Bean Sprout Adventures

January 26, 2018January 21, 2018

Making a rag rug

Rag rugs are a great way to reuse clothing that is too worn to wear, repair, or donate. As my mom says, you can always have more rugs! Basically you tear or cut the garments and fabric into strips, then weave, knit, or crochet the strips into a rug. Super easy!

This is a great use for clothes that are too worn to patch and too worn to donate. Any material (cotton, polyester, etc) and any type of cloth (woven, knit) can be used. However, I try to use a single material and type of cloth within a rug. Knits and wovens in particular behave differently.

There are a ton of rug-making methods:

A woven way

A braided way (you can do the same technique using an n-strand braid)

A knit way (using linen stitch)

Crocheting

This is definitely an accessible craft. For the simplest method (braiding), all you need is rag strips! You should try it!

The finished rug! It is in-front-of-sink-sized. I plan to give it to Sibling A.

For the rug that I made, I used a child’s dress (pink flowered), a robotics t-shirt (turquoise), a scrap of single-knit cloth (pink), an old pajama shirt of Sibling A’s (light blue), and part of a fitted sheet (white with turquoise stripes). It ended up way more themed than expected. I’m used to rag rugs looking more mismatched, which is a nice look, too!

January 25, 2018January 21, 2018

Making potholders!

Friend A, the one who is allergic to everything (not the Friend A who likes bugs and bitcoin), needed some potholders. Of course we have a huge supply of potholder looms and loops (here’s a short history of woven-loop potholders). It is a classic childhood craft.

Choosing loop colors. This also involved sorting out those loops too short to fit onto the standard-sized loom. They will be used for smaller potholders. You can also use rag strips.

You put loops on one way, then you weave the loops over-under the other way.

Use a crochet hook to pull the end of each loop through the next. It ends up looking like a braid and is constructed like a single column of knit stitch.

Finished! Each potholder took me 30-45 minutes.

Good potholders are essential to cooking (although occasionally I have wanted my leather welding gloves to protect the backs of my hands in tight spaces)! Sibling C thinks that this style of potholder is the best there is.

January 24, 2018January 20, 2018

I meant to upload this at New Year’s

The last piece of Christmas! The topper, and several of our other ornaments, were brought from Germany by my dad’s family. His father was born in Germany and immigrated to the US as a child. The Christmas cactus in the background didn’t bloom this year 🙁

January 23, 2018January 20, 2018

Great/grandmother’s watch

My maternal grandparents died several years ago, and my mom and her siblings have been working to clear out the stuff from their house. I specifically asked her to keep an eye out for watches for me, and a recent effort turned up a very nice Bulova that belonged to either my grandmother or my great-grandmother (my grandfather’s mother).

I have not been able to verify a manufacture date, but based on styling, it seems to have been made in the late 1940s or 1950s. The watch is mechanical (no batteries to replace!) and must be wound by hand every day. (Newer mechanical watches can be automatic-wind, where the movement of walking or shaking turns a weight that winds the mainspring.)

Fancy molded plastic case, patent number D-162.364. Unfortunately, the watch itself has no apparent patent number.

My mom had the watch repaired (mainspring replaced) and cleaned by our local watch repairman, Mr. Bennett! Thank you!

It cost $39.75 in the ’40s or ’50s, so about $400 today.

I wish people were better at passing down items as they are needed. Too often, you find out only after your parents or grandparents die that they had an extra set of silverware or dishes or pans, a sewing machine, bedsheets, fabric.

January 22, 2018January 20, 2018

Goodwill adventure!

My mom and I went to the big Goodwill in Austin today. It’s smaller than I remembered from my childhood, but still has a good selection of furniture, kitchenware, and computers. Anyone want a laptop for $80?

We bought some cool stuff!

We’ve been playing the original 1981 version of Trivial Pursuit and it’s woefully out of date. It doesn’t even have questions on the Vietnam War! I found the 2002 and 2008 versions at Goodwill today, so we’ve moved 20 years closer to the present!

A cast iron takoyaki pan in the process of being cleaned. My mom actually got it for making æbleskivers, a Danish breakfast or dessert food. She’s tried making them before, using a muffin tin on the stovetop, but it didn’t turn out well.

Here’s a closeup of the octopus/spider decoration.

We say lots of other cool stuff (of course!): stainless steel popcorn/mixing bowl, cast iron skillet, pyrex pie dishes, pyrex baking dishes, empty pillow ticking, oak cabinet with curved doors (my mom says probably early 1900s).

Enjoy your local thrift store!

January 21, 2018January 20, 2018

Brownies to use up remnants

My parents have a lot of food around (definitely enough to last the recommended 3 days for an emergency. In fact, it’s probably enough to last months). Unfortunately, this makes it easy for things to get lost or forgotten. We’ve had the same jar of Nutella for years (it expired years ago too, and the lid was used in a past automobile repair project by my dad). I was searching for a way to use it up before it goes rancid, and decided on brownies! The recipe I found uses almond meal and instant coffee, other remnant ingredients we have.

The recipe doesn’t actually call for Nutella. It calls for cookie butter swirled into the top of the brownie batter, but I figured I could sub in Nutella. I also used about 2/3 cup Nutella in the batter, as a replacement for the chocolate chips (I decreased the butter and sugar by about 25% each to attempt to accommodate the Nutella. I also added an extra ~1/4 cup almond meal ’cause the batter seemed too wet).

The recipe calls for baking at 325°F for 20-25 minutes. This was completely insufficient, unless you like uncooked brownie batter. I cooked the brownies for an additional 15 minutes, for a total of 40 minutes. Even then, the brownies were wet and fudgy, and incredibly tender. They needed to be eaten with a spoon. However, they had great flavor! Next time, I’d bake these at 350°F for about 30 minutes.