Toy basket

So far Likka does not have a huge quantity of toys but enough to over flow a small basket. In no time she will have doubled and tripled the amount of toys she has, even if I personally would not buy any toys for her.

I personally think it's easier to put stuff where it belongs if the stuff fits there well. So I decided to have a bigger basket for Likka's toys. Since it's bigger and therefore heavier to lift I wanted to add wheels under the basket. My dad found wheels from his supplies and I already had the basket. I wanted to make the bottom of the basket sturdier and so I also got a piece of plywood from my dad. I want the basket to be so sturdy that it can hold Likka when she is older (heavier) in case she crawls in it.

The wheels I attached with screws and nuts. I drilled holes through the basket and the plywood and then tightened the screws. The nuts are now inside the basket and bit pointy, not sure if I should cover them somehow.

I did place the lining of the basket inside, which I had done before, and it does cover the nuts a bit, that might not be enough though. Love the basket. If we declutter the items inside once in a while this basket should be large enough for quite some time.

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You might remember the basket when we were using it as a cradle. Likka had not slept in the cradle for a while and so it was time to let go of it. 

Pest control

We got an invasion of bees the other day to our conservatory. We have no intention of becoming bee keepers and I decided to do something to prevent the bees getting in. I have no idea if the bees wanted to make nest into our conservatory or if they just collected nest material from there or what was their motivation and I don't mind a single bee flying around in there but there were tens in some point and that was bit taunting.

Most of the bees flew in and out from the opening near the ceiling of the conservatory (those places pointed out on the third picture of this post). From those openings also some wasps fly in during summer and the mosquitoes later in the summer and also some birds have flown in from there once in a while and not to mention the biggest pest the squirrel also finds it's way in from those openings.

I invested in stiff mosquito net, I have seen metal ones too but this plastic one is easier to handle. I cut out strips from the net and attached those with a stapler. I like that the net is white, it does not jump out from the white roof beams. The shorter pieces right next to the ceiling are not attached to the ceiling in any way. Because the net is stiff I'm hoping the upper edge does not need any fixing, it is just stretched between the roof laths. In theory a squirrel could be strong enough to break through the net if it's really motivated to get in.

Now I think the only problem is that if some pest does get in (like from the open door) it now does not have many places to get out from. I hope that does not turn out to be a huge problem.

Warm feet

My periferic blood flow seems to be nonexistent and so my feet are cold all the time, especially on winter. I got a heating pad for my cold feet as a birthday present (two and a half months ago). I keep it in the bed all the time and then I can switch it on when ever I need it. It's electric and therefore it has a cable that needs to run from the socket to the foot of the bed.

The cable of the heating pad was just loosely hanging on the side of the bed. It looked ugly and the controller of the heating pad was not easily accessible. But I made a cable holder from a white sheet fabric and now I don't have to reach for the controller and the cable is not hanging loosely anymore.

I made slots for the cable, but left an opening for the controller. The slots are wide because the controller and the plug needs to be pulled through the first slot and the plug through the further slot. The fabric cable holder is attached with safety pins under the mattress pad. In the last photo I've drawn where the heating pad is positioned and how the cable runs under the sheet. I think this holder looks very good (read: it does not really show much at all) and I think it's pretty clever. But the main thing is that the heating pad is now super easy to put on and off.

Kindling from pine cones

Hope you had a great New Year! Ours was bit different than usual, although we did see the fireworks at midnight and did sleep in on the first of January. I feel like I should have somesort of recap of the year 2013, but that recap would be very short. The big thing from the year 2013 is of course Likka and no other thing really stands out after that.

So... I'm just going to continue writing "standard" blog posts as usual. First few blog posts of this year are of some Christmas presents we made.

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Pine cones burn very well on their own, even so well that you can ruin a fireplace if you burn pine cones alone. But if you do want to make the pine cones burn even longer you can dip them into stearin, which is exactly what we did, because we wanted to make kindling. When starting a fire few pine cones make very good kindling.

So for kindling you obviously need pine cones and stearin. We made these pine cone kindlings for a present and I picked the cones from the near by small forest before Christmas. It would be better to pick these at summer just when the cones drop. Now many of the pine cones had already composted a bit and I had to be really picky with them. Also I needed to dry them at home for a week or so, before we were able to use them.

Once the cones had dried and opened we melted some stearin in a tin can. Stearin is best to melt with boiling water. Once the stearin was in liquid form we dipped each of the cones individually into it. The dipping was done twice to make the layer of stearin thick enough.

When the stearin had harden we placed the cones in a basket which I had bought from a trift store. The basket can be also burnt. The cones made a beautiful gift, to me it looks like the cones are covered with ice. Even the person who received the gift said that it's a shame to burn these.

Brush for the pram wheels

So far we have not got much snow and all the snow we have got has melted in couple of hours. But from the experience from those few snowy hours I know the pram wheels will collect dirty snow all over them. Because we keep the pram in the entry the dirty snow will melt there and make the place discusting. We do have a good rug in the entry so it's not a huge problem but it would be better if the snow did not come inside at all. So I bought a brush that can be used for cleaning the pram wheels.

To have the brush easily accessible I hammered a nail into the wall and hung the brush there. Now there hangs a broom and the brush. Hanging the broom on the wall next to the door is an idea I originally stole from Chez Larsson long long time ago.

Handling a wrong size spool

I needed to zig zag some rags quickly, but I wanted to use up some of my yarn that are on various size spools and cannot normally be used on my sewing machine.

Normally the yarn would be on the place where the green arrow is, but the spool I had did not fit onto that. The hole in the middle of the spool was just too small. So I took a roll of tape and just placed the spool into the roll. That is where the red arrow is. It held the spool on place well enough and I was able to use up the yarn from the spool. Any type of container would be good enough for this, a mug, flower pot, just something heavy that will not move with the spool.

Stimulating rag

I've understood babies could use some stimulating toys, something that they are able to touch (and chew) and the toy gives different feedback either in the form of feel or sound. I had some scraps of fabric lying about and decided to make a really quick stimulating rag from the scraps. I dug out my other fabric scraps and ribbons and got going. The fabrics on the rag have different textures and then the added ribbons also feel different to the hand. Also there are various colours, which the kid can also find intriguing.

We'll see how interested the kid will be of the stimulating rag, but anyway it was fun and very easy to make. 

This rag thing is totally NOT my own idea, I've seen similar in this book Sikksakk and also I have seen the ribbons used in lots of sewing projects for example in this blog Hupsistarallaa.

Regaining the fluffyness to the sheephide

After a few months of sitting on top of a sheephide makes it a bit sad looking. The fur is all flat and ugly and the feel is not very fresh anymore. Like in the picture below.

To make the sheephide fluffy and fresh again, it can be washed. I know it sounds weird to wash leather, but it works. I have always hand washed the sheephide, but I read from somewhere that it could be even washed in the washing machine, I guess with wool cycle. 

I've washed this particular sheephide a few times and after the wash the sheephide looks amazing, like it's brand new. I have a quite cheap Ikea sheephide so for me trying this washing on the first place was not a big step. I'm afraid I have no picture of the finished product since I only washed it late last evening and the hide is still dripping wet. But I assure you it works, although I do not dare to suggest you to try this on your expensive cowhide rug. 

Handsfree reading

When I read a book I tend to read it from cover to cover in one go. And when the book is so well written that I cannot even stop reading when I eat I need an additional tool to hold the pages. In some books the pages easily close or automaticly turn, which is really annoying if you are trying to eat and read at the same time. I have previously used a knife or a spoon to hold the pages open, but in some books the weight of those is not really enough. Now I found the perfect piece of a square metal bar from the scrap bin at work. It's heavy enough to hold the pages, it is easy to move up and down on the page and it cannot roll. Perfect for handsfree reading. I am thinking of polishing it, but we'll see...

Sauna drinks

For all you who have a sauna, ever have drinks with you in the sauna? We sometimes do and if there happens to be snow outside we collect some to a bucket and push the drinks into the snow. The snow keeps the drinks cold for a very long time.

Multitasking

I realized it's fully possible to knit and browse blogs simultaniously, I just needed to use my feet. Bit tricky, but it worked!

 

This post was written by foot

Kidding! I'm not that talented!

Wine labels

I have been agonizing what kind of labels I want for the wine we made earlier on the fall. For some reason I wanted to have something cool, but I still so far have not figured out what is that cool label I want. I had promissed to give some wine and cider to my colleague who we got the sweet apples from to make the wine and cider. I had been avoiding taking the bottles to him, because I had wanted to label the bottles first. But on sunday I decided he has waited too long and then just grabed a white marker and wrote straight on the bottle its content.

And I think those turned out really cool, so I decided to label all bottles like this. I really like them.

Broom stick reborn

 

I still haven't foud a good place where to keep my exercise equipment, but I did change one of the equipment to a more handy one. I previously used a long aluminium handle from a mop, it's on the left in the picture. But it was way too long, I was afraid I would hit something with it while I did my exercise. Then I remembered I had an old broom stick from a broom that had broken long time ago. I cut the stick into a good lenght and then painted it white. That is in the picture on the right (obviously). Way more handy to use and to store too.

Removing sticker residue

I showed long time ago a tip how to remove labels from jars, but I have another tip. This tip works well if you need to remove stickers from furniture or from tile.

First try to scrape the surface of the sticker away if you can. Then spray the sticker with a lubricant, with something that you would use for hinges or for car parts. You can either scrape the most of the sticker out with a knife or with your finger nail. Or if there is very little of the sticker residue like I had just wiping firmly with a cloth will do the trick. Somehow the lubricant makes the sticker more brittle and also it allows you to get under the sticky surface easily.

Once you've got the sticky stuff out you can wipe the whole area with a regular cleaning product.

This lubricant removal trick works really well for those foamy double sided tapes that are sometimes used for attaching things on the walls. I very succesfully removed huge amounts of those from our kitchen tiles few years back.

Winter storm

On Saturday morning we woke up to this

We had a bit of a storm on friday and saturday night. And we got some more snow. Also wind was hard and the fluffy light snow formed into dunes. On Saturday our home was inside of one of those dunes.

To us the snow did not do any harm and later on Saturday we were able to chill the white wine in the snow dune. Handy.