Leaded Glass Panels Cemented!

Jeff spent a fairly unpleasant week cementing leaded glass panels. While the process isn't particularly difficult, it is messy and smells awful! Again, we're not going to presume to give a tutorial as there are far better resources available elsewhere:

Cementing: How to Weatherproof and Strengthen Leaded Glass Panels
How to Cement Leaded Glass Windows

Jeff's finally finished all 10 panels and the last two are drying. He has also started installing the panels in the cabinet doors. It is a fairly slow process because the mouldings and nails are so tiny, and he's working right next to the glass. He has to be very careful.

The kitchen is done!! It's difficult to get a good picture of this glass because there is a ceiling height cabinet facing it. But now that there's finally glass to prevent dust, we've cleaned out the cabinet and commenced sprucing it up!

Upholstery Fabric Shopping

Sharon dropped by a couple more upholstery fabric stores this week. At Whole 9 Yards, she found Craftsman reproduction fabrics! OMG, too bad she didn't find this fabric before we ordered the living room furniture last fall!

It's beautiful fabric but it costs $84/yard!! (You can buy it here online.) Despite the cost, it would have been pretty tempting last fall because it is SO wonderful!

If only she had found them before she had ordered her new furniture... She is resisting the impulse to buy it to replace the current fabric; it would be impractical to recover all these cushions at this point. At least the color palettes blend well.

Small Projects

As the tour deadline approaches, we have been spending time trying to actually finish projects. All the way. Done.

Today, Jeff started cutting the tiny mouldings for the leaded glass panels. These tiny pieces are very difficult to work with, but hopefully we'll finish the pieces tomorrow.

While he was working on that project, Sharon installed the little metal pulls at the bottom of the shades.

She had Jeff drill holes into the center of the wood strips. Then she inserted them into the shade casing to locate the proper place to put the hole in the fabric.

She used an awl to spread apart the fabric fibers without cutting them so, in theory, they won't fray around those holes.

Then she removed the wood strip and pushed in a larger awl to make the hole a bit larger than the screw hole.

Then she reinserted the wood strip and inserted the screw into the hole and attached the brass ring. Though, the screw is a bit long, so we'll have to locate some shorter screws eventually.

(It took her a while to locate these small, affordable brass ring pulls at tablelegs.com.)

Today, we also stopped by Fabric Depot to look for fabric to reupholster the new morris chair. The fabrics are awful right now; it feels like the 70s are back. We're definitely going to have to expand our search area.

Though, on the bright side, we discovered Fabric Depot carries Toweling. It's been difficult to find attractive glass cloths for the kitchen that aren't stupid expensive. So, we purchased the remainder of what Fabric Depot had in stock in Sharon's favorite print to give it a try. Though, it's odd they sell the fabric in yards, rather than panels, because you end up getting wasted fabric on each end that doesn't sew up into a proper towel with the borders on the bottom edge. Maybe they think that sewers won't care where the borders are placed.

Sharon already washed it up and hemmed up the three towels she could get out of the piece.

We had another big Craigslist day today. We bought a nearly new sliding compound miter saw! Now we just need to invest in a table saw and a router and we can probably start some of our outstanding woodworking projects.

Craigslist Binge

When she's not busy with other projects, Sharon has been busy scouring Craigslist for our "forever" pieces of furniture. We've had a number of "temporary" pieces and some we bought that just didn't work out as we hoped. We're slowly finding good pieces and bringing them home and selling off the temporary pieces—often for the same amount that we originally paid. (Have we mentioned how much we LOVE craigslist!!?)

The week started out with this wicker set for the front porch.

Basement Bathroom Cabinet

We originally planned to install a pedestal sink in the basement bathroom. Then, because there is zero storage space down there, we thought we should try and find a salvaged wood cabinet for the bathroom. We've poked around several salvage places but have had a hard time finding something that was the right size; they were never the right width.

Well, this week we caved and ordered a custom-built cabinet. We got a good reference from Skye over at Rose City Bungalow and we decided getting this project done would be a huge relief.

We obviously ordered it unfinished and we'll finish it with the rest of the woodwork in the bathroom. This however is a project for this summer. Rebuilding the garage is a priority this year. We need some shop space to work on projects! Working in the basement just doesn't work very well. It creates dust and odors in the house and would be so much better in a garage.

After much searching around (4 stores!), we finally found a tiny ¼-inch hemlock moulding to use to hold in our leaded glass panels. Though it's almost too small, and we would have preferred fir to match the rest of the wood—we'll take what we can find.

We guess it's time to do some staining!

We Made Roller Shades!

This project was quite a trial for us! It seemed like everything that could go wrong--did! But, at last, they are done enough to use now. (We still have to add a small brass pull on the bottom and we have to find a secure way to attach the linen to the rod, but they're up and operational.)

DIY Stenciled linen roller shades

DIY Stenciled linen roller shades

We're not going to give a tutorial for how to make roller shades because there are already other excellent websites that do it.
Sewing 101: Roller Blinds

1959 instructions to make your own fabric roller shades

Update way later, because apparently my earlier links no longer work. This was the best description I've been able to find to show the process:

DIY Roller Shade

We will, however, include information about what worked and what didn't. 

Parlor Leaded Glass Complete!!

Woohoo! All four panels of the parlor leaded glass panels are assembled. We still need to cement and clean them and more permanently install them, but we're really excited to have managed to get so much progress done on this major project in the last couple of weeks. Though, it will be nice to have time to do something else again...