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!!

pockets

yay pockets.

The Victoria and Albert Museum did a great write up about pockets, and as I was reading it, I wondered, but why do the women have a separate pocket and the men don't? My friend's conjecture is that because women were considered property, and buttons were not only a symbol of wealth but also used as money, why would you give money to your property. Women weren't worth it. And with a wage discrepancy of $.75 a woman earns to every $1 a man earns, women still aren't considered worth it.

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.

forays into the 1750's

I'm officially [again] a probationary member of a reenacting group that I'd begun joining as a college student.  While I've found plenty of information on clothing [I did a stint as a costumer after all, and most of my friends sew], I'm coming up so short in the furniture department.

You know who loves to kit themselves out? Viking reenactors and the SCA. For the purposes of portraying the French and Indian War, I have to be a little more specific than hitting the entirety of the Dark Ages with the back of a broad sword.

You know who doesn't like to talk about kitting themselves out? Historical reenactors. What's up with that, guys and gals? Do we not use the internets? I know people sat down to eat in the 1750s. There's evidence of it. I draw your attention to extant furniture, woodblock prints, descriptions and paintings that people have based their pieces from. But there aren't pictures of modern people's camp and campaign furniture, or the plans to make it. Unless I just haven't discovered the correct combination of words to search for it under.

I was assured that this blanket chest [PDF link], also known as a 6 board chest, is fine, in fact, maybe a little too fine, for something being hauled out into the 'wild'. The best part about this chest is that I can make it with my chisels from Wood 2 plus the single pipe clamp I can find at present and the router I got for my birthday, as the chest itself does not need to be glued up. I will not have the fancy molding work because I don't have fancier tools other than the ones noted. Friends over at Popular Woodworking make assurances that again, I don't have to be so fru-fru, and also explain why the mechanics of this chest work. If you know anything about how to put a piece of wood furniture together, you know this chest shouldn't work. And yet it does.

Of course, I got part way through hand planning with a dull planer and said nuts on that and made a few phone calls.

What the article writer doesn't say, but you can pick up from the context clues in the pictures, is that he has a shop to die for, with all the thing-a-ma-jigs, hooshmados, and dinglehoppers to keep any person with more time on their hands than they know what to do with happy.  I have one type of hand plane. One. And it's old. This article writer has about six different types of hand planes, and probably several sizes, depending on which one you are looking for. He's also working at an actual wood bench, not a few 2 by 4's bolted together with a piece of quarter inch thick chip ply laid across the top. Not that I'm complaining, but I'm saying that I'm not up to the calibre of this article writer's shop quality. I am saying that it can be done with a fixed base router, an antique hand plane, and an incomplete set of hand chisels. You can do this! Just make sure you also have a boat load of 3 1/2" and larger c clamps, and maybe more than one pipe clamp! Okay, if ther happens to be a mitre saw laying around also, don't say I didn't say it wasn't helpful [how's that for a triple negative?] and do know either a friend with a jointer and wide planer, or the number of someone who can do some mill work for you if all you have is one hand planer. Local cabinetmakers are usually the people to call, but they will charge. 

I do have a circular saw, but without navicable space in the basement to really set up an effective fence, I called up a friend to make some rip and cross cuts on their table saw. A few weeks later, I made a trip to Pittsburgh and visited another friend with an 18" planer and 140" belt sander of amazing [I don't have the correct number, but it was huge and as promised, worked like a charm]

The article promised that this chest could be put up in a few afternoons... I'm not sure what constitutes an afternoon, but I started working on this in January and it's April now and still not done. Granted, I have had a few things going on like a day job and rehersals and weeks long migraines so I have not always been able to work on this project.

Using a hand held router and not hand tools also presents it's own set of issues, like having to set up a fence, as I do not have a router table [let's add that to the wish list...] Since the dados go from end to end of the side panels and box legs, it was fairly easy to set up the pieces side by side, clamp them together with a fence on the guide lines and route away to the specified depth. Ditto for the rabbets across the bottom of the front and back panels. I set up my fence with an 8 foot board, clamped it down and routed away. Let's talk about getting things done in a few afternoons now...

Setting up fences was the most difficult part of the process. I borrowed a lot of c clamps from my dad. I also ended up borrowing my parents man power, as we own 3 bar clamps, which was not enough to hold the box together and keep it from popping apart in other key areas at the same time...

And then one of the feet decided to sliver off when I was tapping the side into place with the box bottom. There are now two Kregg cover pegs and two 90 degree dowels pegged into the foot to keep it in place. 

As you can see from this picture, the box has finally been assembled! My fingers are fully extended at the bottom of the box and my elbow is hitting the top lip. I'm an average size woman. The till went together with minimal trouble, though there is a squeak coming from one end when you open it. Still trying to sand that out. And yes, I know you're supposed to do all the cut work first an paint last but the paint is burning a hole in the paper bag. It's bayberry green. 

The article writer mentioned the the original chest this plan had been based from utilized snipe hinges, which I priced at $40 a pair. A quick web search told me that I could make my own from cotter pins, which while not materially historically accurate is functionally so. There was a very helpful article from Peter Follansbee about setting snipe hinges, or gimmels which we referred to several times Sunday afternoon as we made and set the snipe hinges into the box. The pine began tearing out in the box interior as we set the hinge pins, so to help hide the damage and reinforce the hole in the lid, we slipped a washer over the pin before splitting and clinching them.  

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. 

Fun games for school - Alibi

A less than classic who-dunnit? this nonetheless has participants practice their listening and storytelling skills. Did I mention this is rather fun for grown-ups to play also?

You will need at least five players.

One person is chosen as the detective and departs for a nearby but out of earshot location while the rest of the group remains in the area of play. The remaining players must decide what sort of crime has been committed and some minor details surrounding the crime, and establish whom the guilty party is. Each of the remaining players then comes up with an alibi for their whereabouts at the time the crime was committed. 

Once the whithertos and whyfors are established, the detective returns to the area of play to learn that a crime [and do tell them what crime] has been committed. For older players, in 20 questions or less, it's their job to figure out whodunnit.

For younger players, the detective asks for alibis from each person, and  might be easier for the guilty party's story to change slightly, for example, when questioned about where they were, this player could say 'I was at the doctors', and at a second line of questioning, they were 'at the dentist'. With a classroom full of participants, it's the detective's job to remember that one story has changed slightly, and remember whose story has changed.

Fun games for school - Lucy Lockett

Of course, some would argue that there's too much play and not enough learning but these people usually don't know much about either education or children. Or both. 

Some of these were games left for me to do with students by their music teachers, who didn't know who was coming in for them. 

Lucy Lockett is an old English rhyme from back in the days when clothing didn't have pockets sewn into them, but were worn [yes, worn, and primarily by women] as a totally separate article of clothing under everything else, which you could slide your hand into by a seam opening.  Unless you were a young girl, like Lucy, in which case you were showing off your pocket because it was embroidered within an inch of it's life to show off your mad skills. 

So it makes sense that it would be easy for the strings tying that pocket to your body to come undone, the pocket falling off, and you having no idea what just happened.

You will need: 
a minimum of 6 players
space enough for them to move around. 
a small coin purse or an ID pouch [like the zippered sort that V. Bradley makes for your ID and other effects]


Also, if you're musically inclined, and know solfeg or can figure out moveable Do, here's the song, plus solfeg. If you're not musically inclined, here, at least, are the words. I freely admit there is like a problem with the music provided below, the solfeg, however, should be fine.  

This game can be played one of two ways.  
First, the children sit in a circle and pass a small coin purse around while singing; a single student sits in the center with their eyes closed, and when the others are done singing, it's their job to figure out who has the pocket. The guesser usually gets three guesses, and it usually doesn't take more than a second go round for the guesser to figure out where the pocket is. The child with the pouch and the guesser switch and the game continues. 

Second, it can be played rather like a game of Hot and Cold. One student chosen as the guesser, and the the teacher or person in charge sends them out of the room or has them cover their eyes, depending on your circumstances while the other students waiting to see where the change purse has been hidden by the teacher or person in charge. The guesser returns to the area of play, and the rest of the group sings 'Lucy' while the guesser looks for the pocket. Ideally, the singing should get louder the closer the guesser gets to the pocket, and softer the farther away the guesser is. This is a great way to practice using vocal dynamics with young students.

Mitten tree

Necessity is the mother of invention. 

With temperatures plunging below zero (and that's Fahrenheit) the hunt was on for gloves and mittens and shovels that weren't broken. Two of our coat closet's walls are not insulated so leaving things in there wet can be a little dicey. 

And then there is pupcake and all his winter gear. 

On the hunt for winter apparel in our black hole closet, I found a ton of mismatch mittens and several dozen wire dry cleaners hangers. And a lightbulb went on in my brain. 

With four of us plus pupcake, 5 wire coat hangers had middle bit clipped out with wire cutters. Using needle nose pliers the (now sharpt) ends were twisted over themselves so mittens aren't snagged or people stabbed. I nailed the hangers on upside down (staples would have been a better choice), and this worked with their natural sloped shape. For air circulation and spatial consideration the branches are bent slightly towards the center of the tree. By utilizing the curved hanger hook on the top branch, the tree has a integrated hanger, and leaving the hanger hook on the bottom branch makes a hook for the dog coat. Hung over a heat register, voilà. Dry, warm mittens, pup booties and coat. I will probably go back and spray paint this later. But it'll have to wait until the summer, when I can do it outside. 

New year's resolution

I will finish these towels. I will work continuously on one pattern. I will resist the temptation to switch colors over and over and over again. 

DIY Ornament storage

I woke up this morning with the distinct thought 'I'm going to be moving this summer!' (What ever that means). 

Being on break, I have a little more time to get things sorted and then put away, rather than trying to do it after work and driving my family crazy, and since it's Christmas and it's out and has to be put away, I thought well, why not get started putting Christmas things together? Because the last time I moved, everything went to my apartment piecemeal as I discovered I needed/wanted it, and was a giant mess to pack back up again. Not. This. Time. This time I will be prepared. 

So I did a Google search. Looked under images; DIY. And turned up several DIY storage solutions. Some included cutting cardboard strips and making cells [frankly I haven't the patience...] one involved dowel rods that slip in and out of hiles drilled into the ends of a storage tote [I still don't have a drill or bits...] and several involved using plastic cups. 

Because we didn't throw a holiday party and have plastic cups laying around. Right? In truth, actually, we didn't, and we didn't get high ticket came-in-a-giant-cardboard-box items either. SO. I went to the store this morning and came back with 

• qty 2 sleeves of heavy duty plastic cups [16oz, ~$3 each]
• qty 2 flippy top bins [~$7 ea] in Christmas colors. Which weren't on sale. Yet.
• qty 2 foam core boards, 20x30 inches, by 3/16[?]  [~$2 ea] in white. because it was cheaper than black, or buying a cardboard display trifold or box.

Things we had at home that I wish I would have known we had but I bought anyway were:

• qty 1 high temp hot glue gun, fun size [~$6]
• qty 2 glue sticks for  the fun size glue gun [~$1 per package]

Things that I already had at the house that were super helpful:

• rotary cutter and mat
• utility knife
• gosgrain ribbon, ~1/2" wide, cut into [qty 4] 9" strips
• some 9oz red cups that were smaller and slimmer than the 16oz, and filled in gaps nicely [waste not]

Things that, had I been thinking, might have been a good idea to scrounge for, at home or the store:

• those 6oz crystal clear plastic cups you drink punch out of at parties. They're the perfect size for most bulbs

THINGS I WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY:
Bought a tub with straight sides, no fru fru indentations for hand holds all the way down the sides. This would have saved myself a ton of trouble trimming to fit. I was also thinking jeez, how big a box do I want to be wrangling next Christmas? A ginormous one? Or several smaller one. Small wins.

On another note, I ended up running out of clear cups. So rather than glue the remnants of 9oz red cups to the top board of the second box, I just left it empty, and filled cups in along the two long sides of the rectangle. I have small stuff I keep in egg cartons; they should fit in there nicely. Also, there is just enough clearance above the two tiers of trays that I should be able to pad the top with seasonal linens; the tree skirt I keep meaning to make, the stockings, those sorts of things.

There was a lot of trial and error cutting, getting the first piece of foam core to fit into the bottom of the first bin. A lot. So for the second go round, since both bins are the same size, I traced the two bottoms, upper and lower tiers, onto the other piece of foam core and cut away. I also discovered it was better to put the base into the bin, put glue on the bottom of a cup and press it down than try to glue outside of the box - I had a much better idea of where to put the cups to get as many onto the board as possible. [hence the tinier red cups, to fill wasted space].

This would have been the part where I stood back and admired my handiwork.

Then I realised I had a bit of a problem. [This is after all the cups have been glued down to the boards, and are sitting in the boxes] My brain said: these boards will be full of ornaments, and therefor heavier than they are now. Trying to pick the boards up from the bottom of the box by the cups might result in cups tearing off. Fix it now.

This is where the pieces of ribbon came in. Like cupboard handles or a dresser knob, they're there to help lift the tray out of the bottom so that the cups don't rip off while you're struggling a full tray out of the box. Two really healthy globs of hot glue on either long end and some gentle pressure. Those puppys aren't going anywhere. 

Now I find myself asking, was that really cheaper than buying the special box? Eh, probably not, but I know now what I will be saving through the year to sort and fix my mother's ornament boxes up. 

Some of the really tiny ornaments we store in old, labled egg cartons [in a box that holds other things], and no doubt will continue to do so. But for now, when it comes time for me to fly the coop, I will know exactly where to find Christmas.