Spring refreshing: School room

I had some free time, and was a bit at loose ends. I picked up The Nesting Place, by Myquillyn Smith, and started looking at the pictures again. Which made me want to apply some of her techniques to the room I was in:  our "school room".

One of these techniques is simply to consider what the purposes and functions of the room are. For this room, I started making a list...which went on and on...and I ended up with seventeen purposes for this one room.

An aside:  Our previous house had one small living room. This house has three not-small living rooms, and it seemed excessive to me at first. But God knows what he is doing, and we do use all three of these rooms heavily.

Then I listed all the things that needed to be in the room to support those functions. Almost everything was there already, but there are a few things that we can add to make the room work much better for our family:

1.  Two more footstools; the one I made before is constantly being used for seating at the low table (repurposed coffee table), or as a perch for the shorter members of the family to see out of the window, or as a satisfyingly hefty toy to roll around, or as a rather unstable step stool.

2.  One more light source; we try to keep the overhead lights off in the evening and instead use lamps for lighting. This room has one lamp and needs about one more. My husband has an LED project planned that will probably cover this need.

3.  Folders for homeschool paperwork and assignments, instead of one big pile of papers.

The second technique is to "quiet the room" by taking down all of the decorative items (things on the wall can stay, if you want). When they are all down, it is much easier to dust the surfaces, and also to think of new possibilities. And then things can go back where they were, or not, and you can bring in different or new things, and just play around with making changes.

It is very useful for when you have gotten so accustomed to your decorating that you aren't really seeing any of it anymore.

So I went through the room, quieting, straightening, dusting, and rearranging, and I got a lot done in the time that I had.

Homemade ricotta cheese

I had been wanting to try making homemade ricotta for a long time, and finally got around to it.

I used this recipe and method from The Kitchn. In short:  1/2 gallon of milk (not skim or ultra-pasteurized), 1/3 C of lemon juice or vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt. Heat milk to 200 degrees F, stir in your acid, let sit for 10 minutes, strain through cheesecloth to remove whey (which can be used in place of water in baking later; haven't tried that myself yet).

Other recipes recommend heating the milk to 180 degrees F, or to "starting to simmer". I found the latter much more useful, as it was a pain to keep checking the milk temperature over and over with the thermometer.

There was also a wide variation in straining times; it depends on how dry you want it to be at the end. If you drain it overnight and press it together, it is basically a farmer's cheese. (You can also get a sort of cheese by straining plain yogurt overnight; may not work as well with low-fat yogurt).

I tried it once with lemon juice, and another time with vinegar. Lemon juice gives it a better flavor, but they both work.

For straining, the first time I used a clean piece of white cotton fabric (and threw it away afterward; not worth the trouble to wash it with the appliances and plumbing that we have) and a colander--actually, the steamer basket of our main stockpot. The second time, I used an unprinted paper towel, which also worked (and didn't seem to shed fibers into the cheese).

The yield comes to about two cups of ricotta, and a quart and a half of whey, for one half-gallon of milk.

My husband approved of the ricotta, but the children didn't like it...so there was more for us!

In terms of time needed to make the cheese, it takes some time, and a bit of hands-on time, so it is not something that I plan on doing often. But it is nice to know about and be able to do. 

Spring decor: Tissue paper flowers

Recently The Nester reminded me that the time for spring decorating had come. I pulled out one thing that I made about two years ago:  a floppy pink pom-pom made out of strips from an old T-shirt. That was the only spring-y decoration I had.

But an importer* of cheap Chinese party decorations has been sending us catalogs, and what mostly stands out to me in them are the paper lanterns and large fluffy paper balls. I had put "paper lantern" on my things-to-make list, and intended to use some tissue paper that I had saved. But with the Spring theme, I decided to use the tissue paper for flowers instead.

I ended up making three different versions, all basically constructed in the same way:

1.  With one sheet of pink tissue paper, I cut it into three long strips, of different widths, and cut flower petal tips along one edge of each strip. Then, starting with the narrowest strip and ending with the widest, I carefully rolled them up, into a fair imitation of a rose, securing it at the stem with twine when I finished.

2.  With one sheet of purple tissue paper, I folded it lengthwise, then cut the long (unfolded) edges with scissors to make a fringe. Again, I rolled it up, and this time tied it at the "stem" with tape. 

3.  The remaining three sheets of tissue paper were white.  I experimented with painting them, with red acrylic paint and water to make pink streaks, and found that it came out...streaky, as I was trying to mix the paint and water right on the tissue paper, and it wasn't holding up well. Mixing them off the paper and using a much wider brush, I could have covered more of the paper than I did.

After the paint dried, I cut each sheet into three long strips, folded and cut each strip to make a fringe just like I did with the purple paper, and started rolling them up.

This time, though, I had more strips to work with, and I decided to alternate them so that the fringe stuck out on both sides of the "stem".

When I finished rolling them all up, and tied them with a string in the middle, and fluffed out the fringe a bit, it made a poofy, fluffy paper flower ball just like the ones in the catalog...except that it needed a little trimming where a few ends stuck out too far. Which I gave it.

I hung it up in the living room, close enough to the hanging lamp that it made its fabric cover look drab. So then I started experimenting with putting a different fabric on it, but that wasn't quite right either...so I'm still working on that one.

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*Now a Berkshire Hathaway company!!  I find that very amusing. 

Last chance? (Technical books)

I just learned that the (online) bookstore formerly known as Lindsay's Technical Books (which was sold to an employee when Mr. Lindsay retired) is liquidating their remaining inventory at a heavy discount.

Lindsay's book catalogs were always entertaining reading, and you could learn a useful thing or two just by reading his book descriptions. He also dispensed kicks in the pants toward actually using your brains and making something yourself. The how-to books that I bought there (in Lindsay's time) were all worth the money, although the projects were frequently not as workable in the present day as I would have liked.

Exercise pants

My sweat pants that I use for exercising at home needed to be retired, so I used yet another piece of the polyester fabric that I received for Christmas to make myself new exercise pants.

For a pattern, I measured myself and sketched out a pattern (complete with seam allowances, and ease for room to move), knowing that I could alter it anywhere that it didn't fit.

I have been experimenting recently with doing away with the outside leg seams on pants, by making each leg a single piece of fabric that extends all the way up to the waist, and that joins with the other leg in the front and back; making a pair of pants from two larger pieces of fabric, instead of four smaller ones.

I took my current measurements to use in the pattern; if you're going to make something for yourself, you might as well customize it. A hint I learned (from Sewing for Plus Sizes, by Barbara Deckert) is to also measure your hips and thighs while sitting down, but I skipped that this time.

The fabric was rather thin, so I partially lined it with one of the other polyester knits; some of which I had to piece together. I basted each lining piece to the edges of its corresponding main piece before sewing the main pieces together. I used a piece of reclaimed elastic for the waistband.

Upon trying it on, I found two things that needed to be changed:  I forgot to measure my calves, and the pants were too tight there. Also, for some reason, the pants were much too long. The first I fixed by making a slash in each pants leg and sewing a long triangle of fabric into it.  The second just needed cutting and hemming at a higher point.

The end result is a bit funny-looking--the geometry of pants is tricky to get right, and I was throwing these pants together quickly--but fits fairly well and will serve its purpose.

Ungraying kids' clothes

I took the gray kids' clothes, and experimented with changing their color using chlorine bleach.

Procedure:  Dilute bleach in a quantity of water, enough for the clothes to move freely. Add clothing, and stir with a stick; watch for color changes in the water and in the clothes. Try for even exposures of the fabrics to the bleach, and for minimization of bleaching time. Remove clothes carefully (not splashing yourself), drain water, and rinse clothes in fresh water at least once.

Chlorine is rough on fibers, and will weaken them (or eat right through them, if you use enough, for long enough), so it must be used with care.

Results:  The bleach had very little effect on the clothes that were cotton/polyester blends...probably because the white fibers were cotton (already bleached) while the gray fibers were polyester (not dyed; made of actual gray polyester).  There were changes in the colors of the 97% and 100% cotton items:  either toward an orange or toward a purple--depending on the dye used to make the gray, I suppose.  The orangey ones needed heavy bleaching to get to an orange color.

Organizing kids' clothes

In the past year, several people have handed down children's clothing to us. Each time, I pulled out a few things that would fit my children at the time, and packed the rest away into closets and spare dresser drawers.

Which meant that I would soon have a very hard time finding the clothes that fit my children next.

Today, the right time for organizing it all came about:  It had risen to the top of my Big Projects list; I had accumulated enough boxes; and someone just dropped off another bag of clothing. Also, it was just before laundry day, so I could put anything that needed washing into the laundry queue (and there were some things that needed it).  Things that come out of the laundry process, later this week, can be integrated into the clothing storage system I have created.

The first step was to pull out ALL of the clothes...boxes, bags, and (in some cases) entire dresser drawers. Everything was hauled to the living room and sorted by size and girls' versus boys'. I also made a pile for worn/unwanted clothing. As I wrote before, I am on a campaign to get rid of gray children's clothing in my house; this was a good time to carry that through.

I let the older children choose their wardrobes from the available clothing; what they don't want may be used later by a younger sibling.

Then I packed up the clothing that was to be stored, into boxes. I started with the largest sizes, which will be in storage the longest before being used, and worked downward, labeling each box front and back with the size.*  When I ran out of boxes, the rest fit into one large dresser drawer, that I had already been using for the purpose anyway.

I still have the Unwanted pile to sort through:  Give Away versus Re-Use/Recycle. Worn-out clothing gets stripped of buttons, zippers, and possibly elastic, and is then cut up into small rags to use in place of paper towels.

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I've adopted this practice of labeling both narrow ends of the box for all of our storage boxes, so that I can read the label no matter which side is facing forward.