needlepoint

With two flights to California coming up in the next three weeks, both with red-eyes, I wanted to be prepared with a good craft project in case things got crazy and I ended up sleeping in the airport. My supplies for a set of needlepoint pillows I wanted to do have all showed up, so I'm getting started!! I wanted to do Moroccan-tile-inspired designs so I only needed 3 or so colors per pillow. I bought normal fingerweight wool knitting yarn instead of needlepoint yarn. Yes, there is a chance that it won't wear as well, but needlepoint yarn is ridiculously expensive! Plus, the yarns I bought are all in heathery tones, which adds a little color depth.

Of course, the colors look strange to me now that I've got them in the house. It'll be hard to see until I've finished a pretty big chunk of a pillow.

Here are the patterns I'm using - modeled off of traditional encaustic cement tile designs. These aren't the colors, however. We'll see how well the designs survive their pixelization onto a needlepoint canvas and my unskilled needle work!

Waiting for a code to run...

While I'm waiting for a matlab job to finish, here are some figures relating to a now ongoing discussion between hubby and myself.

We bought long iron-look cabinet pulls that can either be installed horizontally or vertically. Drawers obviously get them installed horizontally. For doors, vertical is more convenient since it's immediately obvious which way the door opens. However, for sets of three doors, you end up with funny-looking lonely handles. Here's what I mean:

Horizontal on most (but not all)


Vertical orientation on all doors (ignore the ones above the stove)

ARRRRGHHHH!!!!

Argh argh argh argh argh.

That is what it feels like when any possible plans you might have that involve going OUTSIDE with students are interpreted as an attack on the previous field experience of anyone else who has ever worked in the hemisphere you are proposing to visit.

Well, fine. Let's just continue NOT having local department field trips. That's just great.

Ikea hacking

I just have to say that I keep being pleasantly surprised by Ikea customer service! It does help to kind of have an idea of what they might actually do, and to be a bit pushy until you get someone who can help.

We realized this weekend that both of our lazy susans were seriously bent in the middle. They looked like someone had them on a pallet and was overenthusiastic about tightening the straps. That's $70+ of useless aluminum, there! We didn't notice it when we bought the 1st half of the kitchen in June, since the bent part was heavily covered in the shrink-wrap packaging and the rest looked fine. It's a subtle bend, but bad enough that they won't actually work. Not aesthetic, but structural.

So, I called Ikea up without much hope that I could get them to mail me replacements. We live 4 hours away, so the gas would cost more than the susans if we tried to return them in person. Ikea sent us a replacement drawer front by UPS for this same order, but that was a really little item! Anyway, the first couple of people I spoke with told me that I couldn't get a remote return at all since I didn't get home delivery. I knew that wasn't true because of the drawer front, so I kept pushing. I finally got someone who looked up the susan parts to see if they were small enough. They were! Half an hour later, I have an order number and will hopefully get two new susan shelves in a week.

We've been making progress on one of our key modifications: the ductwork section. Our stove will be on an interior wall with no venting possibility above, so we need to run the ductwork over 42" of cabinet to the exterior wall. One option is to cut a big hole in the 39" tall cabinet, but I'm uncomfortable with the loss of structural integrity. We decided to try to maintain the use of 39" high doors, but use a 30" cabinet so that the ductwork could run above the cabs. I'm very happy with the result!

Initial sketch of plan: 30" cab with 9" high extensions cut from a spare cabinet:


Cutting down a cab like this for the new sides (we used the cheapest wall cab) gave us the proper hinge spacing and holes - much better than trying to drill them ourselves!


Actual implementation - a bit beefier!

Side:

Front:

Top:



We'll put a top piece on it to pretty it up. It's actually MORE convenient than having a full 39" high cabinet going to the ceiling. Things can't fall into the back of the top shelf, out of my reach. We'll probably put some bulk spices up there.

July 18

I finally have birds coming to the feeder stuck on my office window! Okay, one bird, but it did eat multiple seeds.

1. Pay John
2. Send out asbestos sample
3. Suggest speakers for next fall
4. Qeshm synthetic
5. T242 noise
6. Look at Nathan's code
7. Go to going away party
8. Go to lunchtime talk

Okay, those last two are just on there to make me feel like I'm doing more, since I have to go.

all cabs bought!

I had to drive down to Virgina for work early this week and decided to bite the bullet and use my rental car to make a "final" trip to Ikea in Elizabeth. We had some returns to make and I figured that I could buy the 6 final cabinets and some accessories without any problem. Since I already had to drive 6-7 hours, making it into a 8 hour drive didn't seem like that big of a deal.

It wasn't. The big deal was that it's really hard to pick up a multi-cart purchase at Ikea by yourself! Luckily, they have big locked sheds that you can use to store your products while you go bring your car to the loading area. It was exhausting, and the boxes just barely fit. Okay, I could still kind of see out the back window, so I suppose it was better than "barely".

While at Ikea, I couldn't help getting drawn into the deeply discounted door pull section, where the black Lansa pulls were going for $1 a piece (similar to photo below).



These are the ones that I originally wanted. They look kind of wrought-iron-y, and I like how they are a bit Euro in styling without being too modern. They also turn every door into a potential towel rack, which is nice. I wasn't completely sure about it since they are a teensy bit clunky, but we ended up going for it because of the sale - all of our 44 required pulls were going to cost less than $50, including the 6 longer ones that I got for our drawers. Bar pulls typically sell for $4-$20 a piece, so this was just too good to pass up. Plus, we can return them if we find something better.


I had to argue with the Ikea lady who took my order. First off, she didn't seem to get that we'd already bought 2/3 of our kitchen. She kept pointing out issues such as the fact that I didn't have a sink cabinet. Also, she didn't want to place the order because Fagerland "was discontinued" in their store. It's not. I knew that they had them in stock, and had gone through the same rigamarole two months ago when they thought they were discontinued. Finally, I walked out of there with my entire, complete order. If we don't break anything, we may not have to go back again at all!

New lamp in entry

My mom will be happy to see that I switched out the old entry lamp for the one we bought at the antique fair in boston last week.



And no flash, so that you can see how sparkly it really looks:



yes, it's true that this is the sort of lamp that many people pull out of their house to replace with something more updated. But I really like it! The glass swizzle sticks are fun. Took forever to wash, though.

Here's the only figure I could find that had a good shot of the old lamp: