Tag Archives: Odds &Ends

My own damned opinion., Paper Crafts

Shadowboxes and Paintings

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My shadow box swaps of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are nearly done. I still need to make labels. I’m thinking of using cuts pieces from aluminum cans to make embossed title tags which will be attached to the top faces of the frames.

Alice in Oz
Dorothy in Wonderland

These were just a wacky idea I had for using leftover papers from two cardstock bundles. I’ve already done tunnels books using these papers. I sold the Wizard of Oz tunnel book at my last sale as well as a smaller Alice tunnel book. I still have the larger Alice tunnel book.

I’m 2 days behind already with my new painting project. This week has been more busy than usual with two different mechanics to deal with a car problem, a doctor appointment, a lab appointment, and temporarily not being able to use my main arm due to straining my rotator cuff while prepping fresh veggies for the week.

The shoulder is less painful now. But I haven’t been as careful of that shoulder as I should be. I most likely should have had the surgery when I was diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff. Instead, I settled for 4 years of on and off physical therapy on the university’s dime because my boss wouldn’t believe me when I told her I couldn’t do certain motions during the move to our new space. I can be petty.

I hadn’t had too much trouble with that shoulder until recently. I’ve lifted more than I should trying to get my craft room back in order. I moved the guest bed back to its corner in an attempt to encourage the boomerang child out of the house.

He still can’t find a job. My thought is that in spite of a population of a quarter million residents, we still live in a place that’s more like a series of small towns where people in my son’s field know him as unreliable. I don’t think he’s worked more than a year at any of his jobs. There could also be the matter of his alcoholic past. The only reason he’s not drinking is he has no income except for selling plasma. That barely supports his smoking habit.

There’s not a lot I can do to help him, except maybe to trade him for my oldest grandson who’s not doing that well either. He lives in a town with two gas stations and a Walmart. Not much opportunity there. There used to be three grocery stores and some small shops, but nobody has any money, so no jobs. What a great time to be alive! /s

About me

Wow.

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I recently read an article on a site called Bored Panda about a woman who spent $500 on groceries for seven people. I don’t know how long she expects that to last. However, there was very little that was what most people consider healthy. At this point in time, my assumption is that the healthy food has increased too much in price. She did mention a garden which is supplementing what they eat.

All kinds of people are making comments about her choices. From my perspective, her grocery haul was not very nutritious, but I can’t judge her. She has to buy what the family will eat. She works full time, and presumably her husband also works full time. They have parents living with them as well as three growing boys. She has to make choices. The article mentions that some foods were left off the list because it wasn’t time to replace them.

I recently spent $200 at the grocery store. I was replacing items from my Covid stash which I have maintained since 2020. I’ve spent similar the last couple of months. It’s my fall-back stash. Usually it’s just for me, but my unemployed son is now occupying space and eating my food. Most of my stash is ingredients but I have a few canned soups and foods like canned hash and chili. My freezer is full with the meats I get from the mark-down bin, as well as 99 cent frozen veggies.

I make a lot soups and stews and dishes that can be eaten over a period of days. It goes back to the days when even though I was working, I could pay rent, electricity, and bus fare, but not buy enough food for a week and what I did buy got stretched to two or more.

Many of my co-workers thought I was on a diet because lunch consisted of a container of cut carrots and celery with a little blue cheese or ranch dressing. Little did they know I couldn’t afford lunches out and I wasn’t going to bring beans and rice five days in a row. My apartment included a washer and dryer so money for laundry wasn’t an issue although there have been times in the past when clothes were washed in the bathtub and hung on hangers on the shower bar.

Right now, I consider myself well-off, not like the folks with lots of money, more like someone who can put some money in savings, buy craft supplies, and pay what’s needed to maintain my house and car. So that’s why I say I’m well off. I can buy extras. It won’t last. I live on savings, retirement, and Social Security. Eventually it will all run out. That’s what the food stash is for.

My own damned opinion.

Okay.

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Pinterest just showed me a spatula/spoonish-shaped thing for applying butt cream on a baby. My jaw fell open. Are parents these day too paranoid to touch baby butts that need cleaning? Or are they leaving diapers for longer periods of time because of cost, so that diaper rash is more common?

I admit my baby caring days are very last century with cloth diapers, diaper pails, and such. I used the disposable diapers on trips or outings, but for the most part, cloth diapers were my normal go-to. But that was just me.

I also had a neighbor that objected to my youngest’s daily summer air nap. I used to put him in a small crib in the carport on nice days, totally without clothing. I’d be there on a lounger reading a book and my neighbor who was way younger than me, would come over and complain that my baby was naked. Every single time!

I finally asked her why she was looking. It was because she could see his “private parts.” So I asked her again why she was looking. She had no good answer. She never complained again. I still don’t know why a naked baby in a carport 30 feet from her house triggered her.

I did find out later that she was from the Wisconsin version of Pennsyltucky, so that might have been the reason. There are a lot of small towns up north that are just like the insular towns in other rural areas of the country.

But back to the butt spatula/spoon thing — they come in colors and multiple sizes. There’s what looks like a suction cup on the handle end so the thing stands upright on a flat surface. You can buy sets. It’s the future of baby care where infants are handled by machines and left in “pods” until they’re large enough to be put in creches with other pod children wearing headsets wired to their brains for “education.”

The way things are going with the current government, this might happen. 1984, Brave New World, and The Handmaids Tale were not meant to be blueprints for the future. But here we are.

Crafting

He got a job!

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So the boomerang child is once again employed. I hope this works out. If you sense a bit of underwhelm, it’s because he has quite a shaky employment history. The longest he’s held a job is just under two years.

More tiny paintings

I’m still painting. I have three paintings to do and the second book will be filled. That will be 50 out of the 100 paintings completed. I’m also working on some larger pieces— 9 by 12 inches.

My soap making class was cancelled due to a lack of interest. I only have one person registered for my paper making class on Saturday. Maybe my teaching fee is too high. I think I’ll make some feedback forms to find out what members want.

My own damned opinion.

Time to feed the cat and other musings.

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The Gingersnap has a routine. There’s 15 minutes until she is fed and she has already tapped my arm. Next she will touch my knee and stare up at me while licking her lips. If it were morning and I was in bed, she would do the poke where she manages to hit my forehead practically dead center with one claw.

If that fails, she bounces to various pieces of furniture and shoves things to the floor. Once I get out of bed, she will lead me to the kitchen, frequently looking back to make certain I am following. Once in the kitchen she will stare at her dish stand until I fill a bowl and set it down.

If it’s her evening mealtime, she will come to wherever I am, to do the arm tap and knee touch. If I don’t comply, she will jump up on the counter, desk, back of the couch, or table, and sit and stare until I head for the kitchen.

Right now now, I’m being glared at. How dare I leave her alone for FOREVER with only three bowls of food to last for 78 hours! She could have starved! Of course there was still food in one bowl, but that doesn’t count. The other two were empty! The amount left in the bowl was the equivalent of the amount she gets in a normal feeding, but she could have starved.

I went on a road trip to visit my now closed alma mater, Northland College (1892 – 2025). Keeping the college open was no longer sustainable, even with a reduced curriculum. One hundred thirty-three years and now shut and abandoned. From the outside, it looks like everyone packed up for the end of the week like normal, except the campus was dead silent. No people except for a maintenance person in a truck.

They didn’t stop and ask why I was wandering the campus. Honestly, I might have burst into tears if they had. There were only a couple of empty campus vehicles parked near one of the buildings.

This was my first Wisconsin home for two years – Anna McMillan Hall. The second floor window to the right of center was my first room. The second room was in the rear.

I found a Civics textbook in a resale shop up there. I don’t even know if they teach civics anymore. With what’s happened in the last three elections, I would say that Civics has gone the way of Handwriting, diagramming sentences, and Social Studies, along with Literature, World History, and Geography. We have become a nation proud of our ignorance. The great technologies that were to give us access to the world’s knowledge have made us more ignorant, gullible, and just downright stupid. We now lack the ability to sort out truth from misinformation. Just my opinion.

Crafting, Mostly me, Stuff

Still stressed but good medical news

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My last blood test results were in normal ranges. In another couple of months if all stays improved, they’ll start weaning off my meds. Yay, Rah!

I’m a little behind on my paintings. I have two in progress but I’m not satisfied. The size limitation is what gets me. I have a chance to start watercolor classes again, but I’m leery of spending money for a non-essential while the Social Security issue is in crisis.

The Melon Felon is going all out for Fascism. I’m surprised he hasn’t had a sparkly gold uniform made. Probably, there’s one in his closet with bogus medals hanging on the jacket and he’ll start parading around in it next month. Enough said.

It was Craft Night again. This time I took a new cat coloring book and some markers. I need to make a list of unfinished projects and work on them. But not too fast. I can’t die until I’m done with all of them. Given the number of items in progress, if I never start a new project but just work on existing ones, I’ll be close to 200 years old when I die.

Crafting

So here we are.

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My taxes for this year are going to be fun. The year is not over yet but I’ve supplemented my income with an assortment of classes at the maker space which means an extra 1099 tax form this year and a bit of additional tax. I haven’t participated in any sales or sold anything this year so I don’t have sales tax to pay. I will probably still have to file a form.

But the teaching is fun. I mostly teach members at the maker-space and charge a sum that covers my gas and extra supplies. I say “extra” because I have a lot of supplies and equipment for many different crafts, but occasionally need to buy extra tools.

This year, I have put together bins of supplies for teaching four to six people. For soap making, I have gathered my molds, bases, additives, and tools into a bin that I can just bring up from the basement and take to class. I did the same with the paper-making and book binding supplies.

I’m planning on teaching other book binding classes featuring different types of bindings such as binding single pages and making decorative covers for paperbacks that need repair, and making junk journals, and pop-up books.

Future soap classes will include making hot or cold process soaps, and making utility bars out of the grated and melted bits and scraps of used soap that can be used for cleaning such as the bars I use in the basement and garage for cleaning messy hands and paint brushes. In a pinch, the grated soap can be mixed with borax and washing soda to create laundry detergent.

One of my summer classes will be making paper from plants. It will be a multi-day class with the first day dedicated to making pulp by cooking the plant matter. Maybe I can find a way to get some use out of the unkillable mulberry tree. It’s basically a weed.

It can’t get properly removed because it’s in the narrow wilderness zone between my fence and the neighbor’s fence. Both fences were there when I moved in. They are both are properly within our lot lines which leaves a space between them that is not even large enough for a weed whacker.

I call the mulberry unkillable because the utility company contacts me every other year to say they’re coming over to trim the tree because it’s in the utility lines again, and they come and trim it down and it just grows back. One year, they tried to burn it. I came home from work, and the mulberry was cut back and the stump was black with char. The next spring, new branches and leaves grew. Next spring, I’m going to drill some holes with my larger spade bits and fill them with stump killer. Maybe that will work.

My side of the street has weird fencing. The property directly behind me has a six foot chainlink fence that extends across three back yards to the east. My yard is the only yard with double fencing. My fence is three feet tall and as I mentioned above, the space between the fences if so narrow that I can’t just hang over the fence to try cut the mulberry shorter.

The fence next door on the north starts a foot from the end of my fence because during installation, they discovered a buried stump of an old utility pole which probably extended too far down in the ground to be easily removed. So I attached a 12” piece of chicken wire to prevent my dog from escaping. The neighbors installed a gate at the back fence so the kids could retrieve their balls when they went over the fence. Without the fence, the kids would have had to walk past four houses to the corner and go around the corner and between two houses, and then trudge all the way up to the ball and go back around the way they came.

The four houses around the corner have very long, narrow yards. I figured that the kids’ round trip to get a ball that went over the fence would mean walking a bit under 800 feet so the gate was a good thing. Those kids are all grown up now and there is a new family next door. Periodically, I find a basketball in my yard, but the kids don’t come over to retrieve it. They wait until I notice and toss it back over the fence even though they have my permission to come into the yard to get it.

At any rate, if I can harvest enough bark from the tree, I will attempt mulberry paper. It will probably be a lot of work for a tiny number of sheets. I’ll let you know.

Crafting

The Cricut Design Space, Cricut Joy, and teaching

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I’ve been spending time watching tutorial videos on the Cricut cutting machine. My next class at the maker space is Saturday and I will be teaching several people how to use the Cricut software, Cricut cutting machine, and our heat press to create unique gifts.

I will bring a variety of glass, paper, plastic, and fabric items to show what can be done with various types of vinyl, including heat transfer vinyl with the heat press. I’ve made stencils for etching glass, a design for a bib, plus designs for tee shirts and glass objects such as plates and jars.

I haven’t checked the stash of objects I keep at the maker space lately, but there should be at least one plate, a couple of glass mugs and coffee cups. I din’t think there are any fabric items in the box, but I’ll bring a couple of tee shirts, a fabric tote, and a ballcap to make up.

Also this week, I had some students from a local high school to teach sewing to. I generally have the kids sew pillowcases as they are simple, only have two seams and a hem to sew. It seems to take them most of the two hours to finish their pillowcases.

I bought precut fabric in a variety of patterns and colors from Walmart. That was faster than my first classes where I used fabric we had at the maker space and had to cut to size. My first classes were assorted ages, either children of members or a group of students from the neighborhood.

Next week is the big project – sewing pillow cases for Ryan’s Case for Smiles https://caseforsmiles.org/. There will be up to forty students with their instructors, taking turns cutting, pinning, and ironing fabric as well as sewing the pillowcases for kids with cancer.

We’ll have ten sewing machines going. I’m not certain how many cases we’ll get done next week, but we’ll get as many done as we can. And maybe schedule a second session to finish up. I was asked by a member if I arranged for compensation for my time. I did not. But if they offer, I’ll accept it. At any rate I’ll definitely be filing extra 1099 forms for tax season with the classes I’ve taught so far.

At the end of the month, I’m going to schedule a class on how to read a sewing pattern. There are a few beginning sewers/sewists(?) who have asked me what all the markings mean on sewing patterns. This one will be a free class, but I’ll require sign ups so I’ll know if I need the classroom with the projector.

Stuff

Lawn mowers.

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My gas mower became hard for me to start. When I was still able to start it, I had to use a bungee cord to keep it running. It was just too difficult with my bad shoulder to keep yanking the pull cord. Eventually, the pull cord became too difficult for even my son to start it.

I bought a battery powered mower and have been keeping up with the front lawn until this year. We have had so many alternating days of rain and sun, that the electric mower can’t keep up. I only get 45 minutes to a charge, but it takes both batteries to run and the chargers takes at least 4 hours to fully charge them. The mower originally came with just one charger for both batteries so I bought a second charger so I wouldn’t spend all day charging two batteries.

Yesterday, I wheeled the gas mower out to find out what the problem was with the recoil starter. I disassembled the housing then pulled out the cord casing. I rotated the motor fins a few times and it was moving freely, so the motor hadn’t seized. I did check the oil and it was clean, since the mower got a tune-up and oil change when I did the snowblower.

I tried to start it and I’m not strong enough to pull the cord to start it, so I asked my neighbor if he would get it started. It was a little rough but did start. I used a bungee cord to wrap the handle and managed to get my front yard mowed. Yay me!

The mower conked out when I tried to cut the back. It’s gets like a hay field back there sometimes. I finally hauled out the battery powered one and most of the back is now done. It was too hot to finish.

Tomorrow – weed whacking.