Rock Therapy

The initial idea for this back corner flower bed.

Now with twice as many landscape bricks.

I played with those bricks like they were giant toy blocks, reconfiguring the wall several times.

At this point the project grew in magnitude. The wall wanted to be part of a circle.

Here with just my eyeballs and instinct I begin to lay out the circle that has formed in my mind. 

After some internet research, I get down to the nitty gritty of making the whole thing level.  

This is the current state of the Fern Garden.  I think I am finished with it for now, as I get to work on the rest of this earthwork project and finish building the circle.

So far I am up to 42 bricks, which seems like a pretty good place to rest for a while as I research the next phase of the project which will be a brick or tile patio.

Beautification

This time last week I went out in the middle of the night and brought home these four little seedlings.  Two Kale and two Brussels Sprouts.  I also planted marigold seeds around the perimeter of the bed to discourage the munching bunnies.  They haven't sprouted yet, but I haven't seen any bunnies either.  I think maybe my gnome is working overtime to keep them away.

Another big project I did last week was to excavate the old concrete steps at the edge of the property.  They were mostly buried in the hillside, so now they are a good foot and a half wider.  Some terra cotta pots are there alongside some rocks from the yard, to help keep the dirt from falling back down onto them.    That hillside was pretty darn overgrown too, so I used my new bypass cutters and folding handsaw to cut down a bunch of annoying ghetto palms and thornbushes.  It lets a little more light in there, and I might get some shade loving flowers to grow over there if I play my cards right.  

A flower bed is in the planning stages, but it is going to take a LOT of work to get all those rocks and busted cinder blocks out of there.  I managed to dig out two rusted fence posts, a discarded piece of what might once have been the back porch, a gigantic hollow metal pole in three pieces that looks to be about 12 feet long, three really nice concrete pavers, and several large pieces of rotting landscape timbers.

Delia said this reed fence makes our house look like it is wearing a hula skirt, but I kinda like it.  It is just stapled up there to hide the garbage cans and the basement door.  Maybe in a few weeks it will serve as a trellis for the nasturtiums I planted in pots at the base of it.

The front of house flower beds also got some Black Eyed Susans, two different colored Columbines, some lettuce and some peas planted. I left the mum that has grown back two years in a row now, and I transplanted Delia's Chocolate Mint, which bravely survived the winter on the sidewalk in a pot.  The Lemon Balm came back, only not where I planted it, which is super weird, but cool too.  And since Kai broke one of my Fiesta mixing bowls, I am repurposing a piece of it in the garden.  Hopefully sometime soon it will be holding up a cascade of luscious strawberries.
No gangly tomatoes over here this year, I will plant those guys out at the Co-op Farm when all danger of frost is past.

To Dye For

Last week I spent my Tuesday evening playing with yarn. It had been a grey weekend, and I badly needed some color in my life. I had recently purchased a fat lot of naked Fishermen's Wool from Michaels when it was on sale, and set about to dye up a bunch samples, in preparation for a project I've had brewing in my yarn brain for a while.

This yarn comes in a pretty big ball, 8 ounces worth, or 465 yards. I had read that you could use one packet of Kool Aid to dye one ounce of yarn, so I had to figure out how to measure out 8 hanks from each ball without any kind of yarn meter. Some household measuring and some simple math problems led me to the discovery that if I wrapped the yarn around the leaf of my dining room table 26 times, I would end up with approximately one ounce of yarn! Yay! So then there was a lot of winding and tying into hanks.

I've been collecting Kool Aid now for a while too, sussing out which "flavors" are available at which stores, and buying bunches of it on sale. I think I went through something like 50 packets on Tuesday. But that's OK, because I can always get more! It's not like I have to order it over the internet, or get any kind of mordant. The citric acid in the Kool Aid is all you really need to set the color in wool. Bonus, the whole process is food safe, so when I wanted to do more hanks at one time I just busted out a regular old stainless steel saucepan and went to town, not worried that I would have to relegate it to the craft cabinet as no longer food safe.

There are a ton of great tutorials all over the internet about how to do this on your stovetop. If you understand what happens to yarn to make it felt, you can use that knowledge to avoid it. Basically don't shock your yarn with rapid temperature transitions, and don't agitate it much while it is dyeing. A bit of stirring is ok.
You can tell when it is done because the yarn will exhaust the dyebath. When your water is clear, you are good to go. In all my experimenting, I used up to 5 packets of Kool Aid to one ounce of yarn and had no color left behind in the water.

Each hank was cooled and rinsed and hung to dry in my bathtub. I let them dry overnight with a fan on, and in the morning just twisted them up all nice to protect them from the cats. I made little tags for the blended colors, hopefully I will find some way to match the recipe to the right yarn before my mind disconnects that information. Now, if only I had a ball winder! It took me one night to dye all this yarn, it is going to take me 2 weeks to ball it up so I can knit with it!

For the Kitties

Someone, before we lived in the house, decided to refinish the banister. Rather, they started to, but gave up partway through the process. It is not pretty, and I honestly can think of about ten thousand things I would rather do than get into the toxic work of stripping the rest of the paint off the woodwork. I have been ignoring it, for the most part, since we moved in. However, someone got a nasty sliver from it not too long ago, because as you can see in the above photo, Jack Burton just LOVES to sharpen his claws there. We can't have people getting splinters every time they come downstairs, that is a public safety hazard. Rather than execute the kitties, I decided to cover the problem up with a half-baked idea and some slapdash craftsmanship.
One day my friend Bryan said "I have some goat hair fabric in my possession!" and like magic the goat hair fabric appeared in my living room. I draped the square over the offensive banister and that was that for a month or so, till the kitties figured out how to knock it off. Then last night I decided to more permanently attach the scratchity fabric, so I located the HEAVY DUTY staple gun, a big ol' pair of scissors, and when the scissors proved too fainthearted to cut through the fabric against the grain, my trusty Dozier Folder.
Last year I wrapped the newel post with some macrame cord I found at Goodwill, to maybe give the boys someplace more satisfying than the banister to scratch. I tried to unwind it, only to find that it had become one with the gnasty half removed paint underneath - so I incorporated it into the new design. I think it gives the project a little bit of a "really crazy people live here" feeling. Also it will help the fabric stay up once the cats find and pull out the staples. I hope. But there are a lot of staples.

So far neither one of the kitties have tried it out. It will last longer that way.

Hanging Tomatoes

I was looking at the upside down tomato planters at Big Lots the other day, and while the idea seemed like a good one, the execution left a lot to be desired aesthetically. Ugly is what they were. This is much more pleasant to look at and hopefully just as effective. You can hang it from a shepherd's hook by your porch even if you don't have much space.

First I found a couple of hanging baskets with coco liners just sitting on my planting bench, condos for spiders. If you buy them new they probably won't have any spiders in them. They are fairly cheap. Other things you need are some potting soil (or just some dirt) and of course, tomato plants. I ordered mine from Gurney's but there are plenty of places you can find them around here now that it is getting warmer. The Morgantown Farmers Market starts up this Saturday, and that's where Keith got my tomato plants last year.

Put an inch or two of soil in the bottom of your planter. Right above the soil line poke a hole where your tomato plant will stick out. Don't make it too big, but make it big enough to get a few leaves through. Make another hole on the opposite side of the basket. Lay the tomato plants in the basket like so, and gently coax the top set of leaves through the hole till they're poking out.

I have always heard that tomato plants like to be buried quite deep. When I transplanted these guys from their tiny tiny shipping pots, I buried them as deeply as the new pots would allow, and they really started growing like mad, so here they are again getting transplanted rather deeply.

Grandpa Lloyd used to plop a dead sunfish in the hole before planting his tomatoes, so if you have any dead fish lying around your garden shed then this would be a good place to put them. I, alas, had none handy, nor are there any fish in Decker's Creek for us to catch, so we are going without the dead fish here at this time.

Cover the plants up with a bunch more dirt. I planted basil seeds on the top of my basket, because I read somewhere that tomatoes and basil get along quite well. Or maybe I just made that up. Anyway, I expect it to look lovely and be handy if I want to make tomato salad. I guess you could also plant lettuce on top, or parsley, or whatever.

Please be advised that this arrangement will require some tomato food, as the plants are crammed kind of close together and will exhaust the nutrients in the dirt after a while. You can use some nice compost, if you have some, or plant food spikes. I use Miracle-Gro. It was good enough for my Grandpa, and I ate sun warm tomatoes right off the vine every summer from the time I was old enough to climb the hill to the garden - probably even before that. Maybe by next year I'll have learned how to make urban composting work (my compost heap didn't turn into beautiful rich soil over the winter, it looks like a pile of dessicated weeds and kitchen scraps!).

Building a wall

We'd been planning this retaining wall for some time, to keep our front yard from falling further into the street. I wanted to use the space for more garden, but every time I would try to plant anything there it would eventually slide down into the street. Ever hear of the angle of repose? Interesting concept, and the reason why my landscaping always washed away down the hill.

Originally I was going to build a picket fence type barrier out of disassembled shipping pallets, but upon actually acquiring some of these things we determined that the wood wasn't sturdy enough to hold the weight of the dirt. Scrapped that idea, now I have a pile of pallet wood to use for something else in the future.

Then we went in search of other building materials, pricing cinder blocks, bricks, concrete, and then finally found what I have come to know as castle brick. Castle Brick is an interlocking system just for building landscaping walls. Each brick has a lip on the bottom of it that catches on the brick underneath. The weight of the dirt behind the wall holds the whole thing in place. Pretty interesting, how physics works in all sorts of situations around the house!

Our search took us to Custom Concrete, which is a locally owned building supply company that is just outside of Sabraton on RT 7. They were super helpful, calculated how many bricks we would need for the length of our wall, and even sold us the bricks for a sweet discount (about half as much as they retail for at Lowes). Keith made two trips in the truck bringing about 60 bricks each time, and we unloaded them into the side yard. There they sat for a couple of days till it quit raining. We watched a couple of how-to videos on the internet and became confident in our ability to build this wall ourselves.

If you click here, you can see a photo of the front yard in the before stage.

Keith and Tammy

Thursday I came home from work and the sun was shining for the first time in what seemed like months, so we set out to excavate and then build the wall back up before it started thunderstorming again. That was an insanely tall order, upon reflection, but we did in fact work from about 2PM till it got dark at 9, and in that span of time, with the angelic assistance of one Malissa Goff (who kept us from killing each other during the ridiculously difficult process of leveling the ground and then the bricks). Keith had a sledgehammer (which he named Tammy Wynette) and I had a shovel, it probably wouldn't have been much of a fight.

There were a LOT of rocks in that dirt, not to mention some fairly rotten landscape timbers and the remains of the original wall. But we got it out of there.

Four feet of remaining cinder block wall, reduced to a HUGE pile of rubble by Tammy Wynette.

Me, on the sidewalk, hunched over the trench filled with rocks and dirt and sand, armed with two levels, a spade, and my fierce determination.

We laid the 5th course in the dark, and had to quit, but I decided it was enough to keep the impending rain from washing the whole foundation of our house away. Then we drank a couple of beers and collapsed into a pile of aching backs jello-like muscles.

The first day's work.

Today, Monday, we woke up, ate brunch, and got to work. Delia wasn't really down with carrying bricks or digging or weeding, so she decorated the job site with the chalk she got for Easter. Keith and I got the rest of the bricks in place, and I putzed around in the dirt throwing out even more rocks, mixing in soil amendments and just generally trying to determine where to put the plants. I think we have more work to do on the yard, but the retaining wall is pretty much finished. YAY!

Refashioning Delia's Room, Part One

Delia got a new twin mattress yesterday, thanks to my Mom. It works beautifully in the Wheat colored Heywood Wakefield twin bed Lisa found for us earlier this year at Goodwill. Delia wants to paint her room in peaceful beach colors, but we aren't quite ready to do that yet - it'll probably have to wait till spring.

What we can paint, and have been planning to for a little while, is her dresser. My sister and I used it when we were little. Delia didn't really like it because it was a bit too girly for her. Also the drawers were getting difficult to open and close. It was decided that the dresser would be the first thing we overhauled on the road to a more grown-up room for Delia.

they call that green stuff growing in the crevices "verdigris" in the antique shoppes

The first thing we did was remove the old knobs and handles. Over the last 30 years or so they got pretty yucky. These handles were not attached with screws like most normal knobs, but were affixed with some kind of expanding anchors. They required (as Delia predicted) a screwdriver, a hammering implement (Keith used a ratchet) and brute force to extricate. Luckily, my husband lives to knock things about with a ratchet. Now we have a free set of six moderately yucky drawer pulls, but I have seen uglier on the Internet being sold as Antiques, so if you would like them to add a bit of antique elegance to your next rehab project, they are yours! Otherwise I guess I'll just toss them.

So the Dresser, sans hardware, moved into our huge bathroom for the painting phase of the project. Delia sanded all the chipped paint places, and then I scrubbed the whole shebang down with Trisodium Phosphate. That was yesterday, and today I primed that dresser with the Killz Primer the cute guy at the Lowes paint counter sold me. Tomorrow when I get home from work we will slap on some Valspar Low VOC Semi-Gloss in Well Water, and then we will wait for it to dry.

And then the exciting task of replacing the drawer glides! Stay tuned!

Have Felt, Will Decorate

Delia and I decided this year to forgo the crepe paper streamers and instead make some decorations for her birthday that could be reused. These banners are the result of our first night's work. The big one is made from triangles we measured and cut out of a length of felt. Each is 5 inches wide at the top. They are machine stitched along with a piece of black ric-rac. Super simple, mega cute. I wanted to cut the felt triangles with pinking shears so they would have zig-zaggy edges to kind of echo the ric-rac, but alas, my Grandma's pinkers are plenty old and not as sharp as they used to be (much like me). They wouldn't cut the felt, so the edges of these pennants are just straight.
These little guys are made from scraps I had left over. They came out pretty awesome, for being all kinds of random. I did sort the triangles generally by size, and then stacked them so the littlest ones would be closest to the ends. Just overlap the triangles a little bit as you feed them through the machine and they come out strung together. I made little loop hangers for the ends out of pieces of felt, and stitched them onto the end triangles.
You could make the little doorway garlands from the notebook paper sized pieces of felt you can get at the craft store. I bought a little more than 2 yards of felt from JoAnns when it was on sale. About 6 dollars invested in it, tonight we used up less than 1/4 of my felt stash.

I am jazzed by how easy this little project was, once I brought my sewing machine down from the attic and got it all set up on the dining room table. Now that it is ready to go, I might have to round up some more colors of felt and make decorations for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

11 uses for cat litter bins

As you may or may not know, Edgehill House is home to three cats. I haven't yet taught them to use the toilet, so we go through quite a lot of cat litter. It comes in a large (non recyclable) plastic bin most of the time, and sometimes we get it in the slightly smaller plastic jug. I hate to throw stuff away, and I have accumulated about a thousand empty Tidy Cat Bins. Fortunately I have discovered plenty of uses for them, and I thought I would share them with you.

1. Recycle Bin - They already have nice handles and they are small enough that I can fit two or three under my kitchen cupboard. Plus, the relatively small size encourages us to go to the recycle center on a regular basis. The first batch I spray painted several years ago are looking rather worse for the wear, but now adays they make spray paint especially for plastics, so you can make them look as cool as you like!

2. Kitchen Laundry Hamper - A nice thing to have if you are trying to cut back on the use of paper towels.

3. Homemade Laundry Detergent Container - The shorter 27 lb container is the perfect size for the recipe we use. I thought I had a blog post about Delia and I making it, but I don't. This One was the starting point for our recipe, but we replaced the bar soap with one part grated Fels-Naptha and one part grated Zote.

4. Bathroom Trash Can / Emergency Vomit Bucket - Once when we were young, a guest at one of our parties decided he needed to puke in my stockpot. That will NEVER happen again. Also, if you've ever had the stomach flu or food poisoning, you know how nice it is to have an extra bucket handy.

5. Drip Catcher - If your house is old like mine, you might have the occasional indoor rainstorm. I can always use one of these buckets to catch the drips, which leaves me free to freak out.

6. Toy Tote - We keep the water pistols, frisbee, and any other picnic toys in one, but you could use them to sort Legos, Barbies, Bristle Blocks, Lincoln Logs, or any toy that has multiple parts or needs to be toted.

7. Gardening Tote - I keep my trowel and fork and gloves in there. They are also good for carrying potting soil around from the front of the house to the back and vice-versa.

8. Watering Can - I am particularly proud of that one. It is made from one of the 20 lb jugs. I used a sharp object to cut holes in the lid and holes in the handle to let air in. It works GREAT.

9. Rain Barrel - Kind of small, but it fits right underneath the gutter drain that sticks out of the retaining wall in front of my house. If we're outside playing in the rain, we can fill up several buckets, and the lids keep mosquitoes out.

10. Compost Bucket - Fits under the sink, and I can carry it out to the compost pile whenever.

11. Charcoal Bin - Keeps the briquettes for our charcoal grill nice and dry!

If it's Broken, Fix it.

The sprayer on my kitchen sink broke a few days ago. Today we got around to going to Lowes and picking up a replacement nozzle. It cost around $6. * The repair took a whole 5 minutes, a large portion of which was spent looking for a screwdriver.

First, just make sure the water isn't running. I didn't have to shut it off under the sink because of where the sprayer hose is connected. If your sprayer operates without the faucet being turned on, then you probably have a fancier sink than I do, and might have to turn the water off under the sink. Be careful, spiders like it under there.
Unscrew the broken nozzle from the coupling that is attached to the hose.

There will be a plastic washer at the end of the hose, take it off. Then you should see a metal ring (called a clip ring) in a groove near the end of the hose. Pry it off with a screwdriver. You may need to cuss a little to accomplish this. The old coupling should then slide right off. Put the new coupling on and put the new clip ring (which is a tiny piece of metal shaped like a C) on where the old one was. You might need to use pliers to squeeze it on there, and also, cussing may help.

Put the new washer on, and screw the new nozzle on top of that.

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy. Seriously.

* While we were in Lowes, Delia wondered aloud if they sold lemon trees. I bet her a dollar that they didn't, and we asked a bored looking girl in the greenhouse. Sure enough, they DO sell lemon trees. But the lemon trees were looking pretty sad, so Delia picked out a lime tree instead. As we were walking to the car, she said, "You owe me a Dollar." I said "I bought you the Lime tree, it cost $5 so you owe me $4!" She didn't give me any money, because evidently, I am a sucker.