Bathrooms, Textiles and Tea, late and early flowers

The Bathtub Adventure is in progress, after landing on a week with long-standing medical appointments I had to rearrange. It is ironic that the work to make the bathroom accessible, finally, conflicted with actual health care appointments. 

It's gone very well, and here are a few interregnum pictures. The insert is now curing for 48 hours, and on Friday it will be finished then tiling and painting will follow.

Chunks cut out of the tub

The insert door is to make the tub work for tub bathing. It locks and seals in place by hand, no tools needed

Those gaps have caps when it's finished, to look more streamlined and be waterproof 

Similarly here's the door in place without caps, until it cures completely.  The step is wide enough for your foot, also has a skid proof finish. So you can get in and out with minimal striding, no reaching your foot over the step.

Mike is a lovely craftsman, leaves everything looking beautiful, not a speck of dust when he gets done. 

He's very pleased that after much searching he was able to get tiles to match closely the ones in place. They don't make them any more, and we're only retiling a section around the toilet where some tiles got broken, helpful amateur work, don't ask.

Anyway he went to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store in Pennsylvania, donated a lot of door hardware and tools and found half a box of the right tiles. Score! 

Today we still have a few late flowers 

and these arrived, for next spring, to be planted near the front door 

They're blue, so I'm hoping for a mass of blue as I come up the front path.

Once again I need to weed that same old patch, now with different weeds from the ones I pulled earlier. I was going to do this tomorrow but had a labor saving idea.  

I checked the first expected frost. Late next week. So that's when I'll pull the weeds, so they don't return this year, and plant the bulbs. Also finally clear the flowers from the patio, since their season will definitely be done. 

Textiles and Tea was unusual this week, with Neil Goss, a true free spirit, an environmental artist, who forages, dyes and weaves works to leave outdoors and eventually join nature. 

He also teaches and creates gallery work, but his outdoor pieces are really his mainspring. He likes community participation in his weaving, here at the backstrap loom he built from a bunch of sticks in traditional fashion.

He does have a traditional floor loom in his studio, a Macomber, on which he created a number of the pieces you see. His work all has a personal narrative but it's not vital to know it in order to get a lot out of seeing it.

When he does a weaving residency, he invites people to take part, add in items, try their hand at weaving, a great test of a weaver's patience and control issues, as he notes. 

He's a generous person and artist, and very aware that he's a white man working in an indigenous women's art form. He also acknowledges the Cherokee people who lived in his region on the land which is now his home.

Check him out. He's a force of nature.

Speaking of art, I just Freecycled this material to a local artist who's very excited to try it out.

This is paper backed silk chiffon which can go through the printer. You peel off the paper and have a beautiful transparent image to work with. 

I used to scan and print sections from my watercolors then use the silk in stitching. It's a marvelous visual experience to have your own work apparently floating in air, released from its original form.

Now that I have none of the electronic equipment needed, and have moved on, it's fun to give another artist a try at it. It's like image transfer raised to a new power.

Happy day everyone! I hope your day is raised to a new power, too.

Sez Ted and Big Ursy and Pony and Ursula 

Exhaling, baking experiment, final flowers

Update on the stair lift and permit: after I decided to go ahead anyway, this morning the township engineer got back to me to say no permit needed. So I've filed that away just in case. 

He was very prompt, considering I'd written close to closing time Friday and he got back early this morning. Clearly a man who attends to email first thing on Monday.

I had also given the go ahead to the stair man, at the weekend, and he too got back promptly, and we're on again. By Friday, all being well, the doings will be in place and carrying stuff up and down for me.

Meanwhile the cleaners wondered if they could use a newly opened slot this morning at my house, and that seems great timing to me, stairs newly cleaned before the installation. So they're at my house and I'm at the library.

And just now I heard from my contractor that he's ordered the bathtub kit, for delivery this weekend.  So with any luck that will move ahead too. It's all go.

In other news, I'm reading via audio while I weave, stay tuned, a book by Ashton  Applewhite about ageist stereotypes. 

It's a manifesto about ageist approaches to almost every aspect of living, written by a woman in her sixties coming to grips with her own aging, who used to believe a lot of the stereotypes herself. 

She's her own audiobook reader, and it's pretty good. I'm finding it a little disheartening to study all the ways, but it's useful reading.

Then last night I watched Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, from a wonderful novel by Elizabeth Taylor. I'd read and appreciated the book long ago. 

But the premise, an older once affluent now widowed lady, real sense of the word, moves into a cheapish residential hotel and what happens then, was much harder to tackle. 

With actors like Celia Johnson at work, and now in my own old age, my understanding is much greater. The poignancy of the people trying to keep up the appearance of having caring family was hard to navigate.

I'm baffled that it was marketed as a comedy, maybe to render the subject of old people having to live out their lives in a hotel more palatable. It would fit with the stereotypes described in Applewhite's book, if so.

More cheerful doings is the new weaving. I'm making a kitchen floor mat. At first I tried making a long warp, using the frame loom with the end piece unscrewed, but I had trouble keeping the tension as I warped. 

I've done it successfully before but this time, maybe the nature of the cotton yarn, not so much. So I decided to make it in sections to join together, rather than struggle.

It's the cotton yarn I made that long summer scarf from, nice color transition tan to pink to slate to white. It will be good against a white floor. And I really enjoy working with that curved shuttle.

 I did a baking experiment. Oatmeal chocolate pancakes, like a cake type thing.

I've added the recipe in case you fancy trying them.  I'll test them on Handsome Son next time I see him. He's done baking experiments himself so he gets the idea. Again I used aqua faba instead of eggs, and it works fine. 

And on the grounds that I'm worth it, I gave myself a present, from As Ever, a top of the line food source, owned and run by Meghan Sussex. Here's the unboxing 

Marmalade, raspberry and strawberry spreads. I've had the apricot spread and it really was excellent. I wonder if a touch of one of them might be good with the chocolate pancakes.

And in case I ran out of things to do, I repotted a couple of plants, creating a mess in the kitchen but finally getting done a couple of jobs I've been meaning to for eons.

Our state is now officially out of drought emergency, thanks to all the inches that fell lately.

 And the little bouquets are tapering off for the year, here Russian sage and chrysanthemums smelling wonderful.

That's Chez Boud for now, and my quiet uneventful days don't sound that way when I write it down. 

Happy day everyone, whether quiet or uproarious.

Update on legislation and bathtubs

The bills in the NJ state legislature I mentioned got  swiftly through the Assembly and Senate and will be law as soon as Gov Murphy signs, which he will.

Here's the doings

So far, so good. 

On the bathtub front here's breaking news. 

Michael the artist friend contractor, came over Monday afternoon, remembered our conversation from years ago and was willing to get the kit, study all the videos -- he's thorough -- fix it, match and replace the few broken tiles, repaint the bathroom and recaulk  the tub. 

Solving a whole lot of problems at once. Even with materials and labor,  this is going to be affordable, yay. I told him no hurry, fit it in where he can, I have another bathroom anyway.

We also had a good catchup of news since before the holidays. All good. 

Happy day everyone, and try to do all the things! Or get someone else to..

An old idea resurfaces, and a new project

The $$$$ tub to shower idea isn't the only way to go. I checked into various versions, from complete tear out and rebuild, to prefab shower inserts, to revisiting an idea I had years ago.

I wondered if it was possible to just cut into the bathtub wall, remove a section leaving a step over, and cover and waterproof the raw edges. At that time Michael the Talented Artist Contractor was very dubious, and we didn't find anything available on the market to work for us.

Anyway now, years later,  there are quite a few companies doing this work and installing the kit, and I can get it locally, and will definitely investigate the best way to go. 

Like this 

And it's many $$$ cheaper than the reno. So I may be able to get the bathroom retiled and painted without going broke. Anyway that's where the thinking is right now. Old thinking not as impractical as it sounded at the time.

And the current making project consists of continuing one of the items that arrived yesterday.  

If there's enough yarn for a cowl, that's what it will be. If not I'll think again. I also repaired and rebuilt underwear but you probably aren't eager for pictures of that.

Thank you whoever recommended this book

I think it's been made into a movie which I don't plan to see because I've got the characters vividly in mind and I bet the movie won't correspond.

It's a book that's wonderful mostly, a bit chick lit here and there but who cares, it grips, that follows interesting people occupied in and around books, writing, selling, reviewing. 

The action is mainly on Alice Island in New England, hard to get to, largely a summer resort place but the characters live there. Not one of those affluent-family-at-summer-home tropes.  

The literary background is second to their lives, hearts, connections, births and deaths. I really encourage you to read it if like me, you hadn't even heard of it when it was a bestseller.

Happy day everyone, and let me know if you have any info, or experience, on the potential mayhem of the bathtub.

I have deleted the coverage of the nomadic textile presentation after finding the presenter doesn't permit recording. I took that to cover screenshots, too.  Just in case you notice.

About politics -- I don't come to blogland for armchair political opining. So I limit my coverage to a few pertinent actions we can take, and  acknowledgment of what blogistas are doing. I'm involved, not trying to ignore our situation, but not wanting to make more noise.  

I have taken to scrolling past blog posts, nothing personal, that include complete cut and paste of the newsletters I already follow.  Just sayin'. 

More DIY, well, more like Delegate it Yourself

For ages I've been wondering if it's possible to convert one of my current bathtubs to a walk in shower without major renovation.  I was musing with a friend ages ago if it would be possible to cut out a section of the current bathtub and put in an insert to seal the gap and make it watertight, so I could just step in.  She was very amused at what she took for a flight of fancy, and I didn't pursue it at that time.

But today, as I was looking through links about bathroom conversions, I found this, yay. 

And I've sent it to my lovely across the street friend, artist, and contractor, to see if we can work together on this.  This is another of my steps to Stay In This Home, just a safety feature I've started thinking about, it getting a bit more iffy to step over the side of the bathtub to shower.  

I'll still have one full bath, though.  And that's another part of my Big Plan.  If ever I need a person to stay with me, the Nook bedroom has its own full bathroom, great privacy, doors connecting and can be closed to the hallway, all that.  So this is just some longterm thinking.  I'll leave that bathtub as a full one, but convert the other bathtub, the one leading off my bedroom.

Anyway, as they say, that's the plan!  much cheaper and less disturbing than tearing out and replacing the bathtub itself. So here's where I ask if any blogistas have experience with this?  any precautions? additions?  the bathtub in question already has a grab bar installed years ago for Handsome Partner, and a portable shower stool, and a hand held shower, so that's all in place.