Crafting progress

 I worked an hour or two on the Fleurs project.  My French knots are a work in progress, and I've decided to backstitch everything that's supposed to be stem stitch.  Also, the how-to instructions for backstitch work great on long distances, but for short bits of stitching, it's harder to do, so I'm probably doing my own version of the backstitch.  But hey, it's not going to be judged. 

 

 

Crafting attempt

 I bought this kit at Goodwill last month.  Only $3, which is a big discount from the new price (for a change - this Goodwill tends to price optimistically).  

 

I'm going to do it in purple floss, since I'm doing it for someone who absolutely loves purple.  It only uses three stitches, I think - backstitch, stem, and satin.   Well, and French knots too.  I haven't embroidered in decades, so we'll see how it goes.  

The library craft swap

 The library and a local craft group have a craft swap about twice a year.  So far, I'm doing good about taking more than I bring home.  This time, I took about a bag and a half of stuff, and came home with about a bag.  Only one cone of yarn, though.   

 

 

 

• Two embroidery hoops (one round wood, one oval metal)
• a handful of short, metal-tooth zippers to practice pouches with
• wine corks (someone brought a whole trash bag full) 
• Pinking shears (vintage)
• tatting shuttle 
• pack of jump rings and clasps 
• Piecework magazines 
• a couple of crochet booklets 
• beaded necklace kit 
• kit to make two embroidery pendants 
• How-to-draw book (vintage)
• Art Deco coloring book 
• fabric to make L a reticule with 
• part of a Tulip tie-dye set 
• kit to make a passport cover and luggage tag with 
• a cone of cotton yarn for potholders
• Fiskars child-size cutting mat with cutting pen 
• mason jar of beads
• pack of assorted pins that say Rue (??)
• Sculpey III for the plan to make a tiny hat and wreath for my HR Shetland 
• paper punch for edges 
• metal box with drawing pencils  

 

Highlights: 

A tatting shuttle - saves me from buying one 

 

 

 

A Fiskars kids' cutting mat with cutting tool 

 

Beads for someone's friendship bracelet fascination, and I'll keep the jar. 

A vintage, made in the US, pair of pinking shears with the original box. 

A bead kit for a necklace that L will probably love. 

 

Curtains, part 1

 The Offspring wanted new curtains for his bedroom this winter, being a fan of color and stuck with mismatched clearance-aisle beige curtains from Target.  Colorful curtains are hard to find, and expensive when you do find them.  Enter the notion of fabric dyeing.  We've done tie-dye half a dozen times or more, and last fall I dyed three pairs of pants for the Fan of Color, so I've moved on to curtains. 

Muslin was the first notion, but it wasn't thick enough.  Then I saw something on Rit's website or on Facebook about using dropcloths as the dye base.  So, we measured the windows in his room, and I spent some time on Amazon looking for cotton dropcloths in light colors.  We need 4x6 foot curtain panels, so I found a 4x12 dropcloth.  Cut it in half, hemmed it, washed it twice (lots and lots of lint), and put in a 3-inch hem on the selvage end for a rod pocket.  

 

Then it was time for the dye.  The 4x12 dropcloth weight almost two pounds, so I went with 2 boxes of Rit powder dye in Purple for the first curtains.  Plus, of course, a dash of dish soap, a cup of salt, and a bottle of Rit's dye fixative.  Oh, and the sacrificial plastic spoon for stirring.  Ninety minutes of stirring later, and a third trip through the wash, we have curtains! 

His bedroom has two more windows, so two more pairs of curtains are in progress - fuchsia and aquamarine.  Two more dropcloths are on the way, and I need to see if I need more thread in similar colors.

Projects - January

 I was energetic after New Year's Day and managed two projects.  

The first is part of a plan to retire the cardboard boxes that the Christmas ornaments are in right now. The boxes are old, and a mouse got in since last year and at least only ate one ornament.  

So, plastic tubs.  You can find some with cardboard dividers, but those are flimsy and don't fit snugly enough to keep things from wandering in the box.  I've been watching Adam Savage's podcast and Youtube videos lately, and he mentioned making foamcore dividers for his drawers a few times.  So, inspiration.  Two sheets of foamcore (from Walmart, because Michaels is out of the larger sheets), and the hot glue gun, plus two tubs from Walmart.  And here we are. 

I've got some Sterilite organizers with small dividers for most of the ornaments, so these will be for the loose plastic balls, the star, and the larger (less fragile) ornaments that won't fit the other boxes.  And at the same time, I'm planning to thin out the ornaments, because we have more ornaments than we can fit on a tree right now.

On the same Walmart trip, I found a string of wired LED lights for half price.  I have a string somewhere already, but can't find it, so I bought another one.  (Story of my life, and the reason I am trying to declutter.) 

We bought two tree toppers like this one a few years ago.  The spring method of mounting them doesn't work on a fake tree as well, but I'm not sure how to fix that part. 

 

The star looks nice, but then it seemed like it would be nicer if it glowed.  For a few years, we just stuffed the end of the light string inside the star, but the colors weren't right for me.  This year, we tried a string of battery-powered lights, but the only ones I could find in the house were Halloween lights.  Orange.  Okay, but not great. 

So, after an hour or so, and some swearing, I managed to fit the string of lights and wire inside the star, and even distributed evenly so it's lit nicely.  The lights are battery-powered, with a built-in timer - on for 6 hours, off for 18.  

More progress - a little

The cassette conversion project is improving.  I found a vintage boombox at an estate sale last week.  Only $8, the cassette and CD work, and it has an AC power cord, so I won't be reliant on batteries.  The borrowed player runs on C cells, which aren't cheap, and I don't have a reusable set or charger for that size. 

And, I found a downloadable version of the manual for the gizmo, since the printed version it came with is in about 5 point type and waaaay too tiny to read easily. 

The plan continues

The big cassette conversion plan is continuing.  I managed to find and borrow a working cassette player, although it doesn't have an AC power cord and I hope it doesn't eat batteries like popcorn.  The Nerilka's Story cassettes both work.  The other audiobooks on cassette are sorted - quite a few are available at the library, so I can borrow those, which cuts down on the stack that needs to be converted.  And I ordered the cable gizmo from Amazon, which surprisingly came with free next-day shipping.  Now I just need to download Audacity and figure out how to work it.

So, not tomorrow (because I have a dentist appointment, a volunteer shift at school, and three estate sales to possibly shop at) but this weekend, I can get started converting these things to a more stable format.

Another failed plan, I think

There's a long story with this.  A couple of years ago, I found an audiobook of Nerilka's Story by Anne McCaffrey at Goodwill.  Read by Anne Herself, so I could finally know how she really meant all those names to be pronounced (okay, at least all the names in this story - so Brekke will by a mystery for a while).  But, it's on audio cassette, and the only working cassette player is in my car, so the whole thing got put on hold. 

A few years later (Last year, in other words), a friend mentioned a gadget that looks like an old cassette Walkman, that will play a cassette and convert that sound straight to MP3 on an attached flash drive.  Off I go to Amazon and look at said gadgets.  Got distracted and put the project on hold again.  Then, this month, I decided that it's time to get this audiobook, and a few assorted music cassettes, finally converted to digital.  Because the CD of the audiobook is $$$, and the music cassettes are obscure stuff that will never be on CD or MP3 or whatever. 

While trying to figure out which of the many variations of the gadget to get, I realized two things.  A, the main complaint seems to be that the cassette player portion is the weak link, both in durability and in sound quality.  And B, there's a related gizmo that will connect an existing stereo with cassette player to your hard drive, via USB, and skip the whole cheaply-made cassette player gadget thing.  Plus, half the price ($12 or so less.)  So, I spent a whole afternoon digging the stereo out of a closet and making a space for it within connecting distance of the hard drive.  And then realized we had to go spend $15 on wire to connect the speakers to the stereo, since they're on a unique hookup and we seem to have lost the original wire. 

And, a week later, I have finally plugged in the stereo and put in a cassette to test it (with no speakers hooked up, because why waste the wire if the thing won't work).  Yeah.  Neither of the two cassette decks seem to work - they play for a few seconds, reverse, play a few seconds, repeat.  And one of the 3 CD trays doesn't seem to work either. 

So.  Barring the engineer of the house being able to fix at least one cassette deck, looks like I'll be returning the $15 of speaker wire, and buying the more expensive gizmo and hoping the cassette player doesn't crap out.  Bleh.

2020 mending

My goal for New Year's Day was to work on the pile of mending.  Because apparently that's where all Chris' jeans were - 5 pairs.  And other things.

Behold, Mount Denim

I managed to fix the strap on the soda cooler, which required picking out all of the old attempt to fix it, and the hole in D's hoodie. 

 first attempt

 after picking out the old attempt

Patch #2, reinforced on both sides

 The holey hoodie

 Many, many jeans with pocket holes

 Oops

But the jeans were not a rousing success.  I managed to break all three denim needles on two pairs of jeans. 

And, possibly my biggest accomplishment of the year, I managed to somehow sew the darning foot to the jeans.  Before breaking another needle.

And now I've got 11 more denim needles (6 Singer, 5 Schmertz).  I hope they last long enough to fix another 6 or so pairs of jeans, if I don't run out of patch-denim before that.  Had to sacrifice a leg from a pair of jeans I made into shorts. 

More lack of will power

More proof that I sometimes lack willpower:

Michaels had a series of painting kits, almost a paint-by-number thing, with a printed outline canvas, paints, and palette.  $10 before Christmas.  I found one at the local store, 70% off, and for some reason came home and looked on the website.  Found a bunch more, but resisted.  Then, today, 80% off.  So I bought a dozen. 

Why????  Who knows.  No more new projects, though.  I need to start, and finish, some of the projects I've already bought.

Estate saling

Went to a couple of estate sales today.  One ad mentioned "vintage metal horses" but no sign of the horses either at the sales or in the online pictures.  Oh well.  I did get some things I was looking for, though.

Sale #1

Three flat sheets, queen size, and two pillow cases, 100% cotton, white(ish).  Sheets were $1 each, cases 50c. 

These are going to be transformed.  The sheets are probably going to be a test for dyeing and making simple curtains, with one saved for costume or sewing yardage.  Pillowcases may be dyed or turned into napkins. 

The three wooden boxes are a set, they stack and one has wooden feet.  $1 each, so $3 for the set. I picked up the top two before I found the third one, and plan to paint or stain them and hang them on the wall as shadowbox displays for some of the Breyer Stablemates.

 

Second sale, I was hoping to find the metal horses.  No joy.  But I did find some goodies.  The View-Master lot has a viewer and some old discs - Niagara Falls (incomplete), the complete Carlsbad Caverns, tour 1 and 2, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and some Disney discs.  Also a pattern for vests, a vintage crochet book, a compass, 6 white napkins with a subtle Greek key design, and 2 men's hankies.  Viewmaster was $10, cloth goods 25c each, misc stuff 50c each.  Total $13.50 at this sale, $7 at the other sale.

May project - Decluttering

Okay, I'll try again.  Goal for the month is to find one thing a day to sell/recycle/rehome/donate/whatever.

Here goes:

May 1: A bunch of stuff from the bathroom counter: expired eye drops, ancient lotion sample, etc.  Cheap purple Easter basket Mom gave Bob (which he would keep just because it's purple, so I'm not asking his opinion.  He's got a perfectly awesome wooden basket my late aunt and uncle made him anyway.)

May 2:  Matted print of Osceola from the first store I worked at.  A puzzle (cookies).  Grade 1 BrainQuest deck. Family Circle magazine that came today.  Two issues of Field & Stream (free subscription).  Finished dismantling the pair of expired car seats that have been hanging around, but I won't count those.

May 3: Bob the Builder flashlight, couple of magazines. Horse puzzle, Snoopy wind sock, Happy Meal hex bug

May 4 - bird identification VHS, Mickey & Minnie Mouse Christmas towels

May 5 - magazines, Happy Meal Lego cup

May 6

May 7

May 8

May9

May 10

May 11 - Two shirts (one the Kid's), 2 bras that will never fit.

May 12

May 13

May 14

May 15 - Sample toothpaste in a flavor no one likes

May 16

May 17

May 18

May 19

Garden update - March 2012

So.  First garden update of the year.

 The clematis survived; I'm surprised. It lived all summer in the lousy plastic pot it came in, and I figured I'd killed it. 

My amazing husband is 90% done with a "real" compost bin. Last year, we made do with the dozen or so random tomato cages we found in the back corner of the yard when we bought the house. No clue where they came from; the people who lived here previously didn't garden (and it shows!). Not sure about the people before them, but there was no obvious garden patch, the whole yard was grass.

After the bin is finished, we're building a 3rd raised bed. Some of last year's compost can go in it, and we'll fill the bin with new fixin's. Which we have a lot of. I'm pretty sure we cleaned up the leaves and stuff last fall, but we've been working in the yard the last two weekends, and the pile of compostable stuff is way, wwaayy bigger than we expected. And here I was wondering if I could cruise the neighborhood on trash morning and grab some bagged leaves. Doesn't look like I'll need to do that after all.

Planted spinach and lettuce already, had to go buy radish seed. The radishes and peas will be planted tonight (allergies willing). The heat mat I ordered for starting seeds will be here tomorrow, and I'll work up a system to start the bell peppers, herbs, flowers, and whatever else. I plan to start the peppers (mini bell mix), basil, rosemary, thyme, delphinium, zinnias (big purple ones), possibly cantaloupe and pumpkins, and maybe some others. Depends on when I run out of room in the seed-starting trays.

 And, allergy season SUCKS. Even with two kinds of meds, I was ready to dig my eyes out with a dull spoon last night. This will probably be the year I start seeing an allergist, because this is insane and annoying, and it's getting worse. Year before last, I started having oral sensitivities too - as of last year, I couldn't eat raw cherries, apples, or carrots, which are the three veggie-snack staples. And I think it's spread to celery and pears. If cantaloupe is added to the list, I will cry.