I’m going to guess it’s age at greater than 75 years.

The stick itself is an unknown hardwood with an unknown finish. The finish might be oil, or it might be age. We’re not sure. It has a snake curling up around the body, and two cut off and polished nails for eyes.

Here’s a picture of the snake.

The first thing was to drill a hole in the end of the walking stick. There is no good way to determine where the center of something that is decidedly not round, nor straight. Dad and I eyeballed it, and drilled the hole. The wood on the inside is a lot lighter, but still reddish.

I made the first peg out of white nylon stock. I turned it to the approximate diameter of the end of the stick, shaped it to fit better, and made a cavity in one end for a cork pad and a hole in the other for an aluminum peg that fits into the hole in the stick. Epoxy the aluminum to the nylon, wait, insert.

It looked horrible- all white and round and modern and not at all hand carved. I carved it down to match the looks better, and tried to paint it a little like wood. I did a terrible job of it, and the paint chipped if you looked at it funny.

Terrible, no?

The second peg was made on the same idea, but out of wood. The stockpile had a pine broomhandle in it, so I cut a section about two inches, made it round and shaped it a little on the lathe, and put the hole in it for the aluminum peg. Epoxied the aluminum in, fit it to the stick, and carved it down fit exactly against the end of the stick in both shape and size. Even though it’s a radically different color, and doesn’t have the patina of the rest of the stick, it looks much better. It also doesn’t have the cork that the other one had.

Prettier, yes?
I may put a finish of oil on it to preserve it, or try to stain it to match. I do not know, and it really depends on how much time I give myself before I leave to college again.

I developed two nearly identical blisters on the insides of my thumbs because of bad hand posture during kali. I have heard conflicting reports on what to do when one gets blisters, so I decided to try two of them.

On my left hand, I drained the blister and trimmed the skin off so that I wouldn’t pick at it. I also washed it out, and made sure to keep it clean. I did this on the night I received the blister. In the following four days, it has healed to a cracked and icky looking scab, and hurts when pressed on.

On my right thumb, I pricked a small hole in the blister a night later, drained it, cleaned it, pressed the skin back, and put a cloth bandage on it, that being what I had around. I made sure to keep it and the bandage clean. It has since healed to a small scab, with the surrounding skin being coarse. The skin over the blister dried and was picked off about three days into the healing process. It doesn’t look bad at all, and doesn’t hurt when pressed.

I believe that my right hand is healing better because the skin protected the soft skin underneath enough for it to heal and that the left hand isn’t healing as well because it wasn’t protected.

In event of me getting two more blisters, I will test the method I used on the right hand against letting it be so that it heals entirely on it’s own.

And a picture to show how big the difference is! (my left thumb is the ‘top’ thumb, and the right is the one that looks fine…)

I do a lot of walking. If you recall, there was a post concerning my bootheels a month and a half ago. I draw your attention to this.

A. Lot. Of Walking.

I was going to get new boots when I kicked the toes of these in. I might have to before I kick the toes in- I might run out of heel…

There are a couple of methods for braiding yarn in- I found the most successful to do the braid one strand yarn, one strand hair, and one strand yarn and hair. The piece of yarn used is twice the length of your hair, so that it is folded over and when it tries to settle out of your hair it gets caught by the braid.

Roots: Divide them into patches however big you want- I recommend smaller patches because they look neater longer and they dreadlock less badly. Do them tightly, but not so tightly that they hurt or give you a headache. You will have trouble doing the back of your head- get someone else to divide the roots at the very least.

Tying things in: make a separate strand of yarn only with whatever you want tied in and leave a bit at the top to tie to your roots above where the braid starts. If you’re using nonacrylic yarn, single knot will do- the yarn will felt together. I do suggest checking on a regular basis to make sure they haven’t gotten loose, especially soon after installation.

Dreadlocking? Yeah, the roots will dreadlock in anywhere between two weeks and a month. When you take the yarn out, pick out the dreadlocking with a comb- do it carefully because if you yank at it it’ll hurt and pull out your hair. Also, when you take it out, you will shed a lot. Do not fear, most of that hair is already shed and was trapped in the braid.

Washing: Wash like normal hair- use your fingertips and rinse thoroughly. I washed mine about every five days. Results may vary for you.

Drying: It’s kind of like washing a sweater- full of yarn and kinda felty. Drying it is the same way- wring it out, run through a towel and then let it drip dry. Depending on how long your braids are, they could be dripping for an hour.

Pictures! Because I’m a narcissistic fool!

This is (obviously) the back of my head, several weeks into my hair being in that style. Most of the braids have settled quite a bit, some of the unacceptably far. You can also see one of the reflectors from one of the additions.

This is the dreadlocking in my forelock braid. About half a inch or so is similar in density to the braid.

This is my hair directly after having the dreadlocking combed out. It is incredibly soft, fluffy and straight. This is also my camera messing with the exposure times and fuzzing things.

Oops: Roomie, who is fantabulous, has a tea boiler. I have a box of eggs.

Mad Science: Tea is basically hot water, right? Heat water, drop in egg, have hard boiled egg for [meal].

Ending well: Of course not. The tea boiler has no controls on it other than the plug. No timer, nor temperature.

Conclusion: It takes slightly longer than 10 minutes to achieve a hard boiled egg, dropping them in is a bad idea- one gets egg drop soup, not a hard boiled egg, and tongs are really useful.

I do not own tongs. Or a spoon- had to borrow Roomie’s, who, unlike me, is prepared to live in real life.

The tea boiler is kinda like a pitcher with a heating element. This is the first egg, surround by egg dropped soup.

The instructions said to let them cool in water. Doing so.

This is the first one again. It didn’t cook completely, but was firm enough to be considered done and it was delicious.

…yep

Here’s them now, and at the end of this year, I will post another picture of them.

Obvious solution: Take the lid off! And so I did. The wires tested continuous from the ring, through the speaker, and to the end of the cable from the shell. There was a resistance (of about 30 ohms? If I recall correctly.) across the speaker, indicating that it was still functional, not just passing current. I resoldered the wires to the pads because it looked like the original joints were all cold soldered, which makes for a poor connection.That did not fix the fault, instead isolating he faultto three feet of cable.

Wires always break at the connectors. That’s where they bend. The easiest connector to get to is by the plug. Taking the plug apart revealed nothing useful. More continuity testing revealed that the break was in the actual wire. Cut the wire back and inch, and it works. Reassemble everything in reverse order, with heat shrink tubing, and tada, working headphones.

All pictures are preoperation.

Here we’ve got the pads where the wires connect to the speakers. The blue wire has the best connection of the four because the other three are cold solder joints or have resin caked around where the wire exits the solder, another sign of a bad joint.

This is the inside of the plug. It looks like they filled it with hot melt glue and jammed the stress relief on over it. Crude, and not much better than what I did. I cut the glue off to get to the plug so I could resolder the wires to it.

The wires. The set on the right are all broken. If you look carefully, they are all missing wires from their left half- headphone cables are usually composed of multistrand wires with insulation that burns off when soldered. The left set is perfectly fine. Here, the yellow ones are from the shell/power, red is from the ring, and blue is from the tip of the plug.

I accidentally made a squid today. So here it is.

This last picture is of it before baking, all propped up on foil to keep the tentacles from falling.

I used the probably-no-longer-available SuperFlex Sculpey for it, a blend of the blue and the green. The body is one lump, the fins are pinched out and shaped a little. The tentacles were rolled out of scrap and smoothed onto the body and sealed between them all with a little more scrap. The pads on the two longest are teardrop shapes smoothed on.

I had some scrap left over from the string bag project, so I made a wristband.

Materials: straightened coathanger wire, 1.5 inch wide strapping (enough to go around your wrist twice), pliers of some kind, sewing implements of some kind.

Firstly, bend up the D-rings. Mine are actually rectangular because that is easy. Make them just wider than the strapping, and try to get them the same size. Mine aren’t the same size, but it looks like it was intentional, so’s all good. If you’re making rectangular ones, right angularness is important.

Make a loop in one end of the strapping, tucking the end under up against the two rings. Sew down securely. Try it on and trim excess strapping, keeping in mind that some is needed to put it on. Seal off the trimmed end. The turned under parts should be on opposite sides of the strap.

Decorate, if wanted. I put a stud in.

Pictures!

The obvious answer is to make a new one. So I did! (I could have just sewed the old one back together.)

String bags are pretty easy: They’re 14.5 inches by 18 inches and made out of two panels of cloth sewn together at the sides and the bottom. There are seam allowances not included those dimensions (1/2 inch on all sides, except the drawstring side which gets 1.5 inches.)

Instructions

• Sew the drawstring parts first: Fold top inch over, then fold 1/4 inch under, to make a tube. Pin and sew.
• Sew the other three edges together, right sides together. Iron the seam allowance over to one side, fold cut edges under, sew down to seal.
• Turn right sides out, sew off at a diagonal. Poke a hole in the corner for the strings.
• Finish the edges of the tube by hand, getting the edges turned under and sewed down. I’d recommend doing this part by hand.
• Pull strings through (tie to safety pin, pull.) Tie off at the holes.

Or something like that. I did it differently. Same principles, different execution. Instead of sewing the seam allowances over to one side, I put light strapping down the outside to protect the seam from damage and in the process of doing that, folded the seam allowances under and made the seam a self contained unit.

Because of the way I did the seam allowances, I had to cut the end of the tube free of the seam allowance to tuck it back inside. Then I finished sewing the strapping down over the raw edges.

Pictures and commentary!

The key differences between this bag and the original is that this one is cotton and the straps can’t be untied- I just sewed them to the reinforcing strapping.

…I managed to get pictures of the inside and the outside of the same part of the bag! How odd. Anehweh, in the top picture, the seams on the inside of the strapping can be seen, along with the slightly crude joint at the end of the tube. Below, the much neater outside, with the end of the strapping covering the crudeness visible on the inside.