49. Gate

This is the Gate That Mr. Murphy built. Possibly Mr. Chapman or Mr. Woltjen. I don't think it's original to the house, but it is old. It is, like many parts of my house, shabby. I think the brick is what fools the eye--brick houses, barring earthquakes, just stand and stand and stand. Yeah, a little tuckpointing, but they don't need to be painted, they don't need new siding or replacement bits of siding. No need to re-stucco. They just are. So it shocks me, still, when other things don't hold up like the red brick.

But I digress. This gate has to go.

My yard, during rougher times in the neighborhood, has been used as a quick cut-through to the alley to escape detection or just as a shortcut. The fault lies in two places--I could put a lock on my back gate, which is 6 feet tall and can be locked with a padlock or other such device, but the major fault is right here with this gate.

That's Billy's hand there, and the gate isn't much taller than he is. It's about as tall as Daisy, actually, easily jumped over by any teenaged male with his limbs intact. And look at that lock--it confounded our old rottweiler dog, but even billy has figured out how to wiggle the bar out of the lock. It is useless as a barrier now.

So it is time to replace it. This is the Year of Unfinished Projects, and I'm getting a lot of them done. This is one that has been staring at my in the face for 13 years. It's time.

48. Ottoman slipcover

So Leo drew on the library ottoman in sharpie marker. Dang it. Plus the thing was a bit on the dingy side--things spill, I clean them up, but it's never really the same as before. The couch itself is still in good shape, but not the ottoman. On the surface, I mean--the furniture itself is solid as a rock. The ottoman opens up for cedar-lined storage and the couch opens up to a twin sized hide-a-bed. I love this thing.

So this year, you know, I'm trying to get my life in better order all over the place. So I took one of those faux Mexican woven blankets (it's made to look hand-done but it's not) and I cut it and sewed it together with French seams, by hand, and attached an elastic band at the bottom. Slipped it right over the top. Washable if need be, free project made of things lying around the guest room/craft room, and completely serviceable without changing the aesthetic in the room. Well, a bit, considering it's rainbow colored, but the couch was denim to begin with. Still a comfortable unfussy place.

Sorry about the smudge on the lens. Didn't notice it until after I'd taken the pictures and I liked the one with the cat enough I was too lazy (sigh, the ottoman in question is right behind me) to go back and take them again with a clean lens. I blame Billy. Of course.

47. Baby Bibs

My cousin is expecting boy/girl twins this summer. So I made her a few relatively androgynous bibs. They are made from old jeans on one side and quilting cotton on the other. I did a little appliqued bit on the front of each one as well. I simply traced a bib I owned, and used sew-in snaps at the top. I considered velcro, but for an item that will be washed quite a bit, I didn't want it to wear out so fast. And sew-in snaps are a weak connector. If the bib had to come off in a hurry (like if the baby, wearing it, got caught on something while crawling around), it would. As cute as buttons or strings are, I hesitate to use them on baby items. Little snaps will do just fine.The only thing I'll change next time is to sew on the snaps before sewing the two layers together, thus hiding the stitches.

I'm thinking this might be my contribution to the church fall festival craft booth.

46. To ply or not to ply

That is the question.

I've been teaching the kids in Sophia's class how to spin roving into yarn using a drop spindle. It's been fun. And I gave them a choice yesterday. They could either split their yarn in two and ply it to set the twist (does that make sense? Like a rope that twists on itself to make a strong solid rope), or they could set the twist on a single-ply yarn.

Which was something I'd never done before.

But I'd read about how to do it, and I thought, maybe I could do it.

You wind the single-ply into a hank, like wrapping it around your hand and elbow like you might do with an extension cord. Then you hang one end from something sturdy, and from the other end, you hang something heavy. We used coffee decanters and hung them from a dish drainer weighted down with cafeteria trays. Makeshift. Make do.

This morning I came in and checked on it. Four girls had chosen to set the twist instead of ply, and they set. Fiona's had a bit of a twistiness left to it--some pieces of her yarn were overdone--but her friend Wendy's was absolutely perfect. The other two were more like Fiona's, although all of them were completely usable, no problem there. They were excited. It was a good project.

I'm going to ply my mitten yarn. But I know now how to do it without plying. Maybe next time.

45. Drop Spindle

This is wool:

This is a drop-spindle:

I made the drop-spindle from a dowel, a wooden model-car wheel, and a cup hook drilled in at the top. Drop-spindles are ancient devices, starting in the Neolithic Era and not being replaced by the spinning wheel until the late Middle Ages. It is hand work, it is slow, but it is cheap, portable, and does the trick.
Here I have it threaded with a leader cord (a piece of single ply bulky yarn). I split the leader cord in order to start feeding in the wool fluff (roving). The wool I'm using here is still a bit greasy from being on a sheep, which is what I want for this project. I bought a huge box of roving and mill-ends from a woman who gets them from a yarn mill and sorts through them by type, quality, and color, and resells them online. Perfect--I'm teaching Fiona's class how to spin with drop-spindles and that's perfect.
I catch the roving into the leader cord and start spinning the spindle, like a top, but letting it hang from the yarn as it twists. I catch it again and again, checking for how much twist is present. Fluff becomes a string, here below. Awkward photograph: I lay the camera on the ground and set the timer. So you're looking straight up at my hand holding the drafted (stretched) roving.
It isn't the most economical way to have mittens on your kids' hands come November (that would be $1 mittens at Target on clearance), but this yarn will ply into a bulky weight yarn and then will knit up tight into a warm wool mitten that, due to the lanolin content, will felt a bit and be somewhat waterproof. You can't buy that for $1 at Target. I'm thinking that the amount of roving I'll use for a pair of mittens will be about $2, and then there's just my time. But I like it. So there. I like being able to create something beautiful and useful out of what is essentially someone else's discards. That always makes me happy.

44. Ribs

I smoked ribs today. I started yesterday:

about 5 1/2 pounds spare ribs
dry rub (I used Penzey's Ozark Seasoning)
wrapped tightly in foil and stuck in the fridge for 24 hours

Today:
I soaked about 4 cups of wood chips (I had mesquite) in water for 30 minutes
I started a small to medium fire on the grill, over to one side for indirect heat
I took my roasting pan's rack and turned it upside down on my grill, and then put the ribs on top of it.
Then I dumped about a cup of wet but not dripping wood chips onto the fire and closed the lid.

I repeated this process whenever I checked it and the smoke wasn't smoky enough. I used all the chips by the time I was done. I never had to stoke the fire. I added a sauce, a sort of Kansas City style, to one side of the ribs but I did not soak them in it.

I smoked them, total, about 2 1/2 hours. Which may have been a bit of overkill. But they were lovely. Better than lovely. I plan to sneak down there in a minute and eat leftovers...

43. Mending

When it comes to chores that have to do with clothing, I'm pretty much opposed. I can wash dishes by hand and even scrub the kitchen floor on my hands and knees--really--but I hate laundry. I hate:

1. Laundry
2. Ironing
3. Folding/Hanging
4. Seasonal change of clothing
5. Mending

My mending, currently, sits on Leo's dresser in the guest room. Every so often I find a hand needle and a couple spools of thread (white, black, gray or light blue) and tackle it. Currently I have only 1 shirt of Mike's to fasten a button to. It's a small enough pile to ignore for now.

Like most all of my clothing chores, they are made tolerable with Netflix and Hulu. I watch Law and Order or Sherlock or 30 Rock or whatever. Really. For a short while I watched season 1 of Hoarders, which is enough to make you do all your mending and ironing and throw all your junk away. Far away. Fill the 10 yard dumpster and have it hauled kind of throw away. But I digress. I do not envy women from 30 or 60 or 100 years ago without Netflix or cable TV or whatever your equivalent is. And I especially agree with the pope when he said that the washing machine was the biggest advancement in the status of women in the past 100 years. People mocked him but deep down we knew.