Showing posts with label garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garden. Show all posts

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Here's How to Make an Easy Macrame Plant Hanger

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

This easy macrame plant hanger makes a comfy home for all your favorite plants!


Like every city planner faced with overcrowding, I am dodging population control measures with my houseplants by instead going vertical. Every window is fair game, as is every corner with ambient light. Even the central room with no exterior windows now has a couple of ferns hanging under the skylight.

Plant hangers are great for getting your houseplants off your crowded shelves and into those sunny windows. They also put all of those tempting spider plants and inch plants and other delightfully dangly leaves out of the reach of cats, dogs, and toddlers.

Especially if you’ve got an older house, though, or any place with unconventional windows or other spaces, you’ve probably found that store-bought plant hangers just don’t fit your space exactly the way you’d like. Or maybe they’re just not the right color. Or maybe, like me, you simply don’t want to have to buy something when you’ve already got everything that you need to make it.

That’s why I found myself making my latest stash of plant hangers: the houseplants had a bumper year, and after dividing them and giving tons away I still had more than I have room for on my shelves. But my weird old house with its half-vaulted ceilings and oddly-sized windows doesn’t lend itself to the comfortable placement of most lengths of plant hangers. AND about five years ago both of my kids went through an epic paracord crafting phase, one that left me with a large stash of unused paracord after they both eventually moved on to using up all of my embroidery floss on super elaborate friendship bracelets.

I have made SO many macrame plant hangers this summer, using my easy technique that lets me make them exactly the length that I want. Here’s how you can make yourself an easy macrame plant hanger, too!

Supplies



To make this easy macrame plant hanger, you will need:

  • split o ring. This is the ring that holds your cute keychain. You want it to be VERY sturdy, but most keychain rings are.
  • macrame cordingCotton cording is availability in multiple widths and colors, and is natural, eco-friendly, and quite sturdy and long-lived when used indoors. Any cording that doesn’t stretch will work well for this project, however. This paracord that I’m using, although it’s all polyester and therefore an ecological nightmare, actually makes amazing plant hangers! Whatever you choose, you’ll need 80 feet, or eight 10-foot lengths, for the hanger, and 2 feet, or two 1-foot lengths, for the gathering knots.
  • tape. A lightly sticky tape, like masking tape or washi tape, will help you keep cords together as you knot them.

Step 1: Use a gathering knot to tie the cording to the split ring.

Cut eight pieces of cording, each approximately 10 feet long, and one piece of cording approximately one foot long.

Thread the eight pieces of cording through the split o-ring and center them.

Now, it’s gathering knot time!


With one end of the cord, make a long “u” over the spot where you’d like the gathering knot to be. I like mine just below the o ring.


Keep that “u” in place as you take the other end of the cord in hand and begin to tightly wrap the bundle with it. Each wrap should be just below the one above.


When you near the end of your cord, leave a long tail and tuck the end through the bottom of the “u.”


Put your hand back on the top tail above the gathering knot, and pull on it to tug the “u” bend, and the end of the cord that’s tucked into it, up inside the gathering knot. It’s a bit of a fiddly process to figure out exactly the right amount of strength to use, so don’t feel sad if you have to start this knot over a couple of times.


The finished gathering knot will look like the one above, with the “u” bend pulled inside to the middle. Notice that I left such a long bottom tail that you can still see it, but the knot itself is well-secured.

Trim both tails for a cleaner look.

Step 2: Tie four groups of five square knots below the gathering knot.



Separate out four adjacent cords. The cord on the right will be what the vertical sides of the knots will look like, and the cord on the left will be the center color.


Ignore the fact that I’m not working up by the gathering knot here. It was too hard to photograph single-handed!

Pass the cord on the left OVER the two center cords and UNDER the right cord.


Pass the cord on the right UNDER the center two cords and OVER the left cord. You can also think of this as putting it through that left loop made by the left cord as it prepared to pass over the center cords.


Pull the knot tight.

You can see that the vertical piece is created on the opposite side from where you started–if you lose count, you can use that to tell you what side you’re on. You can also see that the left and right cords switched places.


To finish the square knot, continue from the right. Pass the right cord OVER the two center cords and UNDER the cord on the left.


Pass the left cord UNDER the two center cords and OVER the right cord, or through the loop that the right cord made when preparing to pass under the center cords.

Pull the knot tight. It should tuck up right under the knot above it.


Repeat four more times to make a total of five square knots with that group of cords. Hint: you’ll have five vertical pieces on each side.

Repeat three more times to make a total of four sets of knots around the gathering knot. This will use up all your dangling cording.

Step 3: Make a second set of square knots six inches below the first set.



Measure down approximately six inches from the bottom of the first set of square knots.

From two adjacent sets of square knots, take the two right cords from the left set and the two left cords from the right set. These are the cords you’ll use for your next set of square knots. I like to tape them flat and in the correct order, because at this point it’s very easy to start getting mixed up.


Tie another set of five square knots (one knot starting from the left, then another knot starting from the right equals one set) with these cords.


Repeat with the remaining three sets of cording, until you have four new sets of square knots, each six inches below the first set and made up of cords from two adjacent sets above.

Step 4: Repeat the process 1-2 more times.

You have enough cording to tie four total sets of square knots, each set approximately six inches below the set above. That being said, four sets results in a plant hanger that is quite long, and I prefer to stop at three sets for most of my plant hangers.

Step 5: Tie a gathering knot at the bottom of the plant hanger.



Measure six inches from the bottom of your final set of gathering knots, and tape the cords together at that spot.

Using the second piece of foot-long cording, tie a gathering knot at this tape mark.


Trim the rest of the cords below the gathering knot.


On the left is a shorter plant hanger (three sets of five square knots long) mounted just above the window. On the right is a longer plant hanger (four sets of five square knots long) mounted to the ceiling.

These plant hangers are super versatile, and since you only have to learn two knots, they’re super beginner-friendly, too! Once you’ve mastered this simple version, feel free to fancy it up with more complicated knots.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Inside the Greenhouse of My Dreams

The local university has a teaching greenhouse that's also open to the public during certain hours. I am OBSESSED with it, and during a recent college break my college kid kindly agreed to go there for the hundredth time with me. 

She and I love going places and looking at stuff the most!

My college student kid spent most of her childhood longing for a little pond. I could never quite figure out how to make it happen for her (my newest dream project that I probably won't make is a dry stream bed!), but if you give me a giant greenhouse, I will!

The corpse plant actually flowered this summer!

Someone local clearly has a homemade vanilla extract side hustle going on!


I really want a bird fountain, but we have West Nile in Indiana now, and I have a horror of adding more mosquito breeding spots to my already mosquito-heavy yard.







When I brought the kids here when they were little, they were always SO fascinated by the real cotton plant!



My teenager recently observed that I "don't like to do things alone," and while I was stung by her observation... she's not wrong. The problem is that once upon a time, I had two kids living at home who liked very different things from each other, but quite a lot of the same things as me, so I became used to always having a pal for every activity. Library podcast+craft night? I brought the big kid. Concert? Little kid. Play? Both kids, but the big kid would actually enjoy it. Shopping for novelty holiday items? Little kid. Museum? Big kid. Fancy coffee date? Little kid. Hike around the lake? Big kid.

So now I keep having these fun things that I want to do, but half of the time, when I think about it, there's nobody I know who would want to do the thing with me. I could make some friends, I guess, or wait until my big kid's next college break, or just suck it up and go by myself. So far, I've relied on the second solution, but I know I've got to work my way up to numbers 1 and 3, as well. Because earlier this week, I said to my little kid, "Hey, do you want to come with me to a concert featuring a band that you know nothing about but that I was flat-out obsessed with when I was 12 years old?"

The teenager said something along the lines of "That sounds sick. Bet"--I forget the exact words, but it was some kind of teenager-speak affirmative. I was SUPER stoked, because she is the best concert buddy... but then when I actually looked at the tickets, it suddenly occurred to me that the concert? It's in late August! By late August, this kid's possibly going to be away at college, too! Both of my pals, two-thirds of the people I talk to on a daily basis, are going to be out of my pocket and out in the real world by September.

Do you want to start taking bets on what my mid-life crisis is going to look like?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Homeschool Science: How to Grow a Pumpkin out of Another Pumpkin

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2015!

My kids just harvested the pumpkin plants that they've been nurturing all spring and summer. It was quite an exciting achievement for them, and even more so because they've actually been following this process for almost a full year now. 

Almost a full year ago, they first picked out some organically-grown, heirloom pumpkins, and these newly harvested pumpkins came directly out of the body of those. It was a fascinating process, a pretty easy way to grow pumpkins, and a great way for a kid studying botany to follow the life cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan. 

Here's what we did: 

1. In the fall or winter, choose your pumpkins. Have the kids look for organically-grown, locally-raised, heirloom pumpkins. We found ours about this time of year--I can tell, because the kids drew Jack-o-lantern faces on them in Sharpie, since of course we weren't going to cut them. 

2. Store them all winter. I don't have any great tips for this, and our own storage didn't go perfectly. The kids had chosen several, and we kept them all winter on our nature table. Every now and then, I'd walk by and notice that a pumpkin was starting to rot, and so I'd toss it out in the bushes for the chickens to eat. Now that I think about it... THAT'S why we have two volunteer pumpkin plants in those bushes this year! We actually got loads of pumpkins from those two vines! 

This winter, I plan to store our pumpkins in our root cellar. We'll lose the opportunity to have all those conversations that naturally occurred as the sight of a pumpkin caused a question to pop into a kid's head, but more pumpkins should survive the winter that way. 


3. In the spring, cut them open and fill them with dirt. Set up a work space outside, give the kid a knife, and have her cut open the top of her pumpkin. Note all of the seeds inside, chat about it, remove a seed for dissection and study under the microscope, etc. 

Have the kid fill her pumpkin all the way to the top with good-quality potting soil, then water it. 

These pumpkins are a little tricky to put under grow lights, since they're so much taller than the other seed flats that you'll also have under there, but if you can manage to start them indoors, it'll be well worth it. On the other hand, this year I deliberately had the kids choose small varieties of pumpkins, so that they could plant them directly in the garden and still have time for the pumpkins to mature. 


4. Plant the pumpkins. Have the kid dig a hole deep enough to cover the entire pumpkin, and then plant it. You don't want any pumpkin sticking up out of the soil to rot, but covering it with dirt will allow it to decompose in the ground and turn into lovely nutrients for the pumpkin seedlings.  

5. Cull the weaklings. One of the coolest things about this project is that your kids will see a LOT of pumpkin sprouts coming out of that pumpkin! Even at nine and eleven, my two thought that this was pretty awesome. 

Of course, they'll have to continually pinch off the weaker ones--I had mine pinch off half of the seedlings at a time, every time, until they were left with one lone winner. 

This step does take supervision. My younger daughter accidentally pinched off her best seedling pretty late in the game, and ended up not getting a pumpkin at all from that particular plant. She was SUPER bummed! 

6. Weed and water. For the rest of the summer, the kids can care for their pumpkins just as they do the rest of their garden. This is a great opportunity for a garden journal, or weekly measurement, or other monitoring of the plant's progress. 

7. Harvest. In the late summer or early fall, your kid can harvest her pumpkin, knowing that she not only grew it herself, and not only from seed, but actually from last year's pumpkin that she also picked out. Does she want to make it into a pie, or save it to make a pumpkin next year?

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

There's a New Fence in the Yard

 

Ugh, I wish we'd done this a decade ago.

The other night I was texting back and forth with my college kid, telling her about Luna's day in my care (we had a nice walk, then some breakfast, then I turned my electric blanket on high so she could lay on it all day, then Matt and I took her for a hike and she saw some deer, then I let her try out the new lick mat that I bought her, then she curled up on the couch so I tucked her in with her favorite fleece blanket, etc.), and she accused me of taking the opportunity of her absence to spoil her dog.

RUDE!

Also true. I mean, my kid's not here, so other than texting her all day and Zooming her once a week and playing Stardew Valley together once a week and watching a couple of episodes of Schitt's Creek online together once a week and sending her monthly care packages with curated treats and toiletries and little handmade gifts inside what am I SUPPOSED to do with all this obsessive parent energy?!?

Spoil the one other creature in the family who misses my kid as much as I do, of course!

It's telling, ahem, that I have thought for the entire decade+ that we've lived in this house that a front yard fence would be great for the kids--the whole family, really--and I didn't get around to insisting on it hard enough to make it happen until the kids were grown and the main ones who'll benefit from it are me and the dog.

Whatever. It's here now, and I LOVE it!


The fence guys for sure side-eyed my instructions for the fence, but the lead guy said, "I just do what I'm told and don't ask questions," followed in the same breath by "WHY do you want a privacy fence only on one side of the yard?"

Because this beautiful privacy fence side--



--faces the street! My across-the-street neighbor is delightful, generous, and kind in person, but he's got lots and lots of Trump flags facing our house, and he's got two absolutely GIANT lamps at the end of his driveway that he never, ever turns off and whose bulbs never, ever seem to burn out. They just burn, bright as the sun, all through the night directly into all of our bedroom windows.

As a bonus, this is where I hang all of our laundry to dry, seasonally, and now I don't have to worry that someone will drive by, become consumed with jealousy of my beautiful handmade quilts and clothes, and sneak into the yard to steal them:

The other two sides of the fence are your basic chain link--


--because they face other parts of our property and I didn't want to cut that off visually.

THIS side even faces the south!


I *think* I'm going to move all of those raised garden beds to live next to this fence, although lord knows how I'm going to water them because I already own the longest hose that Menards even sells. 

I'm pretty excited about planning new garden elements to fit in with the new fence. This is my Late Winter of Optimism, my favorite gardening time of the year, before I have to come to terms with the fact that the parts of the property that I can garden on just don't get the amount of sunlight needed to make whatever I want to do possible. If anyone wants to throw out any great gardening and landscaping ideas for me, feel free! I've got an east-facing hill with morning full sun and afternoon full shade that I'd like perennial coverage on to the extent that I never have to risk my life mowing it again, and a south-facing yard that I'd be happy to have raised garden or bed plants in that gets morning full sun and afternoon dappled sun through the branches of black walnut and persimmon trees. 

Tell me daily that berry bushes will not live in either of these spots. I need to hear it every single day or I'll plant them and be sad.

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

WIP Wednesday: Felt and Fences



It's the middle of the week, and here are the projects that I'm in the middle of!

Felt Moveable Alphabet

I saw this TikTok the other day--


--and immediately decided that a felt moveable alphabet would be the perfect next big gift for my toddler niece, AND it would also work to accomplish one of my favorite long-term goals, which is to use up my ridiculously large felt stash!

Here's where I am on that project today:


Cutting and sewing by hand is VERY slow going for me, so it's good that I'm not in a hurry to finish this project. The letters are looking super cute, though, exactly the way I'd hoped, and I love how tactile and sensorial they're going to be with the color and the heft and the stitching and the texture. I'm also considering making some command cards with short words on them in the same font, sized so that my niece can set these felt letters directly on them to spell the words. 

Front Yard Fence


I've been able to read the writing on the wall for years now, with my college-bound kid and the dog she takes on two walks a day.

Gee, I wonder who's going to pick up that slack when she goes off to college?

I've been bitching my head off for years about our need for a fenced-in yard, and I'm not even going to go into how I would have freaking LOVED to have had it when the kids were young enough that I didn't like them playing out there, just one roll down the hill from a road with a high speed limit. 

But oh, well. I will also love it when I can substitute one walk a day for letting Luna out to frolic in what will soon be our fenced front yard!


And crap. Here's me just now noticing, after the fence guys have been out there all morning so I know that part of the fence is mostly done by now, that the gate isn't lined up with the sidewalk?!?

Whatever. I'll just sit planters on that sidewalk, I guess.

Eco-Friendly Kid Craft Book Reviews



I wrote 50% of this article last week, and another 40% of it on Monday, and now I'm just waiting for the public library to give me the last book I need. Hopefully I'm able to pick it up in the next couple of days, or I'll have to come up with a completely different topic and write an entirely new article for Crafting a Green World this week!

Novel and Non-Fiction


Here are the books that I'm currently in the middle of:


Please note that neither of these are the many books in my house that are overdue--those I'm probably going to have to just return and check out again, ahem. 

Deliberately Divided is a study of what little can be known so far about the unethical human experimentation done in New York City by deliberating separating twins and triplets surrendered for adoption, never telling them or their families what had been done, and regularly testing and observing the children for several years afterwards, to what purpose we don't know, because the experimenters never published their results and instead insisted that all records of their actions be sealed until 2065. To me, the idea of separating newborn siblings for no other reason than to study them feels like an unconscionable human rights violation, and I think I'm progressing so slowly through this book partly because it makes me feel so sad.

The Book of Accidents seems, so far, to be a horror novel about a haunted house and maybe a ghostly serial killer? I'm not sold on it yet, but I do usually love horror, so I'll give it a few more chapters before I decide to DNR it.

Teenager's Bedroom


The house I grew up in had paneling on all the walls, and I still really don't know a ton about painting rooms. But I DO know that I hate priming these bookshelves the most!


I'm pretending like someone is going to help me prime the whole top half of the shelves that are too tall for me, and the top half of the walls, too, but in reality I'm going to have to go get the ladder from the garage, unfortunately.

But check out how much whiter the primer is than those nasty walls that I did kind of already know were nasty, but did think were white?!?

And nope, I don't have drop cloths down, because we've booked a company to come and tear up that nasty carpet, fix the floors so that they're actually level, and then install wood flooring. I'm trying to figure out if I should definitely paint the baseboards and door frames now, or see if I can paint them when the workers take them off to do the floors, or do it after they've finished and just hope I'm more careful in here than I was when I painted the walls in the family room, ahem.

Here's to my fond hope that by this time next week, all of these WIPs will be finished and I'll be in the middle of all-new WIPs!

Other than that alphabet, of course. That alphabet is going to take me months to finish...