How to Remove Wax from Fabric: Two Methods

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2022.

Now that the holiday celebrations have passed, do not look at your beautiful but wax-stained table linens and despair! 

It's possible to remove most candle wax from most fabric, even if your candle wax is highly pigmented, and even if your fabric is precious and delicate. Below, I'll run you through a couple of different techniques to try, one a little gentler and the other a little more aggressive. As you will likely have expected, the gentler technique has the least cleaning impact but puts the least stress on your fabric, and the more aggressive technique has the most cleaning power but is quite hard on your fabric. 

That's why I'm telling you right off that it might not be possible to remove YOUR candle wax from YOUR fabric. If it's a choice between a squeaky clean vintage table runner that's now faded, with splotchy dye runs, and falling apart at the seams vs. a vintage table runner in good condition with a couple of wax stains, I always choose the method that preserves the item and keeps the patina of a useful life. 

But for now, let's stay optimistic, shall we? 

CAUTION: All of these methods involve the application of heat to your fabric. If your wax is highly pigmented, you run the risk of heat-setting that pigment into your fabric, even if you're able to lift the wax. At the end of my post, I'll also give you a step-by-step method that offers the best chance at removing pigment stains, but messing with vintage fabrics always entails risk of damage. 

Here's the main culprit. It's definitely wax, but I don't know what kind. It's melted completely through the batting of this table runner and is also visible on the back. By the feel of it, there also seems to be quite a bit of it in the batting inside the table runner. I know the front and back of this piece are cotton, but I don't know the fabric makeup of the batting.

Method 1 (The Gentler Method): Blotting Paper and an Iron

Because we don't actually live in the Victorian times, alas, substitute white tissue paper, an unbleached paper towel, or even a clean piece of typing paper for the blotting paper. 

Fold one of these items a few times until it's fairly thick, then place it directly under the stained part of the fabric. Put another piece of paper directly on top of the stain, and hold a warm iron to it for a couple of seconds. Lift up the iron and give a little peep at the paper.  

The idea here is that you'll melt the wax using the least possible amount of heat. As the wax melts, it will be absorbed by the paper, allowing you to eventually lift the entire stain out of your fabric. 

You'll have an easier time with this method if you know the type of fabric and the type of wax you're working with. Different waxes have different melting temperatures, and so do different fabrics! Cotton, for instance, can easily stand up to an iron temperature hot enough to melt pure beeswax, but I'm not so certain about polyester. If you're lucky, perhaps you've only stained your vintage polyester table runner with soy wax, which has a much lower melting point. 

I'm pretty certain that my own vintage table runner is cotton (although, to be fair, I'm less certain about the batting...). My guess that the wax was plain old paraffin, however, is definitely incorrect. The melting point of paraffin is barely higher than that of soy, but even taking a gamble and turning the iron up to high, I lifted practically nothing of this wax. It even still felt hard to the touch!

 

Method 2 (The More Aggressive Method): Boiling Water

If you've ever used my method of removing wax from container candle jars, you know that boiling water is the quickest and easiest way to lift wax from a surface. 

The problem is that while a glass container can definitely hang out in a pot of boiling water without damage, your fabric might not be so sturdy. Hot water can cause vintage dyes, in particular, to bleed, a situation that might result in a fabric that, while wax-free, looks a LOT worse than it did with the wax on it! 

Proceeding with great caution, then, boil a kettle of water. Set up a portable drying rack to suspend the fabric over a surface you're not afraid to get melted wax or boiling water on (I vote for your driveway or the sidewalk!), then pour a stream of boiling water directly onto the stain. 

Your goal here is both to melt the wax with the boiling water and use the momentum of that stream of water to carry the melted wax through your fabric and out the bottom. This is a good method for my vintage table runner, in particular, because I can feel that there's even more wax clumped in the batting between its two cotton layers. 

And this is the method that worked for me! I still don't know what type of wax was on the table runner, but the boiling water carried it completely away. 

But remember when I cautioned you about pigments possibly being heat-set into your fabric using either of these methods? Yeah, the boiling water carried away all the wax, but it left a yellow stain. I'd be happy, regardless, because the stain is much less conspicuous than the wax, but I have a couple more stain-fighting tricks in my arsenal.

 

Bonus Method for Removing Wax Pigment

If your fabric survived a hot iron or boiling water, it's probably going to be fine with this method, but proceed cautiously and use your more conservative judgment, regardless.  

Wet your fabric, then use your finger to rub this a really high quality stain remover into the stain. Do a quick wash on warm as soon as you've rubbed the stain solution in, then pull your wet fabric out of the washing machine and give it a look over. If it's still stained, rub in a little more stain solution, and then use your finger (you can use a glove if your fingers are tender, but I hand-wash dishes in practically boiling water daily without gloves, so...) to massage in a tiny bit of sodium percarbonate. Sodium percarbonate is an oxygen bleach that's generally color-safe, but still, this is a more aggressive technique, so be careful. 

Again, do a quick warm wash as soon as you've applied the stain solution and sodium percarbonate. And again, pull the wet fabric out of the washing machine as soon as the cycle's complete and give it a look over. 

If it's still stained, get your portable drying rack back out and set your fabric somewhere sunny for the afternoon. Be careful if there are other, vivid colors on the fabric that you don't want to fade, but otherwise, sun bleaching is extremely gentle on all types of fabric. 

And, as I can attest, since it was approximately 20 degrees out when I sun bleached my table runner, you can sun bleach stains away even when it's below freezing outside! Your fabric will end up iced over... and stain-free!  

I hope this assortment of methods inspires you to use all of your beautiful linens and quilts and table runners and napkins and doilies and such the way they were meant to be used, instead of hiding them away to save for a day that may never come. When I die, I don't know if my kids will even want these precious vintage fabrics that I treasure so much, but I do know that they're more likely to want them and treasure them if I actually use them, sewing them into the memories of their happy childhoods.

How to Clean and Refurbish Old Wooden Building Blocks

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Wooden building blocks are an heirloom-quality toy... IF you treat them correctly. 

Which my children did not do! 

For at least a full decade, I collected--and created!--wooden building blocks for my two children. For that same amount of time, my kids played HARD with their blocks. These kids built with them inside and outside, in the sand and snow and mud. They painted them and printed with them, mixed them into potions and put them into slime. They forgot them outside, spilled juice on them, and absolutely loved them dearly. 

And it shows! 

One of my teenagers is weeks from moving off to college. I'm helping the other prep their long-disused playroom into a new bedroom that she won't have to share with her sister during college breaks. This means that I've had to finally start confronting all of these childhood toys that are no longer played with. It's time to decide what the kids want to keep for posterity, what they want to donate, and what we might want to upcycle. 

Regardless of what choices we make for my kids' HUGE stash of old wooden building blocks, they all still have to be cleaned and refurbished first. One can't simply toss blocks sticky with old slime into storage, or donate muddy blocks, or upcycle blocks stained with who-knows-what-please-don't-tell-me.

Perhaps you, too, have some old blocks that you'd like to make look new again. Perhaps you've obtained some blocks of uncertain provenance, and you want to make sure they're clean and safe to play with. Or perhaps you've bought some scraps or seconds that you want to ready for play. 

Whichever it is, here's how to deep clean wooden building blocks and simple wooden toys. Here's how to refurbish them, and even how to polish them up so they look beautiful and fancy and like the high-quality heirlooms that they are. 

To completely deep-clean and refurbish most wooden building blocks and toys, here's what you'll need:

• cleaning solution. I hate that I love Go Clean Co.'s homemade all-purpose cleaner so much. I used to be a straight up vinegar-and-water gal. That first wave of the pandemic got me panic-cleaning with a lot of less-natural cleaners, and I haven't yet entirely weaned myself off of them. In particular, that Tide+water+bleach combo is SUCH a dang good degreaser and stain remover--ugh! For a much more natural cleaning solution, sub your favorite natural laundry detergent for the Tide, especially if you think it does a good job fighting stains without a lot of extra spot treatment. That's why my frenemy Tide is such a solid all-purpose cleaner! Unless your building blocks have been through some shocking scenarios quite recently, they shouldn't need the addition of a disinfectant.
• large storage bin.
• large blanket.
• sandpaper. Moving through the different levels of sandpaper annoys me. Fortunately, 150-grit sandpaper is rough enough to remove most stains and marks with not too much elbow grease, while leaving the surface smooth enough for play.
• wood polish (optional). This isn't necessary to refurbish your building blocks, but it does make them look even more high-quality and feel that much more luxurious.

Here's how to clean up and refurbish the dingiest of building blocks!

 

Step 1: Sort the winners from the losers.

If your building blocks are well-loved, and/or consist of hand-me-downs, thrifted finds, and scraps or seconds, first sort through them and see what blocks actually deserve the spa treatment, and what blocks may just want to move on with their lives. 

My own losers' pile consists of blocks that have large knots or other flaws, oddly-shaped seconds that look more like scrap wood than toys, and the occasional piece that's clearly part of some other toy set, like wooden railroad tracks, that we didn't keep or never owned. 

My kids loved and played with all these blocks just the same as they did with their "nice" blocks, but there's no need to store them for future play. Instead, I'll keep some for woodcarving or other craft projects, and we'll roast s'mores over the rest. All the rest of the blocks that you want to keep, upcycle, or donate should be cleaned. That's the next step!

 

Step 2: Wash those filthy blocks.

As you can see, you can wash even blocks that have been painted. You can wash natural blocks like tree blocks, even ones with the bark still on. Vintage blocks are washable just like new blocks. You can even wash carved wooden toys, like peg dolls and stackers. 

The only blocks that I do not put into the communal wash solution are the ones that we've already highly embellished. These consist of blocks that my children painted as "art blocks," blocks that I've decoupaged with paper or fabric, and blocks that we've wood burned and stained. I hand wash each of those blocks individually with regular dish soap. 

The cleaning solution is dead simple. All you need are a small amount of stain-fighting, degreasing laundry detergent, and lots and lots of hot water. Also remember that a little bit of laundry detergent goes a LONG way, especially when you don't plan to rinse. Avoid oily additives like tea tree oil, because the goal is to get these blocks squeaky clean with no residues. 

Soak the building blocks in the cleaning solution for a couple of hours. Stir them around every now and then to make sure all the blocks have their turn getting nice and clean. Do NOT soak your blocks for several hours, because water and wood aren't actually friends. An old plastic tub works great to hold everything. Although don't do what I did and add so much water that you can't lift it back up to the sink to drain it. SIGH!

Dump the clean blocks out on an old blanket (or the back side of a vintage He-Man bedspread, ahem...) and let air dry.

 

Step 3: Sand stained or marked blocks.

To clean up blocks that have an old yellowed finish, or are stained or marked, sand them with 150-grit sandpaper. You can also sand the blocks to remove unwanted paint or varnish, although PLEASE use lead-safe practices for this! Use a palm sander to speed up the process. 

When I'm sanding blocks to refurbish for more block play, I also round all corners and edges on each block. I don't know why historical children got to play with so many pointy things. Today's toddlers prefer to keep all their eyeballs intact, thank you!

 

Step 4 (optional): Polish with a natural wood polish.

When I'm refurbishing blocks for more block play, I often paint them and seal them. But there's a lot to be said for providing children with simple, natural, unfinished wooden blocks as well as brightly painted ones! Kids don't always need every single sense stimulated to the max, and wood is already so beautiful on its own. If you leave your blocks unpainted and unvarnished, a nice way to shine them up and make them look marvelous is simply to polish them with a natural wood polish. Your clean and dry blocks can now be stored as heirlooms, embellished and upcycled into fun, new playthings, or donated to someone who will love them all over again.

How Much Foaming Soap Can One Reasonably Have, and Why Do I Keep Wanting to Do Hipster Things with Mason Jars?

I made a few new batches of DIY foaming soap, and I'm so pleased that I took that break from eating cookies, drinking eggnog spiced with rum, and working crossword puzzles that I had to photograph my glowing accomplishment!

Don't let's talk about the facts that 1) making said batches of soap took less than five minutes, and 2) I've nevertheless been putting the chore off since late November.

About the time of year that I baked the holiday season's first batch of sugar cookies... Coincidence, I'm sure.

These Mason jar foaming soap dispenser lids are still working great, and because I'm currently obsessed with consumer math I did the calculations to figure out I'm using approximately $1.29 worth of Dr. Bronner's soap in that pint Mason jar. I'd be spending $3.50 more to buy that same amount of Method foaming soap, times the three sinks in our house, so I suppose that's more than worth the less than five minutes that it takes to make a few new batches of homemade foaming soap every few weeks!

I mean, at least for me. Do y'all get excited about saving $10.50 on soap, or is that weird?

Speaking of things that I shouldn't get excited about, please tell me that I do NOT need the following products that I also want to make from Mason jars:

I mean, we use a spoon for honey, nobody's making more lemonade or cocktails than we can drink in one sitting (if you've never made this strawberry lemonade before, go make it and then reassure me that your family, too, emptied the blender within minutes), and I'm sure not INFUSING anything, but... Mason jars!

Honestly, though, considering we drink out of our Mason jars as well as use them for food storage, all our Mason jars already have jobs and don't even really need to be turned into syrup infusers or more foaming soap dispensers. What I REALLY need are attachments that will allow me to turn vintage soda bottles into useful stuff. Let me know if you see THAT unicorn out in the real world!

I Made our Dry Erase-Boards Look Like New, Because of Course I Did

We haven't used much of these little dry-erase boards lately, but for much of a decade we used them constantly:

Here's Syd learning how to read in 2013. Look at how clean that dry-erase board is!

Here we are playing Compound Sentences against Humanity in 2015.

Here's Will writing a letter to Uncle Mac in 2012. He's since died, which is almost the worst thing that has ever happened, and I'm so pleased that I have a picture of this letter to him.

Here the kids are learning how to square binomials in 2017. Look at how dirty that dry-erase board is!

As of last week, then, our dry-erase boards looked like this:

It took rubbing alcohol, a soft cloth, and about five minutes to turn both dry-erase boards back into this:

Doesn't that make you just sigh a happy sigh?

DIY: Rainbow-Painted Pegboard To Organize a Teen Crafting Space

Will can occasionally muscle a puzzle onto the kids' shared playroom table, but mostly it's Syd's domain, held by the simple means of attrition. How can a kid stretch out a 1,000-piece puzzle or a coloring book and her pencils when another kid already has the entire table covered in fourteen different slime recipes, all halfway done and half-spilled across each other? And the one bit that doesn't have slime has Perler beads and polymer clay AND a bunch of paint tubes and a wet canvas?

It's madness, and hugely messy, but Syd adores her space, and spends much of each day at that table, listening to audiobooks or YouTube video tutorials of even more weird crafts, crafting her heart out and happy as a clam.

Last summer, in an attempt to contain at least some of the mess (and, more importantly, to keep Syd off of MY work table as much as possible!), I created a couple of giant pegboard organizers for the walls adjacent to that table.

I bought a small and a large pegboard, and taped them into seven sections--the best thing about pegboard is that you can just count holes to make your measurements. The green stripe is going to be slightly narrower than the others, though. That is never not going to bother me.

If I had this project to do over again, I think that I would have bought real paint. They have these "sample" sizes of paint that you can buy that are like just a cup's worth; those and small paint rollers would have been soooo much easier to use, and I wouldn't have had to do so much taping off.

Oh, well. With the spray paint that I used, I had to tape off the area that I wasn't painting, for every single stripe, and it was terribly tedious:

And it got spray paint overspray all over the driveway, but y'all know that has NEVER been something that I've been concerned about.

I think it turned out quite lovely, even if my poor photography skills mean that you can't see how nice the purple stripe looks. Bossy blue washes out shrinking violet!

Matt mounted the pegboards for me, and the next step of the process involved more purchases than I prefer, and the revelation that there exist in the world TWO DIFFERENT SIZES OF PEGBOARD HOLES. So there we went, returning half our purchases and trading them in for a slightly different size.

We've actually had this setup in place for almost a year now, and while it doesn't look as tidy as I'd dreamed, it does contain the mess and chaos and nonsense and keep it off the table and the floor... mostly:

She's organizing her glitter stash in rainbow order, obviously.

That right there is everything that you need to make slime or polymer clay creations, or repaint Monster High dolls or squishies.

Next up: wouldn't it be nice to organize and contain all of the American Girl doll mess and chaos and nonsense?

My Kid Made Soap All By Herself

I mean I was there, obviously, talking her through it, but from start to finish, my kid's hands were the only ones to touch this entire batch of cold-process soap.

Imagine. Eleven years old, and she can already make her own soap from scratch! Can you think of a more authentic homeschool credential?

To be fair, there was an actual academic reason to set the child up to make cold-process soap. Syd and I are studying the history of fashion together this year, and it's mentioned (although I'd loooove to see the primary source...) in our textbook that the Celts introduced the Romans in Britain to both soap and pants.

I'll be teaching Syd how to sew leggings after Christmas, but way back in September I taught her how to make soap. It's what a good little Celt knows how to do, you see.

We used an easy beginner's recipe, mostly coconut oil and olive oil in simple ratios, something that you'd have to work hard at to screw up.

When you're just pouring distilled water and measuring oils, you don't have to wear any protective garb:

But when you're ready to get the lye out, on go the goggles, the breathing mask,  AND the rubber gloves!

You can see that she's wearing long sleeves, as well, in this photo--

--although she's not in this one:

Her gloves went almost up to her elbows, so when she got overheated in our early-autumn kitchen and wanted to change, I let her. Probably a mistake, but she didn't receive any chemical burns, so there you go.  I wish I could find kid-sized lab coats for a reasonable price somewhere!

She stirred the lye to dissolve it into the distilled water (you always pour LYE into WATER, never water into lye!)--

--then took its temperature. It is hot, because yay for exothermic reactions!

I didn't photograph the oils for some reason, but imagine them warming on the stovetop, and Syd moving from checking the temperature of the lye water to checking the temperature of the oils, waiting for them to approximately match.

When they do, the fun begins! She poured the oil mixture into the lye water, then blended and blended and blended:

I had previously dug up some of last season's Girl Scout cookie boxes (I keep the empties as much as I can for projects, because it's important to Use Resources Wisely!), reassembled them, and taped them back up, so here Syd is pouring her soap into the Girl Scout cookie boxes,  standing up inside a larger box, to serve as her soap molds:

When the soap has cured enough that it's solid and able to be cut, Syd extracted them from their molds--

--and cut them to size!

I had a half-batch of soap to cut and trim, too:

That wavy knife makes everything cuter! The soap should cure for a few more weeks after it's cut, and even then, the longer it cures, the harder and longer-lasting it will be.

Soapmaking with children is an enrichment activity that can serve all kinds of studies. When the kids were little, they made simple glycerin soaps, and even laundry soaps, as a practical life activity, and an exercise in measurement and a practice in philanthropy:

• kid-made glycerin melt-and-pour soap
• kid-made laundry soap

That latter tute actually reminds me that we haven't made homemade laundry soap since moving into our new house! As you can tell in that post, my process was quite organized, and without that same scaffold in the new house to remind me, it just slipped my mind. 

Mental note to make time this winter break to make laundry soap!

If you're studying history, then hopefully you'll run into the Celts, because they're a fascinating people. We studied the Celts back in April of last year--most notably, by painting ourselves in wool and then having a giant battle with the Romans over the sheep that we'd been stealing--but here are a couple of other resources on my radar for studying the Celts:

• Celtic knot templates. These could be coloring pages, but you could also use them as templates for shrinky dinks or clay.
• BBC Celts. The BBC Schools website is great for any topic that affects Great Britain. They have plenty of information about the Celts, as well as several hands-on activities for enrichment.

And, of course, if you're making soap with kids, you'll surely want some more interesting soapmaking resources!

• Explode Ivory soap. This is a fun rainy day activity, and perhaps an interesting tie-in to a consumer science study.
• Felted wool soap. The kids and I have felted wool around rocks and wooden Easter eggs before, so I know that it's a great kid-friendly activity!
• Paint with bubbles. This is a way to get younger kids involved, but even my 11- and 13-year-old still love sensory activities like these.

Here are the books that Syd and I explored as part of our soapmaking study. Some are more on my level and some more on hers, and I have some bookmarked recipes still to try out in several of these!

• Homestead Blessings. This DVD is kind of amateurish and they don't use safety equipment (gasp!), but it's still helpful to see the process of soapmaking from start to finish. Just wear goggles, though.
• Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life. I like to learn more about whatever the kids are studying, so this history of our conception of "dirt" in our cultures was super interesting.
• The Natural Soap Chef. Here's one of the books that Syd looked through to find the recipe that she wanted to use. I still have a couple of recipes bookmarked in here!
• Handmade Soap Book. Here's another good one for recipes.
• You Wouldn't Want to Live Without Soap! The kids both love this series, and I'm often surprised about how frequently they have a title suited to something that we're studying.

I Figured Out the BEST Way to Clean Glass Bottles, and Surprise, It Requires Power Tools!

First, some news:

News Update #1: Crafting a Green World has been sold, and so I am no longer its editor. I might write a post a week or so for the new iteration of Crafting a Green World, or I might not--in other news, negotiating sucks and I hate it. I do love being paid, though, which is now not happening, so this is as good a time as any to remind you about my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop and that if you shop on Amazon using my Amazon Affiliate links--why, look! Here's one now!

--I get paid a miniscule percentage of that sale, but hey, every nickel shifted my way from Amazon is one more nickel towards my kids' ballet classes and horseback riding lessons.

The upside is that I've finally discovered that what I actually needed in order to consistently work on my novel-in-progress was actual dedicated writing time, and so using my formerly CAGW writing time as novel writing time has been excellent.

Which leads me inevitably to...

News Update #2: I'm on a roll with working on my novel, so of COURSE my laptop died. The computer repair shop says the motherboard stopped working, and the laptop is under warranty so Dell says they'll fix it... in 10-12 business days, not counting transit time. Many men have mansplained for me not to worry, Little Lady, your computer's memory is fine and so you'll still have your novel and all of your photos when it comes back, but in my 40 years on this planet I have learned some distrust, let's say, for the patriarchy, so all I'm gonna reply is a disenfranchised sort of "we'll see."

And that's why today's post is 1) not a continuation of my Greece vacation, on account of all of my Greece photos are on my laptop with a dead motherboard, and 2) concerning a subject that normally I'd be writing about on Crafting a Green World, because I'm not writing for Crafting a Green World right now, and although I'm negotiating (shudder), I'm not holding my breath that I'll be writing for Crafting a Green World again, so why sit on a post that I've researched and am ready to write?

If I do write for them again I'll probably wish I'd sat on some posts and had them researched and ready to write, but whatever. Live in the moment, Y'all!

Anyway, y'all know that I have been trying to find meaningful uses for a neverending supply of vintage glass bottles pretty much since we moved into this house. It was about a week afterwards that the kids and I discovered that the drive-in next door apparently spent the 1960s and 70s dumping its trash into the back of the woods, and man, if you went to the drive-in in the 1960s and 70s, you sure as hell drank a lot of beer and soda!

None of them, not even the perfect Coca-Cola bottles, are worth more than a couple of bucks, and the vast majority of them are worth absolutely nothing, but still... I can't put them in the recycling, because if they're not soda-lime glass, they won't go through the equipment correctly. And I CANNOT toss them in the trash, because then they'll just live forever in someone else's dump instead of my own.

So yeah, I hoard them. One day I'm going to get over my fear of being axe-murdered and put them on Freecycle, but today is not that day.

To make the thing a little more annoying, even if I do want to clean up some of the nicer bottles to display or maybe even sell, it's ridiculous, because they've spent 40-50 years outside in the woods, and so they're dirty and gross and need a good scrubbing inside and out. I broke my heart trying different methods to get them clean, always coming back to the need to scrub each one by hand for a million years...

Until Matt thought of the solution. It looks like this:



This is a cordless drill with a paddle bit attached, and to that paddle bit Matt has duct taped a bottle brush. Here's a closer look at the sophisticated join:

Yes, I love it, but I do want you to notice that he used not the regular duct tape, but the more expensive gold duct tape that I bought for making Spartan armor.

That, my Friends, is all you need to do this:

Thanks to Syd for the excellent photography. No thanks to anyone in the family for not helping enough with the dishes.

You put a squirt of dishwashing soap into the bottle, then some water. Then you insert the bottle brush and use the drill to scrub that baby OUT!

Soap will fly everywhere if you do, but you can also scrub the outside with the same set-up:

See the soap flying everywhere? Worth it!

It used to take FOREVER--seriously, I promise you it took forever--to scrub one bottle, but yesterday I did seven of them, timing myself with the oven clock, and my average was five minutes per bottle for the whole process, including rinsing it out afterwards.

If you're dealing with vintage bottles that have been exposed to the elements, this will not make them perfect. Nothing will do that. They won't have degraded, because they'll never degrade (which is why you want to keep them out of the waste stream as much as possible), but the sun will have done weird things to them, as will the soil, as will the 40+ years of temperature fluctuations and freezes and thaws. If I want them to look as nice as possible I will then fill them with straight vinegar and put them in a bucket of straight vinegar and leave them to soak for at least a day.

I didn't do that for these bottles, though, because I'm probably just going to paint them. Still, don't they look very nice?





Some will be cut and turned into candles, because I've also taught myself how to cut glass bottles in my CAGW-free time, but for most, I have this weird idea for painted bottle candle holders that I'm playing with...

...so stay tuned!

A Children's Bedroom Update: Work in Progress

While the kids were at camp, you might think that I'd be in high gear prepping for our Greece trip, or perhaps whittling down my note-book-sized to-do list, or maybe even chilling out in bed with Netflix and ice cream.

Yeah... no. Instead, I decided that it was the perfect time for another bedroom revamp. The last time I've done anything with the kids' bedroom was when they were at camp two years ago and I ripped out the giant closet in their room to make a nook the perfect size for their bunk bed.

It was a big improvement at the time, but even then it sorely needed painting, and the walls were uneven and unappealing, and two years' worth of clutter and treasures and candy wrappers have since built up and been stuffed into drawers and bins and behind bookshelves every time the kids "clean."

So that's where I spent much of my five days--moving furniture, sorting stuff (so many candy wrappers. So many rocks!), spackling things, taping off, painting walls, visiting Menard's, visiting Menard's again, moving the furniture back, hanging all the kids' pretty treasures, and vacuuming about every five minutes.

The bedroom is by no means finished--Matt is right this second on his way to Menard's yet again to buy the materials to make a platform that will loft the bunk beds a little, and I need to sew curtains, and then after the bed is lofted we have a whole slew of other pretty things to display, and then we can figure out the outlets--but it was finished enough that we could pick up the kids from camp this morning, bring them home, and surprise them with what is practically a brand-new bedroom:



I'm surprised every time I do it by what a world of difference a fresh coat of paint makes. The kids' room, like the rest of the house, hadn't been painted since before we'd bought it, but while the rest of the house still looks okay, their walls had gotten pretty bad. Inspired by Will's collections of dragons and swords and Syd's collection of magical ponies, we were going for a vaguely medieval castle look, and so chose to repaint their room in grey. I've heard that grey is the worst for looking different in different lighting, and that's true, because this grey actually looks lavender in the morning sunlight, but lavender is also a lovely color, so there you go.



Will has been longing for a place to display her sword collection ever since she got that first one, so this was a priority. She's got a couple of kid-made swords (including this Minecraft one!), to add, but she'll have plenty of room on this wall to expand her collection.



This top shelf had been crowded with just everything--treasure boxes, more boxes filled with rocks, a couple of canisters filled with more rocks, fancy hats, tons of empty wine and beer bottles (fun fact: the kids collect interesting wine and beer bottles; Matt and I basically let them choose our alcohol based on the bottles that they like), and some old candy wrappers. You couldn't see or appreciate anything, and there was nothing on the walls.

I moved everything around, severely edited that bottle collection (they can surely get more!), and chose to display here just a few favorite things: Will's fencing mask, a couple of souvenirs from a past trip to France, Syd's crown from her first Trashion/Refashion Show, a dragon from Will's vast collection, two fancy masks, and a perfectly preserved butterfly that Syd found lying dead in the grass one day.



I gave this stained glass dragon to Will for Christmas, and only now found a place to hang it for her.



This is Syd's side of the dresser, and the shelves where I removed hundreds of candy wrappers and neatly rearranged the remaining treasures. Now Will has a full shelf for her dragon figurines, Syd has a full shelf for her treasure boxes, and there's still room for Will's Waldorf doll, her horseback riding trophy, and a few more containers of rocks.

Syd has her photo album, camera, bush knife, and ballerina doll in her basket, her solar lantern next to it, and her Nutcracker posters above it. The kids need to help me put some of the stuff back on their shelves, because I forgot who many of the little figurines and random bits and bobs belonged to, and you can tell that we deeply need those curtains that are on my to-do list.

There are still other plans to come--I'm refinishing their light switch cover and a couple more picture frames, and after the bed is lofted Matt is going to add shelves, and wire the room for more outlets, and we can mount the artwork that the kids want next to their beds--but an hour after arriving home from camp, the room makeover has already had one big payoff:



Toys that had been forgotten about are once again revealed!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Spring Cleaning

It's Spring Cleaning Week over at Crafting a Green World, so I celebrated with redos of my favorite recipes:

two-ingredient beeswax wood polish

and homemade laundry soap

Right now, we're in a fortunate cleaning groove here at home--I tidy up everyone's mess once, in our first break from schoolwork, and then for the rest of the day I point out each mess to the person to whom it belongs for tidying. The kids do a full load of dishes, and Matt does another after dinner. The kids also take down the dirty laundry and take out the recycling; I do laundry off and on, and Matt does more on the weekends, and sorts the recycling that the kids have put in the garage. I make most dinners each week, and try to make at least some food for other meals or snacks--baked goods, overnight oatmeal, tofu salad, etc.--and Matt makes maybe one dinner, and some nights we eat sandwiches or frozen pizza.

The key is that all this nonsense has to be done Every. Freakin'. DAY. If I'm busy one day and don't get the house tidied, then I guarantee that the next day, the mess will be too great to tidy in a reasonable amount of time, and the clutter will overpower all humans until the weekend. If I don't remind the kids every single time they've made a mess, they'll never clean it up. If two loads of dishes don't get done every single day, the sink will never be clear of dishes, probably for weeks. If I don't get into the kitchen to cook, we'll blow our budget on take-out pizza. We don't mop enough. We definitely don't clean the bathtub enough. 

And, of course, very, very soon, spring will unfurl and we'll have all-new outdoor chores to add to the daily list, and then nothing will ever be completely cleaned again, for sure.