Rolling On One

One disturbingly warm day in January (I mean, in northern New England you can get a January thaw, but when it lasts as long as that one did, and is as warm as that one was, you start looking over your shoulder because you suspect that the weather has something really nasty up its sleeve) we walked around the block up in Maine. I mean, we walked down the driveway, turned left on the road, and kept taking all the left turns we could (down cut-through streets of course) until we got back. Our neighbors had told us it was a good three mile walk, with 300 feet of elevation change between the lake (granted, ten or twenty feet lower elevation than the end of our driveway) and the top of the ridge. Up on main road (well, it’s not a state highway, but it’s paved and relatively wide) along the ridge you get away from new lakefront houses and see some nice old New England architecture like this house.

A little farther along the road is a magnificent view out to the White Mountains. This is looking back the way we came, which put that mountain view behind us. We’ll have to learn to do the walk in the other direction.

I can’t find any mention of this cute piece of furniture in posts where it belongs. Arlene found it for sale on Craig’s List and was immediately enthusiastic about it. I somehow imagined it as being much bigger and clunkier than it turned out, and slightly grudgingly agreed to go look at it. A young woman living in one of the apartment houses on Comm Ave that backs up to the street along the Chestnut Hill Reservoir was selling it. She had had it for years, from back when she lived in Iowa, I think it was. It turned out to be small enough to fit in the Forester without any trouble. One of the doors was broken when we got it, but all it took was a little Franklin Tightbond glue and a big pipe clamp (which, granted, isn’t something everyone has) and it looked good as new, or at least good as the other door with its cracked panel. The difference in color between the doors and the rest of the piece makes us think they’re not original, or at least that they’ve been refinished separately from the rest of the thing. Here it is right at home the kitchen in Casco.

This picture is actually from back on January 22. We had some unseasonably warm weather, and it was easy to take this project outdoors to avoid having solvent fumes in the garage and basement.

I used Minwax wood finish, Golden Oak color. Minwax is easy to use. It goes on with a rag, not a brush, so there are no brush marks to worry about. Suicidal gnats don’t get themselves stuck in it as happens if you try to dry varnish outdoors. It rubs down to a nice soft luster. Golden Oak is a color that comes out close to antique oak furniture, nice and warm, and always feels to me like what the wood (if it was oak, that is) wanted to be.

That’s the can of finish and applicator rag on the bottom left, just outside the garage door.

The stepstool has a piano hinge joining the two top steps. It unfolds to an A shape, with a nice wide step at the top and narrow steps on either side halfway up. The narrow V at the top closes and keeps the A from spreading too far apart, and the broad V at the bottom flattens out as the sides meet the floor. This is the design I cribbed from a stepstool I saw at a store in Newton Centre that was closing back in November.

I tend to do little bits of lots of projects rather than stay focused on one thing, if I have a choice. This weekend besides baking bread, cleaning a sewing machine, building my first rustic furniture, and doing a little reading, I almost finished my mittens, and started a cap.

Here are the mittens. One is all bound off, but doesn’t have its loose ends worked in yet. The other needs five more rounds of knitting before being bound off. You’re looking at the fronts of the mittens, with the thumbs. They’re the kind that Anna Zilboorg calls invisible-thumb mittens, meaning that the pattern carries through on the thumbs. In normal lighting you’d see at least shadows around the thumbs, but the camera flash really did make the thumbs invisible in this picture.

The cap just has about an inch of ribbing so far, in Bartlett Yarns aran weight fisherman yarn, oatmeal color:

An unexpected bonus of our Maine house was a non-functioning antique sewing machine in the garage. The previous owners had picked it up at some flea market, I think, never done anything with it, and it weighs a ton. They didn’t want to move it to their new digs. I, in my naivete, am hoping to rehabilitate it. Last week I got a can of spray liquid wrench, something like WD-40, a very light lubricating oil that’s supposed to be good for loosening nuts and bolts that are rusted together. I sprayed it on some strategic points of the sewing machine and wished it good luck.

The first problem with the sewing machine was that the treadle and flywheel were stiff and didn’t much want to turn. I had put some 3-in-one oil on all the bearings I could see of the flywheel and treadle last week, but it still didn’t want to keep turning. I could turn the wheel by hand, and push down on the treadle once, but it wouldn’t keep turning far enough for the next push on the treadle.

This weekend I took a solid wrench to a setscrew and a nut that seemed to be holding the flywheel in its bearing. Leaving the liquid wrench to penetrate for a week seemed to have been a fine idea. With some effort I pulled the flywheel off the frame.

Take a closer look at that bearing shaft. That gunk was once lubricating oil, but now it’s gum that’s keeping the wheel from turning.

A few seconds of quality time with some 000 steel wool on the shaft and inside of the bearing and the shaft was shiny, smooth, and clean. A few drops of 3-in-one oil on it, and a tightened up setscrew, and the treadle assembly went back together.

The treadle again makes the wheel go around and around! I wonder how many decades it’s been since it last did that.

I’m not guaranteeing I can do as well with the rest of the sewing machine, or that I’ll maintain interest in the project, or that it will ever run again. If it does, it’ll be months from now. About all I know so far is that machinery works lots better if you clean the gunk and rust off all the pieces. But I’m hoping.

I mentioned getting some classy yarn for a hat. Here it is, alongside a ball of good hardworking Bartlett Mills aran weight fisherman yarn that’s going to be part of the same project. I’m not convinced that I have enough of that Jo Sharp to make a cap that will fold back over my ears, so I’m going to start with a few inches of ribbing in the Bartlett yarn, then switch to the softer stuff for the inside, so the Bartlett makes the outer layer folded up over my ears. There’s enough winter left in Maine this year that I want a new warm cap.

One of the things I want to do is learn to make (and then make!) rustic furniture. There are lots of trees on our property in Maine, not a few of which we’ve cut down to make a trail around the place. Those saplings, two and three inches in diameter at most, are calling out to become chair and table legs. Because wood shrinks as it dries, I won’t be able to do anything serious with the trees we cut this winter until sometime in 2007. But I still can try to play with the thinner sticks, which dry quicker, especially if I’m not really serious about the product. I made a first try this weekend. Here is one one-inch-diameter branch, with its end cut down to 3/4 inch with a hollow auger (now that’s a tool I didn’t know existed until a couple of months ago!) and fit into a 3/4 inch hole in a scrap board; a chunk of 2×4 with a 1/2 inch hole bored in it; a piece of scrap birch plywood; and a few sticks. What do I have on my mind??

When I brought it up from the cellar Arlene recognized it right away, although she said that her first thought was “a rake??”.

No, a music stand so I can practice trumpet.

Charley and Arlene feel that there’s too much sawmill and lumber yard wood in this project, that it would be better if the wood were more consistent. I think I want the bottom piece of the actual music rack, the piece of thin plywood that the sheet music sits on, to be smooth plywood. I agree, I’d prefer the rest of it to be more tree-like. As a step in that direction, I cut a chunk of log in half to be the base. When I planed it smooth on the bottom, I got a beautiful even-grained shaving:

I think that’s from a log that we cut off a fallen tree somewhere along the edge of the property. That’s a good sign that there’s good woodturning material growing here. I’m looking forward to getting a lathe someday and learning to use it.

Over last summer, when we were looking for a vacation place to buy, we started hearing about the new supermarket about to open in Bridgton. First, the woman who ran the B & B we stayed at in Harrision said she was looking forward to having a good produce department closer to her. She needed to get good melons, etc., for fruit cups for her breakfasts. The FoodTown in Bridgton didn’t have enough selection to suit her. Later in the same trip, I think, a storekeeper in Bridgton was telling us about the town and said that in addition to the other good things about it, people were looking forward to the new Hannaford’s opening. Well, it opened today. Apparently all Bridgton was sent a big flyer of coupons, and the first 500 customers, or something like that, got a free wooden recipe box. The cashier told us that there had been a line to get in when the store opened in the morning. It had calmed down by the time we were there, but how often do you see a supermarket with ALL the registers running?

“Nothing pulls me out of a funk quicker than Jazz Times Ten going klezmer” — Rachael Dratch’s character, in a bar mitzvah sketch. The SNL band went into Odessa Bulgarish after that for a few seconds before the commercial and right after the return from it.

OK readers, the bread checks out! I approve of the recipe in my previous post, and I’m glad to have it online where maybe I’ll be able to find it again. That was a good supper with Charley’s chowder (apparently Jasper White’s recipe), that bread, and a little salad.