hudebnik | Entries tagged with crafts

A few years ago at the Berkeley Early Music Festival, we bought a used crwth, a traditional Welsh folk instrument since the Middle Ages. If you know anybody whose last name is Crowther or Crowder, that person probably had an ancestor who played it professionally.

Getting the crwth properly strung and learning to play it has been a low priority, and it's been leaning against the side of our "entertainment center", a repurposed armoire we picked up twenty years ago. But we wanted at least to get the crwth off the floor, e.g. hanging it up on the side of the armoire. I tried putting some picture hooks over the top edge of the armoire, and they kept falling off: the top edge is about 1/2" wide, then slopes down at a 45° angle. The outside edge also slopes inward, somewhat more vertically, but anything I hang on the hooks tends to have its weight in-board from them, which rotates the hooks outward and off the 45° inside slope.

So in the course of a visit to Home Depot yesterday, we picked up a strip of 1/8" aluminum, and a strip of 1/8" steel (not sure which would work better for the purpose), and I started trying to make custom picture hooks. I started with the aluminum, which I was able to clamp in a vise and bend by hand (with a few hammer blows to get tighter curves).

After half an hour or so, I had two things that looked like eighth-notes.

So I tried them on the armoire, and they stayed in place nicely. I tried hanging the crwth on them, and it really didn't fit: the hooks ran into the tuning pegs.

So I did some more clamping, bending, hammering, sawing, and filing, and came up with version 2.

There's still a bit of interference between the hooks and the tuning pegs, but this will do for now -- at least until we string the thing and actually need to use the tuning pegs. We may also want to stick some moleskin or felt to the insides of the hooks, so the metal doesn't scratch up the wood.

Spent a weird weekend at Northern Regional War Camp.

We had both taken a vacation day for Friday to pack for the event. There was yet another smoke plume from Canadian wildfires, and the air quality was getting bad in NYC, and predicted to get bad in the Hudson Valley, so we weren't sure until 10 AM on Friday that we would go at all, but I pointed out that it was an opportunity to test the brand-new pavilion that arrived mail-order from India a few days ago. So we packed things up and left Friday afternoon. Traffic was bad getting out of NYC, but clear thereafter. We reached the site (one of the numerous ugly but flat county-fair grounds the groups in the Hudson Valley tend to use for events) before dark and started setting up the pavilion.

The pavilion appears to be very well-made: solid cotton canvas, with solid machine seams everywhere, hand-sewn reinforced eyelets, steel D-rings (or I guess Delta-rings) at the shoulders to attach guy ropes, which are provided and apparently made of hemp (!). As advertised, it was shipped without poles, but it did come with steel stakes (in two lengths, presumably the longer ones for guys and the shorter ones for walls). There's no hole at the peak, but rather a reinforced pad, which means you don't need (and can't have) a spike from the center pole or a finial on the outside. We might do some surgery to change that, since the finial on the outside provides not only decoration but an attachment point for external storm guys.

First surprise: we thought it had 16 roof segments, and it actually had 10. Which makes it more difficult to lay out initial stakes before raising the roof, but not impossible.

The pavilion was intended to be set up with vertical perimeter poles: each roof seam has an eyelet near the bottom, and each wall seam an eyelet near the top, and the spike in the top of the perimeter pole goes through both to hold them up and together. However, the pavilion was shipped without any poles at all (as advertised), and we didn't want to add vertical perimeter poles for a variety of reasons (more stuff to transport, and we've never seen any evidence of them in any picture of a tent before the 16th century), so we had come up with a mechanism involving eye-bolts, washers, and S-hooks to hang the walls from the roof edge. Which basically worked, except the washers I had bought turned out to be too small, so they occasionally popped through the eyelets and the wall fell down. So that was a second surprise.

On our way to the site, we had stopped at a craft store to buy wooden ball finials to screw onto the aforementioned eye-bolts to (a) hide their obvious modernity, and (b) protect the fabric from the screw tips, so (c) I could pack up the pavilion with them in place rather than re-attaching them every time. The eye-bolts are 3/16" diameter (i.e. #10 gauge), 24 threads per inch, and the holes in the finials are 3/16" as advertised, but slightly too large to screw on: I can put them on but they won't stay unless I also use glue or wood putty or something. Third surprise.

The center pole we re-used from our oval pavilion (two hardwood wheelbarrow-handles held together by a 2' length of plumbing pipe) was too short for this pavilion (not completely a surprise -- I thought it might be the case), so the walls puddled on the ground (even where they weren't falling off the walls). And it seemed to me that if the center were any higher, and we continued not using vertical perimeter poles (so the guy ropes need to be at the same angle as the roof), the ropes supplied with the pavilion wouldn't be long enough.

With all this, the pavilion clearly wasn't habitable for the night, particularly with two hounds who might panic and run away if anything fell down, so we stayed in a motel.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the nearest hardware store for bigger washers, longer pipe, more rope, etc. I found a very nice hardware store with helpful, knowledgeable staff and almost everything on my list... except the pipe. They had the right length of pipe, but too narrow to fit over the wheelbarrow handles, and they had the right diameter of pipe, but only in 5' lengths, and they didn't have the capability to cut that kind of pipe in-house. So I tried another hardware store, and then a Lowe's, and nobody had the pipe. But at least I had better washers, and spare nuts, and more rope, and good scissors for cutting the rope, and tape for binding the ends of the rope. So I replaced the washers, and the roof is no longer falling down. I replaced one rope, as a test of feasibility, and concluded that we could do it, but (a) the manila rope is really nasty, unlike the lovely apparently-hemp rope that came with the pavilion, and (b) even with longer ropes and a longer center pole, the pavilion will take up too much real estate to be usable at Pennsic.

Which leaves us with three choices for Pennsic: (a) use our old oval pavilion, which is over twenty years old and showing its age; (b) use this one with vertical perimeter poles, which we would have to make; or (c) finish the new oval pavilion.

I have today off from work, so I plan to spend a good deal of it on option (c).

Following up on this post...

( cut for pictures )

So that project is mostly done for now.

Following on this post...

Finished making a three-part silicone mold of the button. I hadn't applied enough release compound (aka Vaseline) to each mold piece before pouring the next one, so it took some work to get them apart, and they tore a bit, but I did get them apart, extricated the master button, added a sprue and an air vent (coming off the back loop, to ensure that pewter gets into the back loop) by hand, and melted and poured some pewter. The first pour didn't even get from the sprue into the button, so I enlarged the sprue and the air vent, re-melted it, and poured again. This time the button is mostly complete, even the loop on the back. There's a glitch on the front center of the button,
( Cut for pictures )

Continued a few days later here.

My pourpoint is down several buttons, and we still have a bunch of lapis to glue to the buttons, but only one un-bejeweled button. So D. suggested casting some more in pewter, mail-ordered some casting compound, and we watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to do this. Last night I built a 2"x3" MDF mold box, filled the bottom third of it with plasticine, embedded the remaining button in the clay, and poured the first half of a two-part mold. After it's cured tonight, I plan to open the box, pull out the chunk of clay and plastic, flip it over, remove the clay, put it back into the box, and pour the other half of the mold. Although it might need to be a three-part mold, with a secondary split along the loop in back. Anyway, once the mold is done, we'll try filling the mold with pewter and make some more buttons. Pictures eventually.

When you drill a hole in a piece of hardwood whose surface is at an acute angle to the grain, the drill "walks" down-grain from where you started it. And to the right of that direction (I guess because of the clockwise spin of the drill bit).

Any woodworkers out there, are there standard best practices for how to adjust a drill-hole that's in slightly the wrong place? (The location really needs to be correct, since I'm putting pegs in the holes to align two pieces of wood and glue them together.)

To do:

Go through set list for next week's living history show and identify pieces that need work. Maybe do a complete run-through for timing. ✓

Build new music stand top.

Buy groceries. ✓

Find Duco cement and fix some shawm reeds.

Make another harp tuning peg

Easter decorations ✓

Play Easter hymns on shawms on the front porch to entertain the neighbors

Declutter something ✓

Vacuum something

Mow lawn (the parts that haven't been converted to flowers yet) ✓

Plant more things in front yard ✓

Start more seeds in egg cartons

Pay bills

Make Easter dinner (lamb-and-prune tagine, couscous, some veggie) ✓

Consume mass quantities of chocolate ✓

When we got our greyhounds, we were told to hold onto the leash using a particular method: lark's-head the leash loop around your wrist and wrap the leash around your fingers. This is quite secure: even if a dog lunges after a squirrel or something and pulls the leash out of your hand, the lark's-head will tighten around your wrist and you won't drop the leash. Of course, it also means that the leash, which is basically a long flat ribbon, gets twisted; if you're like me and your sense of the rightness of the universe requires untwisting the leash, it sometimes requires undoing this whole assembly, untwisting, and redoing the lark's-head and all that.

Of course, I have two dogs, whom I frequently walk together. Which means not only can each leash get twisted, but they can get twisted around one another, and you can't untwist either of them individually until you've undone the twist-around-one-another.

This sounds like a job for... Math! (Into a nearby phone booth, a quick clothes change, and out comes Algebraman!)

I'm sure that better mathematicians than myself have analyzed cord-twisting and braiding from a group-theory perspective, but (a) I want to try developing it from first principles myself, and (b) most of those mathematicians don't know about fingerloop braiding, so I might have something to add.

First, I should give a roadmap to what I'm doing and why. Much of what mathematicians do is "find a concrete phenomenon, erase as many details as possible, and prove things about the resulting abstract concept." If you can prove something about the abstract concept, then since the original concrete phenomenon was an example of the abstract concept, whatever you proved must be true of it. Furthermore, by erasing the details, you may find lots of other concrete phenomena, apparently completely unrelated, that turn out to be examples of the same abstract concept, so the same must be true of them too. So today's voyage is inspired by the concrete phenomena of twisting dog leashes and fingerloop braids, but it'll have things to say about lots of other concrete phenomena like piles of paper in my office and infinite checkerboards.

( Cut a lot of math-for-the-layman content )

Things get much more interesting when you have three or more bowes. But I'd better wrap this up and prepare for bed.

When we reinstalled the bookshelves in our spare bedroom cum office, we realized we still had more books than would fit (some of them had been in piles on the floor, some in boxes). In particular, several boxes of math- and computer-related books retrieved from my University office when I moved out of it had been in the attic cum sewing-room for years, posing an obstacle to using the floor for laying out pattern pieces, and we saw this as an opportunity to triage and shelve them.

I've managed to categorize one box of them for giveaway, but the rest really didn't fit thematically with the wall of fiction. So

shalmestere pointed to some floor space next to the desk and said "could you fit another bookcase here? And indeed, that space wasn't really being used, and would seem an appropriate place for computer-related non-fiction. So I took some measurements, went to Home Depot, bought some oak 1"x10", and started building a bookcase to exactly the right size and shape.

A few days ago I cut all the boards to length and checked them for squareness. Some of the cross cuts were pretty good, some needed a little fine tuning with coarse sandpaper, and some needed more work than I was prepared to do that day. Last night I got back to them and started in with a block plane, as I predicted that cleaning up the ends of these hard oak boards with sandpaper would take the rest of my natural life.

The plane didn't seem to be working very well, and I thought "maybe I need to sharpen the blade." I took off the blade, turned on the grinding wheel (one of the two power tools I own), and set to work. After a few minutes the blade didn't look any sharper, but it did look as though it had about half a dozen different bevel angles rather than one. So I pulled out the book on everything you ever wanted to know about hand tools but were afraid to ask, and read the section on sharpening plane blades. Naturally, the author does it with an oilstone rather than a grinding wheel; I figured this would take longer but couldn't produce a much worse result than I already had, so I started over that way. (The book also tells useful basics like which side of the oilstone is coarse and which fine.) And it produced a much better result: the bevel is now all at a consistent angle. But the proof is in the cutting: I remounted it on the plane, and it cut much better than before. So after an hour or so, all the boards were decently square and I could start putting them together.

Except that we want to be able to adjust the shelf heights, which means drilling holes at several heights on the insides of the uprights for movable shelf brackets. I measured and marked a couple of plausible hole positions, drilled a test hole in a piece of scrap to make sure the bit diameter worked for these shelf brackets, wrapped masking tape around the drill bit to keep it from going all the way through the boards, ... and found that both power packs for the cordless drill (the other of the two power tools I own) were dead. One of them is plugged in now, but this happens every time I try to drill anything, so I think I need a new drill. (The drill is old enough that I can't find replacement power packs for it online.) And, while I'm at it, more sharpening oil. And maybe a proper honing stone. And come to think of it, I need some plywood or masonite or something for the back of the bookcase. Some of this I can get at one of the hardware stores in walking distance, but some will require another trip to Home Depot.

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Not really, but (a) I can easily work from home, and (b) my work-for-pay is tangentially related to CoViD-19. To wit: I work for Google Maps, which in the past month has dealt with tens of millions of "temporarily closed" businesses, tens of millions more changes in business hours, the invention of new kinds of business hours like "senior citizens only", the invention of new kinds of geographic features such as "CoViD-19 Testing Center" (some of which the local government doesn't want publicized because it would be swamped), etc.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine has started?

Two to four times a week we have a chocolate avocado milkshake at bedtime, including 2 oz. of some kind of liqueur (one "drink") in a milkshake that serves two people. So, one to two "drinks" per week.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

No kids, two dogs, who are LOVING the increased time with us and the opportunity to walk in the park in the middle of the day.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this?

None, really. We have a bunch of long-term construction and home-improvement projects that are progressing slightly faster under Stay At Home than they would have otherwise.

Oh, I've planted some bean and squash seeds in the front yard and in planters in the back yard. I figure green beans and squash are both almost impossible to kill, and will produce a bunch of food with minimal tending.

And I've been lifting weights more often than before -- probably every other day.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

Probably two a week, although we're trying to keep it down to one. The limiting factors are milk and salad greens. My mother is horrified that I'm going out that often: she goes shopping every two weeks or so under normal circumstances, and is down to once a month now. We've had a couple of grocery deliveries, mostly specialty stuff like sausages from a German butcher; haven't yet hooked up with an ordinary grocery store that can promise delivery before May.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

Not expecting to get one, because we're in the top 5% of the U.S. income distribution. Revisiting our annual charity list to make extra donations to especially CoViD-impacted organizations (Meals On Wheels, City Harvest, Red Cross, etc.) Employer's matching limit has been raised for this year.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

A bunch of summer early-music workshops have been postponed or cancelled. But the people who would have been running them are instead running early-music classes by Zoom, which usually works OK unless you want to hear one another in real time. Pennsic may or may not happen, and if it does, we may not go because the thought of staying in a dense tent city with dubious sanitation and people converging from all over the world is terrifying at the moment.

8. Are you keeping your housework done?

No better than usual.

9a. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

See this post. No others that I recall.

9b. What are you reading right now?

Too much news.

9c. What video game are you playing?

Turn-based civilization-building or empire-building games like FreeOrion, FreeCiv, FreeCol. Entirely too many hours.

10. What are you streaming with?

FiOS, which comes with phone and Internet as well as a few hundred channels of TV. We haven't historically watched enough TV to make any of the strictly-TV services worth the cost.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

No.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

One thing I've been making more often than before (because I have more time between waking up and work-for-pay) is custardy oatmeal. Boil 1/2 cup of water, add 1/2 cup of old-fashioned rolled oats (plus salt, honey, cinnamon, whatever), and cook for a few minutes while beating an egg or two and microwaving 1/2 cup of milk. Drizzle the milk into the egg, beating constantly. Add to the oats and cook for a few minutes more, stirring constantly until it thickens into custard.

Oh, and I've been baking a loaf of sourdough bread every ~5 days, up from every ~10 days before the pestilence.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

No. I don't see any evidence that anybody's out to get me or us in particular, or even that there's much of an intentional conspiracy, only a rare confluence of greed, corruption, mendacity, and incompetence that was bad news even before the pestilence.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

Nope.

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

Some face-to-face businesses will be able to reopen in a month or two, with restrictions, but we won't be back to the status quo of six months ago for at least two years. On the bright side, the next few cold-and-flu seasons may be less bad because everybody has developed habits of hand-washing, social distance, and mask-wearing. Also on the bright side, the economic shutdown may have bought us a few weeks' delay in global warming.

16. First thing you're gonna do when you get off quarantine?

Dinner out and a concert.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

Actually, I'm pretty happy where I am right now.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Dinner out and a concert.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

No. We had a decent amount of TP, and installed a "hand-held bidet" a month ago that has reduced demand for it. We didn't have hand sanitizer before, and still don't.

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

Perhaps, including all the dried and frozen stuff. It would get a little weird towards the end of the month as we got down to the ingredients in the backs of the cupboards that we'd forgotten about years ago. Storage space, particularly frozen, is a limiting factor. We seriously contemplated getting a small trunk freezer last fall, but it would have required calling an electrician to put in a new line, and we didn't get around to doing that before the Pestilence.

21. Anything else?

We're basically enjoying the stay-at-home situation. The air is cleaner than usual, the streets are quieter than usual, there's less traffic than usual, and we're not spending hours a day on mass transit. We're both still employed and doing something resembling our usual jobs, so we're not suffering economically, and we're both sufficiently introverted to be not suffering socially. Feeling a bit guilty about not suffering enough.

A miscellany of Things Happening, Things Not Happening, Things Getting Done, and Things Not Getting Done:

The cherry tree we planted in the front sublawn last fall has had green-tipped buds for a couple of weeks, but as of yesterday they looked as though they could eventually be leaves.

The quince trees we planted probably ten years ago in the front lawn came into leaf three or four weeks ago. I hung up a sticky trap, baited with allegedly Oriental-fruit-moth sex pheromones, about two weeks ago, and it has a bunch of black dots in it that look more like fruit flies than full-grown fruit moths, but I'll take what I can get. I have a bunch of tabs of eggs of OFM-parasitizing wasps in the fridge, and will hang up one of those as soon as I'm convinced we're getting OFM's in the sticky trap.

A couple of weeks ago we mail-ordered and installed a handheld bidet attachment to the toilet, to reduce demand for toilet paper. It was sort of a pain, because the toilet that came with the bathroom renovation a few years ago tries to hide all the hardware out of sight, so I had to attach everything without seeing it, reaching around into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall. But eventually I got things to work without leaking all over the floor. I imagine the effect could be "invigorating" in the dead of winter when the tap water is really cold. OTOH, I imagine it could be quite pleasant in the hot-and-sticky summer. And it does seem to be reducing our demand for toilet paper.

The first harp we bought, a Hobrough, is now a wall-hanger: it hasn't held tension in years. Our large Lewandowski Gothic harp is currently in a faculty office at Fordham University, to which I had lent it for this semester's Collegium Musicum before all that stuff was cancelled, and I haven't had a chance to get to Fordham to retrieve it since the Pestilence started. Our Lewandowski Romanesque harp is in good condition but has only 13 strings, which limits what you can play on it. Our Morillo Gothic harp is a little larger but several of its wooden tuning pegs have died over the years, so I've been whittling replacements for them. The last time I tried that, the smallest drill bit that fit in my Craftsman power drill was arguably too big, and the power drill is definitely too heavy and unwieldy for this kind of delicate work. We had a bunch of teeny tiny drill bits (#61-80, I think -- no idea when or why we acquired them), but they don't fit in the power drill, nor even in the Dremel. So last year I bought a set of different-sized Dremel collets (the doohickey into which bits have to fit), then discovered that my old Dremel no longer held a charge. So later last year I bought a new Dremel, then misplaced the teeny tiny drill bits. A week ago the new, mail-order teeny tiny drill bits arrived (#41-80, just to cover all the bases). (I promptly found the previous package of tiny drill bits, but most of the previous package had been lost or broken so it's OK.) Over the weekend, I finally managed to use all these things together to drill holes in some newly-whittled harp tuning pegs. I've been using maple, on the theory that it would be hard enough to withstand string tension, but they've been compressing significantly where the string goes around them, which hasn't happened to the pegs that came with the harp; I have no idea what kind of wood Morillo used, but does anybody know what kind of wood would be sturdy against both lateral (cross-grain) tension and compression? I should add some pictures.

Our third medieval-style pavilion is still a bunch of piles of fabric. Two roof-caps have been sewn together (Mac had suggested that this part is under the most stress, and so should probably be doubled), but one is an inch longer from peak to peak than the other, so I need to remedy that before putting them together or attaching them to the rest of the roof. Then we need to attach a valence on the outside of the shoulder, and probably a buttonhole strip on the inside of the shoulder, and we need to make walls, and we need center poles and a ridge pole, which I was thinking of commissioning from Mac (on the model of the lovely jointed center pole he made for Will McLean's pavilion).

Started a batch of bread dough yesterday, using the starter I got from

ilaine last fall. With both of us at home all day, we're using more bread than usual so I've been baking a loaf every four or five days rather than every week or two. Haven't had to worry about yeast, since the starter has been working well without commercial assistance, but flour has been scarce every time I've been to the grocery in the past few weeks. Pictures to follow.

Last night I dismantled an old fitted sheet that Thibaut (upon whom be the peace and the blessing) had put holes in, and finally made a couple of masks, using this pattern from the Washington Post. After making the first one, I understood the pattern instructions better, so the second one is neater (and has fewer cutting errors, and fits

shalmestere's smaller face pretty well). The first one basically works for me, but I may go back and make another one for myself now that I understand the pattern better. The directions call for four strips of "elastic ribbon", without specifying their length: I thought "If I'm using elastic anyway, why don't I just use two so I don't have to worry about tying them?" So I did that. It turns out I needed about 14" of elastic for the top band; 14" for the bottom band was too long on both of us, so I did 12" for the bottom band of

shalmestere's mask and that seems to work. It's important that the elastic be pointing in (with the cut end almost at the edge of the fabric) when you sew it on. Pictures to follow.

We got a couple of used wooden shutters mail-order last week. Haven't attached them to the office windows yet, because the widths aren't exactly right and it'll take some customizing to get them to fit, but they're propped up in the windows now and they look cute. Pictures to follow.

Saturday we attended an early-notation class, led by Pat and Doug in Durham, with people joining from the San Francisco Bay Area, the DC area, Louisiana, British Columbia, etc. I don't think any of the Hawaii early-music posse were there. The notation itself wasn't difficult -- Petrucci, early 16th century, and very visually clear -- but the rhythm was sometimes tricky, and they picked some lovely pieces. On Zoom, there's enough propagation delay that people can't "play along" and hear one another in real time, so Pat and Doug picked a bunch of three-part pieces of which they played two parts so students could play the third and hear all three.

shalmestere and I, however, were across the dining room table from one another, so we usually played two different parts, so one or the other of us was usually doubling Pat or Doug.

Today is Monday, which means I should actually get clean and dressed and "go to work" (either in the home office, on the living room sofa, or at the dining room table).

Our Pavilion Mark 3 has been underway for a good number of years, and we're making another push this year in hopes of having it ready for Pennsic. It's an oval tent -- more precisely, two semicircles and a rectangular midsection. The roof consists of a three-piece cap (rectangle and two pie-slices) going down about 18" from the peak, and a second tier made up of two rectangles (front and back) and two truncated pie-slices, each made up of 8 narrow trapezoids, going down another 6 feet and a bit. The cap was sewn together years ago, and looks good. Eight of the roof-end trapezoids were sewn together years ago, and I finished sewing together the other eight yesterday.

And then I measured them. Each round end of the cap is about 25" in perimeter (at the seam, with a fair amount of flexibility in fitting by moving the seam slightly up or down, since it's a sharp curve). One batch of roof-end trapezoids is 27" along the top, which is fine because there's a seam allowance on each end of it. The other batch is... 36-1/2" along the top. I'm not sure whether I cut these pieces wider, or just did consistently narrower seam allowances, but it's way too wide to match the cap.

The right answer, of course, is to rip out the seams and do them again correctly. Seven flat-felled seams (with two or three rows of stitching per seam, of course), over six feet long each. Yuck.

The not-quite-as-right answer is to give some of the flat-felled seams an extra roll, using up an extra 2W of width (where W is the width of a flat-felled seam). This doesn't require ripping out anything, and requires sewing fewer new seams, since I don't think I need to give all of them an extra roll. But it does mean sewing some extra-heavy flat-felled seams, with six rather than the usual four layers of fabric; I hope my machine and needle are heavy enough for the task.

This will also narrow the bottom of this truncated pie-slice, but fortunately, it's too wide by roughly 10" too, so that's fine.

And then I need to attach the two truncated pie-slices to the rectangles for the midsection of the tent (which may get false seams in the middle first to make them look like period fabric widths), and somehow attach this whole second tier to the cap. Which will be fiddly.

A year or so ago we bought a set of six Stickley chairs at an antiques auction. They all needed to be re-caned, so we looked up some YouTube videos on how to do that, and put the chairs in the basement awaiting re-caning.

Naturally, that hasn't happened yet. But a few days ago shalmestere mail-ordered the materials, in hope that their arrival will spur us to actually do the job.

The YouTube videos seem to assume that you're winding your "fiber rush" (i.e. fake cane made of recycled paper) directly around the edges of the chair. If you look closely at the above photo, you'll see that the "caned" part of the chair is a separate piece that drops into the receptacle formed by the four sides, so the precise technique shown in the videos won't work: you need to be able to weave over and under the sides, dozens of times (multiplied by six chairs), frequently using both hands, which is difficult if you're also holding the seat-bottom. So I built a jig from scrap lumber left in the garage by the previous owner:

It looks cockeyed because it is, because the chair bottoms are not rectangles but isosceles parallelograms; the sides have a slope of about 1/10. I thought that was enough to warrant chiseling a slope at both ends of the stretchers to accommodate the square legs.

And here it is doing its job:

BTW, the jig is sitting on my "carpenter's bench", which used to be a butcher's block in a neighborhood restaurant that was going out of business. The "crafts area" in our basement is cramped, cluttered, poorly lit, and a work-safety nightmare, but better than none.

Scene 1: night, a street in a residential neighborhood of New York City, lit by the occasional streetlight. A man and a woman are walking their greyhounds, and they notice a large styrofoam cooler left out on the corner for trash pickup. It seems in good condition, and reasonably clean, so they take it home and adopt it.

Scene 2: some years later, they take the styrofoam cooler to Pennsic, pre-loaded with a 22-lb. block of dry ice. It lasts for about five days, and they conclude that a cooler with dry ice is a Good Idea. If only it weren't so ugly and blatantly modern-looking...

Scene 3: on the way home from Pennsic, they stop at a pizzeria to re-enter modern society and make a list of projects for next Pennsic. One of them is building a wooden chest around the styrofoam cooler.

( construction photos and narrative )