Muslin Bunnies

Our family just got back from a trip to the west coast to visit my family. I made two quick stuffed bunnies to give to the children of a friend of Becky's we stopped in to see in Berkeley.



In 2010 Violet and I made a stuffed bunny, mostly based on something I saw on the internet (don't remember where I found it). I freehanded an outline for the front and back fabric, both made from a linen blend muslin type fabric we bought a bolt of years ago to make into curtains but didn't end up using. Then I embroidered a design onto the front. The tail is a chunk cut from a sheepskin I got at Ikea a while back for use in sewing projects. A small circle was cut in the rear fabric, the edges folded under and backstitched to the edges of the skin (thimble required!).

Then the two pieces of fabric were sewn right sides together, inverted through a length of open seam, and the resulting bag was stuffed with wool batting from West Earl Woolen Mill. Finally the opening was stitched closed by hand.

The first bunny has held up well being in the general stuffed animal rotation at our house. The joint between ears and head has gotten plenty of flex, so the ears are rather floppy now but this is not unpleasant for a bunny. Violet recently decided she liked it above the other animals and has been taking it to bed, which is gratifying. This design is a good payoff for not much work, so it seemed like a reasonable choice to make up some small presents for kids.

I once again freehanded the outlines, mostly based on Violet's bunny but slightly smaller to accommodate the odd pieces of fabric I wanted to put to use. One non-ideal characteristic of the first bunny is that the wool fibers work their way through the muslin, making it look slightly hairy all the time. So on these new bunnies I cut enough fabric to have a double layer in both the front and back. We'll see if that slows down the fiber extrusion problem.

Becky's friend has a boy and a girl. For the boy style bunny, I made the face more fierce but still cute. The girl style bunny is nearly identical to Violet's, other than that I enhanced the flower embroidery a little.

The embroidery is all done with three strands of DMC floss, not particularly elegantly. I joked to Becky's friend that it looks so coarse it could have been done by a blind woodcutter. The outlines are mostly in black, with a mix of backstitch and stem stitch. The flower stems are dark green, the leaves are satin stitched with some light green my mom had at her house. On the blue flower, Becky reminded me how to do french knots to form the stamen parts in the center with peach colored floss. For some reason I seem to have put the faces too far up, so the eyes are almost running up into the ears. They still look pretty cute though.

Before our trip I had cut all the pieces and packed up the necessary supplies. I did the embroidery and tails in free moments along the first half of our trip.

Someone joked that to make them more realistic I could make some french knots in brown thread just under the tail. Alas I had not packed any brown thread and my mom didn't have any in her stash!

At my mother's house in Oregon, she pulled out our old electric Kenmore which I sent to her last year and I got to briefly renew our acquaintance while joining the fabric layers. One night my mom and I stayed up late stuffing in wool batting I had brought along, and I closed up the openings by hand about one day before the bunnies needed to be delivered in Berkeley.

We made plans with our friends to meet in Muir Woods in Marin so our kids could check out some redwoods.

It was raining steadily, but the park was still packed. Child 1 especially enjoyed the rain!

The kids kept a sharp eye out for "fairy houses" formed in the base of the redwoods.

So despite the poor weather, everyone had a fun walk around the flat part of the park. Becky's friends lent us rain coats and umbrellas.

The pictures of the bunnies are taken at a tree near the entrance to Muir Woods.

In passing, Becky's friend mentioned she had a box of socks she had deemed excess to requirements and was going to throw out. You can believe I snapped those up! Boo-yaw! I should be set for another couple years on socks, and my number one problem with continuing into year 3 of my no-buying-clothes challenge has been neatly resolved.

2013 Apple Sauce - 30L cooked and canned

Last weekend we did our once yearly apple sauce run. I ordered 2 bushels (36kg) of Macs from Kimball Fruit Farm, which Child 1, Millie, and I picked up at the Somerville farmers' market on Saturday morning. We also got to see a demo of a bicycle powered honey extractor put on by the beekeeping dad of the lady who runs Relish in Union Square, which was cool.



I'm not crazy about Macs in general, but they make a nice flavored apple sauce, and this is one application where their habit of turning to mush is in fact helpful. These two boxes of apples were not the most flavorful macs I've tasted, but they are still fresh and local and thus will make a sauce far superior to the flavorless mulch purveyed by the supermarkets.

On friday I had picked about 1kg of crab apples from landscaping in my office park and various trees along the bike path on my commute to work.

The first order of business was to wash the produce. Fortunately the weather was glorious, so Child 1 and Millie worked together to wash the apples while I prepared things upstairs in the kitchen.

The apples cook much faster if you chop them up first; the smaller the chunks, the faster the cookdown.

For each pot full of apples, I added a handful of crabs for seasoning, and about 250ml of last year's hard cider to aid in initiation of the cookdown.

This year I tried a pipelined production technique, with a packet size of one of my medium pots full of chopped apples. So I would wait until the pot was cooked enough to process, empty it out and refill with already chopped apples and start another cookdown.

While the next pot was cooking, I would can a batch of sauce and start a canning cycle, process the previous output from the pot into sauce, and put the new sauce into a secondary pot for pre-canning cook. This was easier to manage than taking the whole load of material through each step entirely before starting the next, which is more or less what I have done previously.

I borrowed my co-worker Jim Serdy's Squeeze-O handcrank food mill again, which the kids enjoy operating (for a while, then I keep working it for the other 5 hours :)

Everyone took turns cranking, and much sauce was consumed hot from the mill.

The bottleneck in the pipelined process was the cookdown in the medium pot. To help this step go faster, I added a pre-bake step. So I would chop up the apples and put them into stainless bowls covered with foil, baked at 175C in the oven.

See that handle sticking out? Kind of inevitable, but of course I grabbed it while it was still burning hot on the countertop. Doh.

When the cook pot was emptied, I poured preheated apples from these bowls into the pot, then refilled the bowls with raw apples. Even if I had another big pot to add a parallel cookdown station, all 4 burners were already in use on the stovetop (cookdown, sauce cook, canning kettle, jar lids). So putting the oven to use made a lot of sense.

Here is the yield of this year's effort, in 35 jars, mostly quarts.

Should be enough to keep us in sauce for the year, with a few extras to give away as gifts.

Fairy Chairs

The other week I was in the basement working on the new back gate, when Violet and Millie came down and wanted to make something. I asked if they had any ideas for something simple we could work on in an afternoon. Violet came up with fairy chairs.



She has been arranging a little fairy house outside, with moss, brick walls, a wood roof,

and a mat woven from leaves

So she thought a chair might be a nice addition. I had some scrap red cedar pieces (the cheeks of the half lap joints from the gate) that looked like they wanted to become fairy chairs, so we started cutting and fitting.

These were fairly quick and crude, but it was fun to cut up the pieces with the japanese saw and put them together, and Violet was delighted with the project. Of course I did a lot of this, but she did a number of cuts, some planing, sanding, and filing.

After the glue was dry, we did a seal coat with shellac.

Child 1 helped by scratching some scrap wood.

When the shellac was dry, we sanded lightly in preparation for further finishing.

Violet wanted to paint two chairs with Real Housepaint,

and one with dark stain that I used for the bathroom cabinetry.

She gave one of the red ones to her neighborhood friend Maddy. I'm sure the fairies are enjoying the other two. I think they are adorable!

Puff pastry and local peach treats

I'm still working through the last batch of puff pastry I made, in which I think I put a bit too much water. It turned out a little tough, so it hasn't been flying out of the freezer. Lately we have been getting amazing peaches with our CSA, so I took the opportunity to make some desserts with the puff pastry and these seasonal delights.

A tiny stretch of fence, in Red Cedar

There used to be a dilapidated stretch of fence with a gate at the end of our driveway, to close off the back yard. Some years ago it rotted past the point of any use as an actual barrier, after spending a while being reinforced with plastic chicken fence. Early this spring Becky asked me to make a functional fence + gate there of some sort, so we can let Child 1 (2.5yrs old) hang out in the back and not have to worry about him escaping if we go up to use the bathroom or fetch lunch.



I fairly quickly put in some pressure treated 4x4s,

screwed up more plastic chicken fence, and repurposed a section of garden lattice as a kind of gate. However, I had plans to do a nicer job on the fence, and use it as a test bed for some ideas about how to redo the fence around the whole property.

Last weekend I finished up with the nicer version of the fence and gate, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. The lot is made from clear vertical grain ('CVG') western red cedar, purchased at Anderson McQuaid. A&M is not usually the cheapest place to get stock, but their pricing on CVG red cedar is actually not bad; cheaper than two lumberyards I called, and a bit more than an internet supplier in another state. Anyway, this was not a tremendous amount of wood, so I figured the convenience of A&M was worth it.

Western red cedar is a lovely wood to use for exterior projects. It is grown sustainably in the pacific northwest, mainly in British Columbia, and there is reported to be more red cedar forest now than there was 100 years ago. It is not in fact technically part of the cedar family, but rather part of the cypress family. It is highly rot resistant, straight grained, and with few knots. Of course that was especially true for the CVG grade I bought, which is the absolute cream of the timber industry. The wood cuts and carves wonderfully, and is surprisingly strong for its very light weight. An added bonus is the sublime smell released when working it. It doesn't seem to gum up blades and bits too much.

On the down side, it is quite soft and takes dents and other marring easily. The end grain is pretty rough when exposed unless cut with an exceptionally sharp, fine toothed blade. The preferred hardware material for use with cedar is stainless, but I already use stainless torx drive screws whenever possible. It can also be tricky to paint, but I've so far had good luck with some one coat exterior stuff from Behr that advertised its compatibility with cedar. I opted not to paint this fence; while I am not in love with the gray color exposed wood weathers to, I am even less excited to have to scrape and repaint fencing. I'm using this same wood to do the trim on a tiny back porch exit, and the paint is doing ok so far. Maybe we could think about a solid color stain for the future; I don't have much experience with that class of finish so I don't know how suitable it would be.

In the vein of using this stretch as a lab for trying out some ideas for the full fence, I set out to design the fence panel itself. Becky favored a picket style, feeling that the less formal look went better with our un-fancy Victorian two family than a more formal close spaced square spindle fence panel might. We both thought it would be cool to have something unusual at the top of the pickets however. At some point I had seen a sort of round eye design at the top of fence pickets, so I tried out something like that. Wanting a little more interest, I added some slight relief carvings to give the appearance of a loop with a half twist.

Post Covers
The post covers were made by milling a rabbet and matching groove on the edges of the face pieces.
These were glued together using waterproof yellow glue.

After assembly, a bevel was added to match the design I'm working out for the porch trim.

The routed bevels were given a lamb's tongue stop treatment with a chisel.

I made up 5 post covers, one of which was painted to be the terminal post of the back porch handrail (not shown in the below picture).

Post Caps
I happened to have some 5/4x8  spanish cedar around, so I tried gluing two layers of this together, then chopping squares from it. I got a tenoning jig for the table saw to cut the top bevels, but my saw can't put the blade up far enough to cut the whole bevel, which is probably just as well from the standpoint of possible undercutting of the clamping pressure zone in the jig.

So I cut four sides, rotating 90 degrees between cuts, then finished it off with a japanese saw

and a couple minutes with the hand plane.

Plus a little sanding, and I was happy with the results.

We'll see how the glue joint stands up to weather, but I think for the main fence I'd rather use 2x stock in CVG red cedar and not have the glue joint. Spanish cedar is an amazing wood, but I was sad to find out that it's tropical, and thus much harder to feel good about using it. The caps are held onto the post covers with pocket screws on the post covers, which are later hidden by an inverted mahogany basecap molding from A&M.

Rails
The fence rails are 5/4x4 red cedar, toe screwed with stainless screws long enough to get into the inner post.

Then a small piece of spanish cedar molding is put over the screw heads with stainless 15ga nails.

I think for a 2.5m long fence panel, the 5/4 might not be strong enough to support an adult climbing on it. I'm now thinking I would do two 19x90mm pieces; one on either side of the pickets, both top and bottom.

Pickets
When thinking about a fence design, Becky favored a rectangle section picket style rather than some of the more formal looking square element styles you see around here. We both thought it would be neat to put something a bit unusual at the top of the picket. As I mentioned above, I took a cutoff piece and started fooling around to work out a circular design, then copied it to the other pickets.

I had a 35mm forstner bit from putting cup hinges in another project, so I drilled  through holes with that after marking from the test piece.

then bandsawed the outer arc

 and sanded to smooth it out. I used a sanding disc in the table saw, then a finish pass with the palm sander.

Eased the edges with a small roundover bit in the router table

Now for the carving. I have almost no carving experience and limited tools for it, so I tried to think of something that wouldn't take much skill, wasn't too complicated, and could be done quickly even by me. This little relief detail is what I came up with, which makes it look like the top circle has been twisted around by 180 degrees on the picket. I think it looks pretty good and with some practice they go quickly. First I score with a marking knife.

Then some quick chisel work to define the reliefs

Usually a second pass with the knife is needed to free up hanging chips left from the chisel work.

Each top gets four little relief details.

This was an early one, so its a bit rough. Later ones got smoother and faster. I still gave each one a few swipes with the sander at the end.

I did fear that this was going to be too much work to do on all ~500 pickets that the full fence would require, but since it was for this tiny section I figured I could do some gratuitous and unpractical labor as an experiment.

Finally I finished the fenceposts and put them up. Each is secured with two #8 flathead stainless wood screws in both the top and bottom rail.

I can tell you I am now pretty quick at the chisel details. I made about 25 pickets for this project, each one has four carved relief sections. By the end it was taking me about 5 minutes to do all four for one picket. I'm also not shooting for the same level of work that I would if I was making indoor furniture. This is a fence after all, not furniture for the Queen!

Thinking about scaling up and doing 500 posts, I think the outside arc shaping is the biggest challenge. I tried to whip through the last set of pickets on the bandsaw, but you still have to be pretty careful and rushing makes them misshapen. So I think the thing to do is get the kids to help me build a small CNC router to do the round profile, then chisel the details by hand. Might even be possible to rough the reliefs in with the CNC, then finish them by hand.

It wouldn't be hard to build a little stepper motor type tabletop machine using some junk I've got sitting around. I could do two or three picket ends at once. Some alignment pins or even just lines on the bed, and some Staco clamps to hold the work in place lower down the picket out of the carving area. We'll see.


Helpers
While doing fencepost ends (which happened over a period of months on and off), the kids would often come down and want to do some woodworking.

They are very young, but enjoy trying out the tools and experimenting with wood.

Red cedar scraps are well suited to this. By the way, japanese saws are great for kids.

Violet helped me drill all the inner holes

then sucked up the wood chips with a hose from the dust collector.

Just in case you are wondering, I do have the kids put on safety glasses (and usually earmuffs too) if we are using a power tool. So Violet would have put on her glasses in the drill press picture before we actually started drilling. I don't make them wear glasses when using hand tools.

Gate
With the fence put up, it was time to turn my attention to the gate. I decided to try to make this from 5/4x4 red cedar, just like the fence rails. I made up a square frame, and put in half laps using a router table, bandsaw, and chisel.

 These were glued together with epoxy.

After the epoxy was set, I trimmed and planed a bit to clean things up, then cut and fit the cross brace.

The cross brace is secured on each end with three #10 stainless screws set in counterbores in the outer frame. The counterbores on the top and sides of the frame are plugged for looks and to help keep water out.

Earlier this year when I thought this was going to be a quicky project, Child 1 and I bought some gate hardware at home depot. The hinges are nice and sturdy, but are galvanized.

The latch is stainless, but not very heavy duty. Note the plugged screw holes on the top rail in the picture below.

Hopefully this gate location is "temporary" until we execute our dream landscaping on the yard. When it comes to house projects, temporary for me means between one and twenty years. This hardware will probably be fine for many years in any case.

The gate swings easily and feels sturdy enough. I thought about putting a tensioned cable brace on the other diagonal, but I decided it is probably not necessary. I'll have to see what happens when kids are hanging on it and swinging. The gate is much more user friendly than the old section of wood garden trellis we were hanging on lag screws to act as a gate prior to completion of this project.


Results
I'm quite pleased how this section of fence turned out. Yes, it took some time to build. But now I get to look at it and feel good about it every time I am in the back yard

 or drive up the driveway

Note the chicken fence at left, where I still am working on the handrails and balusters for the tiny back porch!

It would cost some thousands of dollars worth of wood to do the entire 75 meters of fence. But we have quotes from two commercial fence companies for this project which cost up to 10x what I estimate the wood would cost in clear red cedar. I still want to have someone else put in the posts, but I think it will be fun and rewarding for us to put up the fence sections.