Pysanky: prepping and making dye

It's Lent again! =D that means it's time to make pysanky! Or pysanke [I've seen it spelled that way, too], or in layman's English, Ukrainian Easter eggs. Whether or not it is Lent, any time is a good time to make a pysanke, it just happens to be one of my favorite things to do at this time of the year. There are a number of reasons why pysanke are made during the season of Lent, but I won't get into that. One of them was the availability of eggs.

I'm starting with white eggs this year; as you can see, some of these are already written on with wax.

At this point, some of the eggs are ready to take the first dye bath, but I don't have any fresh dye made. With this in mind, I thought I'd write up a quick semi-tutorial about setting up dyes using a premeasured dye package.

Materials:
packages of dye in desired color[s]. We order ours from The Ukrainian Gift Shop
glass jars and tight fitting lids - I use wide mouth Mason jars [more on this later]
scisors
a tablespoon measuring spoon
a quart size sauce pan, tea kettle or electric kettle for boiling water
a bottle of white vinegar 

a gallon of distilled* water

A tempered glass measuring cup such as Pyrex are very helpful but not necessary. We have a 16oz and 8 oz size; I used both of them.
A baking sheet or other tray such as melamine, that you are not fond of, with a lip is also helpful, but not necessary.
Nitrile gloves, or another exam style glove to keep your hands dye free, if you'd like. You could use dish washing gloves, but I find them cumbersome.
an apron to keep your clothes clean, or wear your painting clothes. This is dye, after all.

*Many dye companies, not just for dying eggs, reccomend using distilled water. What this means is that any particulates such as iron, lead or calcium have been processed out leaving pure water. Depending on the quality of the water in your area, using distilled water as a vehicle for you dye will yield the best end results. A gallon is typically the unit by which distilled water is sold.

Process:
Since I had saved last year's dye, the jars and lids needed to be cleaned. Best practice is beginning with clean, fresh materials. As I said, I use wide mouth Mason jars, specifically pint size. The wide mouth is easy to get an egg into and out of, especially if you find you have to fish one out with your fingers. The pint also holds the 10 oz of water needed to make the dye without spilling over when an egg is put in. I have not tried a goose egg in a pint size jar, but duck eggs still do not displace too much dye to spill over. When purchasing a 12 pack brand new, the cardboard box is an excellent  place to store the jars in. The plastic lids, whether they are Ball or aftermarket, hold fast. Permanent marker does not rub off of them. The plastic lids also do not corrode the way the metal gasket lids will [don't ask how I know...].  

I was planning on making at least four different colors to start, so I filled my sauce pan with the equivilent of two pints of water [I used a clean pint mason jar as my measure] and set the stove top to medium, so the water would heat while I set up my materials.

As the water is heating, clean and dry jars and lids. Set aside to dry 

Assemble other materials - tray, lids, jars, measuring cups, dye, scissors, tablespoon and white vinegar. Rather than try to pour out into the spoon, fill the smaller of the cups with white vinegar and dip out the spoon. It's much easier this way. Any left over can be poured back into the bottle. Set the vinegar with the measuring spoon aside for later.

I highly suggest either making your dye in a sink, or on the tray if you are a more confident DIYer, and remove any materials that could be stained. Your hands will probably be stained, unless you wear gloves. I personally don't care, and it won't harm you.

To keep myself straight, I presorted my dyes from lightest to darkest, and made sure each jar had a lid that was labled. Once they come out of the packet, the powder forms don't necessarily look like the color listed. Furthermore, once water is added and the color develops, it is easy to confuse some of the colors.  These dyes have an outer paper packet with instructions, and an inner foil packet of dye that must be cut open with scissors. It has been my experience that for best results, shaking the packet a bit forces the color powder to collect at one end, with less chance of powder ending up where it shouldn't be [for example, on you, or your clothes].

It is very important to follow the instructions on the packet!  

Ingredients go into the jar in this order:

1. color powder

2. boiling water

[3. vinegar]

The lightest color of dye available from the Ukrainian gift shop [and that I have on hand] is yellow, so my first jar got a packet of yellow color powder [I should note that it doesn't look yellow]. Next jar gold, light green, and turquoise.

 By this time, the water I put on the stove was just boiling. To keep the water from boiling off, I turned off the heat, but kept the sauce pan on the burner. Each jar [I double checked the instructions on each packet] gets 1 and 1/4 cups of boiling water, or 10floz. This is why the 16oz measuring cup is handy; it has a line for 10oz.

Each jar gets 1 and 1/4 cup [or 10 floz] of boiling water. I had enough water on hand to make one more jar of dye, so I grabbed a packet of pink. Dye powder first, then water. You can see in the first picture that some of the dye powder got stuck on the side of the jar, and the steam developed the color.

After the water, add vinegar. Double check the packets. Most of the colors take vinegar, which is a mordent, or color setting agent. A few of them, however, don't. To keep myself from accidentally putting vinegar where it doesn't belong, I covered the no vinegar jar with it's paper packet.
 Each jar gets 1 tablespoon of white vinegar, unless the packet says otherwise.

With the vinegar added [or not], the plastic lids go on and the jars of dye are set aside to cool down to room temperature. Yet another reason the plastic lids are so nice is that unlike the metal lids and bands, the plastic lids don't pose a burn hazard, nor will they seal during the cool down the way a gasket lid will. Our back porch was 35 degrees today, so the jars went to chill out there. This is a melamine caffeteria tray we use when dying eggs, and it's permanently dyed in places.

With such cool temperatures, the dyes are probably ready for use in four hours or so!

Oh, little bed: a miniature

I've been looking on Etsy and eBey for replacement pieces for my dollhouse and have been coming up empty handed for some pieces. The time period I am trying to achieve is 1800something, and I am not sticking hard and fast to the Federal or Antebellum or any other time in American history; rather, I'm trying to make the house look like a mash of times. 

The bed that I made is a little folk art, a little... I'm not certain. It is based on extant pieces that I have seen at historical sites and antiques I have seen online, and would have been meant for a child or the 'help'.

This looks like a mess, but after discovering that the C clamps and quick grip clamps I had were too strong for the wood I was using and that rubber bands alone were warping and contorting the form in all directions, I turned to a favorite childhood toy for some support. My bed was slightly too big for the clamp, making the finished project slightly distorted - not as distorted as it could have been! Next time I am going to draw the concept, build the clamp, dry clamp then glue and rubber band it up.

Out of the clamp after 14 of drying time [brick for scale purposes]

To help hide some of the imperfections, such as one of the headboard posts blowing out and needing wood filler, I painted the piece with Federal blue milk paint, completely VOC free and child/animal safe.

Then it occured to me that I needed to cut in some bed rails. Derp. 

While I was cutting rail slots with my 1/4" Irwin chisle, I started sewing a mattress and bedding - more on that later.The wood is nothing fancy, a combination of bass an balsa available in a multi-pack from an average craft store.

Sweet dreams: bedding for a tiny bed

After making a small bed out of a combination of balsa and bass and painting it a federal blue, and then making a tufted mattress for it stuffed with six layers of cotton quilt batting, I found some wool and cotton blend sock yard at the local charity shop that I knit up on 2.5mm  DP needles [I realize it's not finished, but I needed it for the pictures. It's 40 sts, done in a knit 1 purl 1 rib for 5 rows, then switches or a stockinet for 4 rows with 3 stitches of seed on each end and the 5th row is garter, knit to the desired length, which was this bed specifically. Folks kept thinking I was knitting a miniature rug or a potholder; it's such lovely yarn in person, I wouldn't want to muck it up with grease. 

The blue fabric below was labeled 'summer denim'. It's hardly what I'd call a denim; it's a straight weave and the only thing it has in common with denim is the color and the warp/weft white blue combo. Otherwise it's very light weight.

It's too big for the little blue bed, and too narrow for the double bed. I had thought to make a coverlet and double it over, but for the scale of the miniatures, I'm going to leave it alone. As a weave, the design is reversible if a little big. Color wise, it would have been appropriate for the 19th century. A turkey red would have been more difficult to accomplish, but the use of a white warp and a colored weft still might have been costly for something as large as a blanket. Not that people didn't do it.

 

the little dollhouse that could.

Presenting the Hofco Junior Collectors Series Gettysburg House Kit. It took a lot of digging on the internet and finally discovering a post on eBay of a partially assembled kit including the instructions [for which mine a long gone] with the name on it to figure out that this was my doll house and the manufacturer. I don't remember when I got it, I think perhaps it was a Christmas present?

That little table is all that I can find of the furniture that was in that house. Thankfully, we still have all the trim pieces to finish the exterior.

I got a bug in my ear to finish it, an so began a flurry of paper collecting an research online and pinning on pinterest

I wasn't sure where to start- walls? Floors? Put on an addition? 

Ceilings, suddenly, with cream milk paint, seemed like a good place to start. The interior hall is not finished; I can't quite get in there with the brush I have.

New take on an old classic

The French memory board. Tres classique, non? [please forgive my horrible, horrible French. It's been too long.] This, however, is obviously not a French memory board.

I have a bitty, bitty classroom with many dry erase marker boards but no bulletin boards... a small problem. So I took this old frame, measuring about 30 inches square and made a faux French memory board.

 

Using craft twine [which may upset allergies, so cotton might be a better material] I started in one corner and proceeded to weave through the staples which had been left in from the previous art installation. I first created horizontal [or vertical, depending how you looked at it] rows, then moved on to the opposite direction. This is where the weaving, the over under over under really came in that you can see in the picture above. It creates a little tension in the strings, keeps them from flying everywhere when you try to clip something to them, and keeps the frame pulled together.

when I finished the project, I made sure that the two loose ends met so that I could tie them in a square knot. I also used a square knot any other time I ran out of twine and had to join two other pieces. The twine isn't very stretchy, so I don't have to worry about it loosing it's shape through the school year, unlike yarn, which is more elastic and would begin to sag unless pulled very tightly.

If the frame looks slightly off square, you're right; it isn't perfectly, square, and it top it off, the staples weren't at perfect square intervals either, adding to the tipsy effect.

The frame was $3 at a resale store, the twine was marked down at a craft store to $1, and the most expensive investment were the tiny clothespins at $3.50 for the bag of 20 [never again].

boxes, boxes, boxes

Quandaries of a box.

Here's my first box. You've probably already read about it. This is the box I want to take with me. This is the box I heavily researched and worked hard on. This box is my baby. This box has highly inappropriate steel snipe hinges that I made myself from cotter pins from Tractor Supply but also has hand forged handles and a hasp. I have yet to put them on, but I've been a little busy.

The plus side of the jolly green giant is that it
a. quite possibly could have held everything, clothing wise at least, except for the cloak which would have been spread on my bed
b. was period appropriate

Alas, the JGG does not fit easily into my current vehicle. I drive a coupé, which for the purposes of this hobby, or really, anything else except being youthful and free, is useless.

So. Smaller boxes. After building JGG I decided against trying to go from scratch again. It was just to much of a pain. There's not time, no space, and I don't have the proper tools. Not to mention the right amount of clamps. Not to mention my income. And migraines. We won't talk about that. Let's just say rock and hard place.

At my first event, of which I have no pictures because I brought only my phone and we were in the middle of a National Forest [and guess what! There is no cell reception in the middle of a National Forest! And iPhones don't have super power save mode like 'droids! :D >:( ] someone had a painted dome top box with canvas over the dome. This, I thought, had distinct potential. No muss, no fuss, no why is there an EXIT sign in pieces on my bench [I wish I was making this up...].

To the craft store with the coupons et voilà.

you can't actually find a picture of the chest I bought online for some strange reason... you can only go to A.C. Moore, in person, and buy it, but if you search at Home Depot, they have a fair approximation for $40.

the home depot chest, not to be confused with the one I bought, which you can't find a picture of online. it's like it doesn't exist. weird. Also mine retails for $10 less. And I had a coupon for 25% off. Um, yay.

I can see why that person chose to cover the top with canvas. Mine probably didn't need it but hey. Better safe than sorry. The huge perks of being a person that sews include having scrap canvas laying around, so I had a piece of navy blue canvas that I coated with polycrylic and more or less trimmed to size, allowing a little for tucking under. A trip to the small local hardware store and I got slightly more appropriate brass hinges and some 'soldier blue' milk paint. Milk paint is VOC free, so with the migraines, its fabulous. No fumes, I don't get sick.

After the monsoon reenactment of 2015 the first event of the year, I decided adding skids to the bottom might not be a bad idea. My mother and I were at the Carnegie Museum of Art and took especial interest in the bottoms of trunks and chests so I know it wasn't totally out of the ordinary for a trunk to have feet or runners of some kind. And seriously, this sucker has a bottom made of 3/16ths ply if it's lucky so no way I'm setting it directly in wet grass or mud. And yes, I know the bottom skids aren't blue. It's been raining here to beat the band- I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the tung oil and polycrylic took. Some things are best left to wait until it is a bit dryer.

It just doesn't have a hasp - okay, it did have a hasp, a very Asian style hasp which would have been cool if it had been stamped with Asian symbols instead of a bald eagle... guys? The lack of hasp bothers me for travelling purposes but meh. One less thing taking up space in the tent.

peach salsa

I can't believe I never wrote a post about this.

So. Without further adieu. A few caveats - and if you've ever read my blog ever, you know I'm full of them.
A. Feel free to ditch peaches in favor of nectarines. Same flavor profile without the preboil to remove fuzzy skin. You will thank me later. Trust me. No one tells you to remove the skins. And when you catch on to it... it's gross. And time consuming. And ... just trust me on this. Unless peaches are cheaper and/or you have the time/resources/patience, etc.
B. Short on peaches/nectarines? Mangoes. Mangoes are an excellent addition to either fruit and can be mixed cup for cup, I believe, up to half of the recipe. Then you run into issues with sugar contents and the mangoes turn into babyfood. Do not quote me on all this [the sugar bit and the baby food bit yes, but the ratio may be less]; this has been done on occasion in a pinch to achieve require fruit amounts with excelent results. However. proceed with caution, and do a little research. Pro tip.
C. Nothing anywhere says you have to use all of the spices or, for that matter the cilantro. Any of the cilantro. At all. Really, you're going for the acid content, which is controlled by the vinegar in the recipe, so that you have to use. All of the vinegar. The vinegar is what kills bacteria, IE botulism, which in turn tries to kill you. SO, if you don't like it hot, or you think green chillies are lame or whatever, swap them out, but keep the ratios [this number of cups and that number of tsp, etc]. This is actually chemistry we're dealing with. Chemistry = modern medicine, too. You just don't want to have to walk into the ER greenface with a jar of homemade salsa ...

Otherwise. Kind of cool, huh?
Last note: no one has ever gotten sick or died from MY canning. Your canning on the other hand is all on you and how YOU take care of YOUR raw ingredients, sterilization and kitchen.  :)

This recipe is sourced from the Ball Blue Canning book, which is available through most major retailers as well as to BORROW FOR FREE your friends at your local Public Library WHO WOULD LOVE TO MEET YOU!!! And also have a bajillion other books about canning. Ball is a great place to start.

This recipe makes 4 pint or 8 half pint jars. Or what ever combintation there in you decide to go with. Or can find. That's usually where I end up.

Ingredients:

Peaches (nectarines), enough to make 6 and 1/2 cups diced. Like kitty kibble or slightly bigger than peas or corn diced.
Onion, enough for 1 and 1/4 cups diced 

1 (one) Red bell pepper (I'm convinced this is only for color because green fades out in canning), deseeded and pithed (the stringy white bits) diced. The whole thing. 

1/2 cup of white vinegar. It may say distilled on the side. Same thing. Apple cider vinegar works too, as long as the acid content is 5%

Honey. 2 tbsp, liquid (warm up those crystals in the microwave if you need to, no shame) I know, it's a smuckers packet. All about the visuals here. 

Cumin, 1 and 1/2 tsp. use the powder. 

Garlic. 1 clove. Mashed, chopped, or the equivalent measure of diced.

Options I left out* (aka season to taste, or the BTU tolerance of your mouth)

*Cayenne: 1/2 tsp

*Cilantro: 1/2 cup

1/2 cup diced spicey pepper of your choice, seeded or not for heat. - substitution note: I use canned green chile. You know, the tiny 4.5 ounce mild, peeled and chopped ones in the Mexican foods section. This may make me an evil person but I don't have to touch it and I like the spice level and no one has died. Yet. ;) 

I am a spice wuss. I also hate cilantro (I think it tastes like soap). A final note, you can always control for additional heat after the fact. You can't tone it down later.

Cooking instructions:
Put diced fruit, onion, peppers, spices and liquids in a stock pot. Bring salsa to a boil, stirring gently. Simmer 10 minutes, allowing to thicken, stirring occasionally. Pack into jars with 1/2" head space. Process in waterbath for 15 minutes. Allow to rest 24 hours.

Don't forget to label. Hoard from family and friends.  

fun things I relearned making this. It takes six [6] fist sized fruits to do this. Not five [5]. six [6]. Otherwise in the pre-coffee morning fog that says, oh yes, here we go, 6 cups of fruit in the pot, la la, you end up with the picture on the left. A sad half a jar of salsa that cannot be processed. That one fruit makes a difference. I did go nectarine crazy at the store, so there are four left over, and that onion was rather a whopper. So.

One red onion, one can of chilies and two more peaches...

lighting the way

Lanterns. So. Much. Fun.
Except of course, when you have your first event coming up, and you were an obsessively prepared girl scout and you think to yourself  'But wait... how will I see in the dark?'

For after hours there is the obvious flashlight but we all know how hard it is to be digging around for something and not have both hands free. Head lamp you say. Yes, but do you know how easy it is to blind people with those? I made a solar lantern the hard way by galvanizing a solar stake that is light sensitive [on/off depending whether there is light or not] and hot glued the cap to a wide mouth jar band. It now lives in my mother's bathroom window as a nightlight. Not even kidding. My friends and I found premade small mouth solar lantern lights at the craft store that have an on/off switch...  Because when there are small children and tired, stumbly adults about, who wants to leave a line of FLAMING luminaries around your worldly possessions? That's right. No one does.

This still didn't solve the problem of a period appropriate lighting device.

Example A, also known as a barn lantern is period appropriate. It is to my liking and would suit my personal proclivity to knock things over and break them at any moment.

It costs an entire day's pay in my present income bracket before taxes and shipping. That would be a no. It's beautiful, but I need that money for other things right now.

The girl scouts didn't really teach you how to do anything handy, at least, my troop didn't. Maybe that's changed...? In any case. I found another man's blog. He's from Utah, and he made similar lanterns, and had some enlightening photographs on his blog. So I thought. Why not. I'm handy with this sort of thing. 

Let me first preface this with I have little to no idea what I'm actually doing, or rather, I don't really have the tools at my disposal to do things with. This lantern is about 11 1/2" tall. About. There are no cabinetry making specs here. I used a pine 1x4 from Lowes or Home Depot from the nice section, 4' x 1/2' long. The door/back are about 2 inches shorter than the top crest of the lantern. As I have absolutely no idea how to make a candle pan from tin/aluminum sheet, I used a black candle holder from Ikea, and had to cut grooves for it on all sides after the fact so it would fit in the lantern cavity. It fits snugly, so I have no fear of it sliding out or tipping over. It's also black. I suppose if I'd have picked up the brass one with a loop at SalvAl I could have made that work, too.

As you can see from this top picture, there are two horizontal grooves cut out on the door near the cavity of the lantern. I tried to set snipe hinges like the ones in the picture above [and it failed miserably], but mine would have been 18 gauge aluminum wire because again. Money. Working with what I have. However, I messed up the mechanics of the hinge and should have set the loop on the outside of the door, not the inside. I was also in a hurry to get this done.

That said, the lantern has extra holes in it that are covered up by period appropriate leather strap hinges. I have no idea where we got this piece of leather but we had it laying around the house and no one was laying claim to it so I commandeered it for this project. If you have no idea what you're doing, nail the strap/screw the hinge onto the door first. Trust me.
Once the door was on the the little tab nailed in with an OBVIOUSLY APPROPRIATE NAIL, I discovered that the door sticks. I tried to shave off suspected sticky places with my furniture chisels but no luck. There is the addition of a leather tab to help get the door open while I sort that mess out with files and rasp and sandpaper.
The windows voids were cut out with a drill and cleaned up with a chisel and a router, then the rabbet for the window was made with a router and cleaned up with the chisels. I made the stripping for the widows out of what is referred to as 'fill it' strip, but with the humidity in our basement, felt safer nailing it in with brass brads. Most of them split on the ends, but they are stuck in there. One of the panes of glass cracked on me while I was driving nails, so it was back to the store for another custom cut of glass [I had thought of just getting 2x3 picture frames, so it would be easy to replace the glass if it broke, but silly me, I marked the wrong cut lines and then drove the drill into the wrong place without thinking at 9PM after a long day at work...]

The 'tin' lid is actually a piece of 8"x4" chimney flashing, which is deceptive for someone who doesn't know what they are looking for because it's actually 8"x8", but it's folded in half down the middle. I punched it myself with a claw hammer and a set of 'wood carving chisels' from Harbor Freight on a piece of scrap pine. No one is carving wood with those kiddos, believe me, I tried. Get some Flexcuts or something, but for this application, punching aluminum sheet, the "wood carving chisels" were perfect.
The exterior of the lantern was finished with with a homemade mixture of food safe beeswax and mineral oil because again, it's what I had. And also, what I could find at the time.

And then, and then there are those times you walk into the store and suddenly you see...

And you think to yourself 'what?!'

I had this ripped apart and turned into a more, shall we say, appropriate accoutrement in four hours. Four. Hours.

It doesn't have a candle holder and I can't find my pillar candles but details. It's done. I pried the mesh and framing out with a chisel, had glass measured at the hardware store (pried off the top, broke the top, messed up the back up top, made a second back up top) purchased dowel rods, drilled holes in the  (new) lid the same side as the dowel. Drilled matching holes in the interior base of the lantern for the dowels to fit into, as close to the corner as possible. Fit the glass into the door and secured temporarily with leftover strip bits from the mesh (I'll use ripped strips of fill it trim later) fit the pins of the door back in and secured it into the opening. Secured the glass into the frames, slid the dowels into the slots in the base of the lantern and the new lid, nailed down the aluminium cover to the top and cut and fit a new handle out of coat wire, into a hole drilled into the lantern body, not the lid. Voilà. 

The lantern on the top would have cost me $65 ish dollars, the one above $40ish? By making them myself I think I saved $75.

Field tests are this weekend!!

Brining for dummies

As I was trolling Pinterest, I saw a post about brining, looked at it, thought 'oh, interesting', filed it away in the grey matter and promptly forgot about it.

World Autism Awareness week is the last week of March into April and in the United States, national autism awareness month is April. A project I'm working on currently for two brothers uses flannel and denim. Before I send these out, I will prewash them, but it occurred to me that even after prewashing, the denim and flannel will, for an individual with Autism, be stiff and rough, more than to a neuro-typical.
 

So I decided to brine the denim. What is brining going to do to it? Its going to soften it up, hopefully way up. People describe the softness as 'vintage' which brings to my mind broken in and washed. A lot.

Ratios for brining a single tee shirt were available at octane shop, but I have at least two yards of upholstery grade denim. A quart of water and a half cup of salt were not going to cut it.

When making brine, I recommend using warm tap water, and if you've got a rinse sprayer, put the salt in the container first and spray it. This will help the salt dissolve in the water, giving you a better brine. Yay brine. (In case you were wondering, that is a half gallon mason jar I'm mixing water and salt into. it was $0.79 at the thrift shop.).

This is a gallon and a half of water to two yards of fabric. Not enough water. 

At left, two gallons, right, three. I put the empty jar in there to help weight it down and keep it under the water.

Mark the calendar, wait three days aaaaaaaand...

Toss it in the wash. Put it in the dryer. Poof. noticeably softer denim.

Good wool is hard to find

I picked this up at the second hand store for $14. No tags, and I haven't done a burn test to see if it's 100% wool, but gee golly is it toasty, and my alergic to wool friends itch when they touch it.
We have wool blankets from my grandmother's estate, the kind from the 50's with the satin blanket binding and pastel colors that just won't quite pass 1750's muster.
For resons as yet unknown to me, herringbone would have been used as a blanket, but not apparel. Maybe because a plain weave was easier to set up than a herringbone, thus making plain weave cheaper and herringbone dearer...? Again I don't know.