Projects

I've had some requests to see my "shirt quilts".

I've made four now and two were in the last year. I have one that will be done in time for L's b-day next week. For the most part they are made out of old shirts of D's. They are 7" squares so finsished they come out to just over 6". I use sheets for the back and tie them with thick crochet string rather than yarn. I leave the pockets in and have filled them with love notes or money. It's amazing to me that even though I use the same kind of fabric by adding different shirts it really changes the basic look and color of the quilts. The next one has a lot of green and orange. I acutally had to buy some blue to throw more of that in.

Now here is D's project for the winter. He had lots of home improvement projects to do but he saw this idea on line and he was hooked.

Can you tell what it is? It's a Redwood Canoe. The plans call for Eastern Cedar but at the wood store they told him he could drive to Vermont and get it cheaper than they could get it so they suggested Redwood. Well, we had a whole deck of redwood that we wanted to replace with Trex. So we spent a little more and got the trex and he stacked all the redwood out behind the garage. He has cut the planks into 1x1/4" strips. He built the tooling first (forms) and that took a couple of weeks. Then he started laying up the strips. Each piece has to be routed to make the edges fit together and then glued down and clamped so usually he can only do one row a day. Now he is working on the bottom. It's pretty tricky to fit those pieces together but in the end he says it will be "tight like unto a dish"

After all the wood he will take a sheet of fiberglass and lay it over and cover it with epoxy resin so it will be sealed tight. After that is dry he will turn it over and ovelay the fiberglass coating on the inside so the wood should never come in contact with the water and the scratches should buff right out.

Now he wants me to go on a three day canoe trip on the green river. I'm trying to talk him into taking B. It looks like fun but three days?

It's projects that keep us sane and busy.