Furniture Making

I recently bought a circa 1790 rocking chair frame at auction. I have the rush to make the seat with,....just one of those things I haven't gotten around to yet. But since it's in my living room gathering dust, I guess it'll be sooner than later. Before you get too bored and start on the next blog, take a look to the right of the chair in the photo:

I'm in the process of making a birthday "roombox", and if you have a table, where you can show the cake, plates, forks, napkins, etc, then you also need somewhere (besides the floor) where you can unload all the presents, right?
One of the tutorials at the CDHM forum was for making a country ladder back chair. The teacher was Barbara Vajnar. The same lady who was featured in American Miniaturist - April 2009 magazine. You'll find the article on pages 34-6, "Primitive and Pretty Country Furniture".
If you haven't joined CDHM, I urge you to do so. They are a fantastically friendly & helpful bunch of people, ranging from beginners to artisans. While there are a few "free" tutorials, you'll be able to access so many more as a member and if, unlike me, you're at a loss of what to do on a Saturday, there's a new, live online tutorial every week.....or you can do like me: stay after class & take it by yourself.
So right, you're asking: "let's get back to that teeny tiny chair, you showed us!"
This is what happens when you've skipped class and have to stay late to do the lesson by yourself: On the left are the rejects! All three of them!!
Upright, at the right, are the 2 keepers. One is completely finished; the other, like it's human sized prototype, still needs to be "rush"ed.
Originally seating material came from dried rushes as opposed to using willow cane. You can be more creative with cane but basically both when interwoven create surprisingly solid & durable seating.
Barbara's chairs are made entirely of 1/8" dowelling, craft sticks and toothpicks with #10 crochet thread used in place of rush. The only tools required are a dremel or drill with a fine bit and some sandpaper. Only don't get too creative with your dremel....hence the rejects! My idea about using it to sand with instead of using sandpaper wasn't very good....
Other than that, my only advise is to remember when weaving your chair seat, that altho the thread needs to be held tight, the chair is also fragile....especially when made by an amateur......hence another reject!

So stay tuned.....today was meant to be a basketweaving day for the babys roombox....if I can tear myself away from surfing for decent printies. The chairs are for the 2 birthday roomboxes and then....in my other spare time, I still have to finish the "travel" roombox....as well as watch for orioles.

So many ideas...so little time. No rest! I must be very wicked indeed LOL

Printies Links

I've just spent the morning surfing the net to find some baby product printies & in the process acquired quite a bit of knowledge.....there's not much out there that's at least 196dpi(dots per inch)! In fact it seems that I'm going to have to make my own. Thank goodness we have a baby in the family. Now if only I can get those empty containers, boxes, etc out of the toyroom, before they get turned into train tunnels or worse. LOL

If anyone out there knows of decent printie sites, for any type of printie, let me know & I'll start a new link section. There's only one stipulation: you must have used the printie & know for sure that the print quality is sharp. Places like Miniboop & Jim Collins may have lots of printies on their sites but most of it is 72dpi which makes the printed item look fuzzy.

Having twice lost postings about my garden yesterday (I get very envious when I see all your gardens that are so far ahead of mine), I'm almost afraid to try again.
But when I looked out this morning, there were 14 Blue Jays cleaning up the ground beneath my feeders. With the feeders less than 10ft from our living room window, it's sometimes hard to approach & not scare some of them away. So here I sit, on a hassock in front of the window, my laptop on my knees, my camera & a coffee next to me, waiting for the Baltimore Oriole to come by. They're new to my feeding community and in all my years of feeding birds, I don't believe I have ever had this bird come by before.
Here we have 3 types of woodpeckers, blue jays, the odd cardinal, grosbeaks, a number of finches as well as grackles, the scourge of every feeder as they scatter more seed than they eat. We've even had a occasional hummingbird hover by to see what the commotion is about.
Yesterday I added a fourth bracket to the pole so I can now give everyone their choice of seed. There's thistle seed for the gold finches. At times I've seen at least 6 or 7 finches trying to eat while at the same time battling each other for superiority. I have a double feeder with sunflowers at the top and canary seed on the bottom. There's not as much demand for the sunflowers now as there was over the winter but the canary seed is still going down a treat as the grosbeaks, blue jays & of course the grackles go for them. I have a third feeder made of mesh containing peanuts for the woodpeckers. It's amazing that the strength of woodpecker beaks means this type of feeder needs to be replaced at least once a year. Last but not least I've added a glass nectar feeder...just for the orioles!
Do any of you feed birds? Do you ever get the chance to watch their antics? This morning I watched a blue jay waiting his turn for the canary seed while belligerently pretending to attack the finch who had gotten there first. Each time the finch would duck down but never yielded.
In the city, where the squirrels grow as big as small cats, I used to grease my feeding poles. I don't mind the squirrels coming round as long as they know their place....cleaning up the ground around the pole. There would always be at least one, cheeky enough to climb the pole & empty a feeder in one gulp. (It's extremely amusing to see them jump onto the greased pole & then slide right down again.)
At the moment I have 4 feeders in use.
Oops, my camera seems to need recharging. I'll try again tomorrow. That'll give the Oriole some time to become less shy.

huh????

I was trying to make up for not posting in so long; had a big long post that took me most of the morning to compose. I was almost ready to publish.....when bam! half my stuff disappeared! Then while I was trying to get it back, the rest of it disappeared!
If that's ever happened to you, would you email & tell me how to get things back. Maybe it's going to be a full moon tonite, and the gremlins are out early.

polymer clay

check out this amazing roombox made into a quilters store....even the quilts are made of clay! You can see it in it's entirety at Sarajane's Clay Gallery.
If you search thru the site, you'll find some great tutorials as well. It might even tempt you to join the Yahoo group, like it did me.

Happy Mothers Day

Being a Mother!

Somebody said it takes about six weeks to get back to normal after you've had a baby.
That Somebody doesn't know that once you're a mother, "Normal" is history.

Somebody said being a mother is boring...
That Somebody never rode in a car driven by a teenager with a driver's permit.

Somebody said if you're a "good" mother, your child will "turn out good."
That Somebody thinks a child comes with directions and a guarantee.

Somebody said "good" mothers never raise their voices,
That Somebody never came out the back door just in time to see her child hit a golf ball through the neighbor"s kitchen window.

Somebody said you don't need an education to be a mother.
That Somebody never helped a fourth grader with her math.

Somebody said a mother can find all the answers to her child-rearing questions in the books.
That Somebody never had a child stuff beans up his nose or in his ears.

Somebody said you can't love the fifth child as much as you love the first.
That Somebody doesn't have five children.

Somebody said the hardest part of being a mother is labor and delivery.
That Somebody never watched her "baby" get on the bus for the first day of kindergarden.
Or on a plane headed for military "boot camp."

Somebody said a mother can do her job with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back.
That Somebody never organized four giggling Brownies to sell cookies.

Somebody said a mother can stop worrying after her child gets married.
That Somebody doesn't know that marriage adds a new son or daughter-in-law to a mother's heartstrings.

Somebody said your mother knows you love her, so you don't need to tell her.
That Somebody isn't a mother.

Roomboxes

Well it's 8pm, and we are without Internet AGAIN! Lately this seems to happen every night. Because we're out in the boonies, the big Internet companies aren't interested & all we can get from them is dial up.
Our only choice was to go either satellite or with a private company. Unfortunately we went private. We needed a receiver down at the boathouse to pick up the signal from the tower....at that, we're lucky because some parts of the lake have no direct sight line and are therefore condemned to dial up. From the boathouse we had to run 300+ feet of cable to the router in the house.
So this posting is written in Word & from there, when we're on again, I'll transfer it.

I wanted to show some of what I've been working on. Currently I'm making 3 rush seated ladder back chairs.....no pics of those yet. Once I'm done, I'll get you the tutorial.

Here's the travel roombox....it's coming along nicely.
this is the suitcase is that I started with
I've cut the hole, ripped out the innards, built a box of birch plywood and am in the process of painting the walls & ceiling.
I've cut a piece of Plexiglas to fit over the opening which I can either attach to the plywood or to the suitcase lid.

Project #2: take one finding, add one bashed Michael's hutch and you get:

the change table is formed by a couple of craft sticks

It's still kinda empty. I've been looking for printies of diaper boxes & other baby products but so far any that I've found have printed out fuzzy even tho I'm using photo paper & have the printer set for high definition. So what I'm going to have to do is scan real boxes & shrink them. Hopefully that will resolve the issue. Not sure what to do if it doesn't.....buy, I suppose. Any suggestions will be gratefully appreciated.