabric for living room curtain

Grocery store:

$10 food, we've been eating down the pantry for weeks

There is more that I would like to say about some of these things, particularly the curtains and fabric, because they are splurges relative to what I would normally spend on such things.  But we are still roughing it in terms of functioning Internet technology, not to mention the past day or two without hot water.

It only took two weeks...

...to get the internet working consistently at the new place. That's one week less than it took for the last move, when they lost the first order entirely and had to start over from scratch. (This is one reason why I have resisted going paperless with finances; working online is very convenient, except when you cannot get online.)

We found this place in the last two weeks before moving, through a unique and Providential set of circumstances. We were looking for a house in an older urban neighborhood, close to where my husband works, but ended up in a suburb. In a house that is more than twice the square footage of our previous house, which is ironic considering the amount of voluntary and involuntary downsizing we have done in the last few years. Suddenly we have achieved a cleaner and much more minimalist aesthetic, solely through the generous addition of square footage and closets. We had help from about a dozen people for the actual move, which we badly needed because neither of us can do heavy lifting at the moment.

In the past, I never put aside any money for new decorating after a move. This time, I scrimped for weeks and weeks and saved about $70. Last weekend, I went to various stores, looking mostly for fabric for curtains. I'll save the precise breakdown for another post.

I'm now at the point in the unpacking where the books are all back on the bookshelves, but the TV is not yet set up.  It turned warm a few days ago, and the children have been spending many hours outdoors.  Finally.

What really happens when you fall off the radar

We've been debt-free for several years now. Of the three credit reporting agencies, one can't even get my name right, another hasn't been able to keep up with my current address, and the third seems to have chosen to forget that I even exist. (As if it's so hard for a company built around gathering and storing information en masse to keep one more handful of bytes of data around.)

Meanwhile, I see more and more and more articles about how it is absolutely necessary to have a good, long credit record and a high credit score, and how not having those things must mean that you are a very, very bad person.  (Who may not even deserve to get their mandated Obamacare.)

Let's spit this propaganda out and step back for a minute:  Who created credit reporting and scoring? Creditors, so they can tell who will be most profitable for them to lend to. Who is it most profitable for them to lend to? People who routinely use credit, and who might someday have to live off credit for a while. (Creditors take a little in interest and fees off the top in the good economic times, and will take much more than that in the hard and desperate times.) Who is the least profitable for them? Two types:  people who run up huge piles of debt and then never repay, either intentionally or unintentionally, and people who rarely or never use credit.

So there is more than one way to get a lower credit score, and having one does not necessarily imply immoral or irresponsible behavior.
 
The Bible is clear:  debt is to be avoided, but the poor cannot always avoid do this, and will sometimes get into debt beyond any possibility of repayment. There should be a mechanism to erase their debt and allow them to start over with a clean slate--this is laid out in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, containing the Law that was given to the Israelites), and it is the origin of our modern bankruptcy laws. The rich who exploit the hardships of the poor to enrich themselves even further are thoroughly condemned throughout the Bible. One reason for the periodic remission of debts is to prevent the economic winners from actually taking all and permanently enslaving their countrymen.

Today, powerful corporations and their allies in media and government and academia would like you to believe that living debt-free is impossible. But debt is slavery, your enslavement is to their profit, not yours, and they are even ready to deny an honest living to those whom they can't enslave. Who is it who really determines what is possible and what isn't? God and only God. Look around you:  there are millions of people surviving and getting by who don't have "good credit", who don't have credit cards, and who don't have much of an income. A fair number of these people are even living quite well. It is not impossible if there are people who are actually doing it.

Beyond this, when God provides supernaturally it is utterly beyond the understanding of those who are merely of this world. It is this Providence that I have come to depend on more and more. The best way to make "something from almost nothing" is to follow the One who made absolutely everything from absolutely nothing, and who can always provide that little something to get you started.

More armchair design possibilities

In the library, I was leafing through a book on Arts and Crafts furniture, and came across an armchair that was similar to the one I built, but with a back that could be adjusted to tilt at several different angles. There were two versions, both had the back attached to the seat frame with hinges. One had pegs to support the back, with three sets of holes into the sides of the armrests. The other version had a wooden bar that fit into three different sets of slots. These were very interesting, and I could incorporate either of these ideas into my chair later, but at this stage of my life I need a chair that the children can't slam down on each other, or run away with essential components.