Cribbage, Anyone?

I love games, and my most reliable partner for games in our house is my son, Quinn. He's 13, which means he's most often inclined to be off in some corner of the house doing his own thing, but almost anytime I ask when I'm home from work, he'll agree to a game.

If we can convince anyone else to join us, we'll usually play Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Uno, Spite and Malice, or Code Names. If it's just the two of us? It cycles among Backgammon, Rummy, Abalone, Boggle, and Cribbage. During isolation, it's been pretty much all just Boggle or Cribbage.

But our Cribbage board was annoying. It's the type where you have to move your pegs around your track twice to finish, and on evenings when we're fading a little, we can honestly forget which round we're on and suddenly have no idea who is actually winning. We decided it would be better to have a board with one, long winding track from start to finish.

So why not make our own board? Looked easy enough, and I can make things.

Of course it didn't go quite as planned, but I like the final result anyway. Behold our new Cribbage board!

Pretty, huh?

Now let me explain what a goofy adventure this turned out to be.

At least as a violin maker I knew I could find a nice piece of wood lying around to work with. I happen to have a small pile of odds and ends that were given to me by a nice wood supplier in Washington state when I was out West for a VSA convention many years ago. Wood that was too thin or didn't have its book-matched partner, etc. I dug around in that pile and found a piece of maple that was never going to be a violin, and made it into a shape and thickness I could use.

For pegs in the board we went to American Science and Surplus and found matching rods of brass, and "music wire" (whatever that might be--didn't come up in music school), and I sawed them into little pieces and polished the ends smooth. (Quinn has barely been out of the house since the pandemic shut everything down back in March. It was strange to wander around one of our favorite stores while wearing masks, but it was also nice to get out and do something purely fun for a change.)

Once I knew the thickness of the pegs we'd be playing with, we decided how we wanted the layout of the track to go. We penciled in spots for drilling, and I hit my drill press. This is where my general lack of patience decided to teach me a lesson. There are 120 holes per player on the board. (Plus a few extra for a tally of how many games each person has won.) The smart thing would have been to poke a hole to mark each spot before trying to drill them, but ugh, that seemed like a lot to do. I thought, eh, how hard could drilling holes in straight lines be?

Ha! After the second hole I just started laughing. The flame in the wood was guiding my drill bit into odd places, and it was beyond my control. After about half a dozen holes I realized I was either going to have to start completely over, or just deal with the bizarre mess I was creating. I decided to plunge ahead with my Cribbage board that with each new hole was looking more and more like the drill press version of a failed test for drunks at a traffic checkpoint. I showed it to Ian and Aden when I came up from the basement, and they both asked what happened. I told them at least no one would ever ask where we bought our new Cribbage board from.

So I pondered the wonky holes for a day and decided that an artistic solution was the way to go. I got out a nice pen and went to work between projects on my bench one day. I created the vine design, and now it looks maybe like it's all on purpose. Quinn looked pleased anyway, when I showed him the finished board. That's all that really matters to me.

I used an old box from a rosin I bought at a violin convention in 2004 (from which the rosin has long ago been used up) to store the scoring pegs. Maybe someday I'll make a case to keep the whole thing together along with the necessary deck of cards, but not now.

Not exactly the kind of project I was hoping to complete during all of our unexpected free time, but still fun. It always feels good to make something. Strangely, of late, I feel busier than ever. Which I don't understand since so many activities were wiped from our calendar. But somehow I'm having even more trouble making time for the things I most want to do.

In any case, one day when we look back on our pandemic days, we'll have a pretty cribbage board made from violin maple to show for it. I love game time with Quinn. That will be part of this whole mess I will be able to remember with nothing but fondness.

Peeps Art

My kids, my mom, and I all have pieces on display in this year's annual Peeps Art show at the Racine Art Museum.  None of us won a prize, but when a TV station interviewed the artist who took first place and asked her what things in the show she liked, she singled out Mona's bird (which got a nice close up).  And this morning my Peeps orchestra was featured in the paper!

I liked all the things we entered so I thought I'd share them here for some pre-Easter fun:

The first person to finish the Peeps Art project was Quinn.  He likes maps and decided to do the United Peeps of America (Land of the Peeps, Home of the Other Peeps).  Note the different types of Peeps for the different oceans.  He also did the map outline freehand (because tracing would be cheating, even though there is no one anywhere who expects a ten year old to draw the U.S. freehand).

Clean Sweep

In recent weeks (months?) the house has really gotten away from me.

I don't think I was mentally built to be a full time stay-at-home parent, but at least back during Ian's two deployments when the kids were much smaller I adapted well enough.  There was no real upside to Ian being away, but there was some satisfaction in staying on top of most of the basic chores while stuck at home.  With another responsible adult around there is always the hope that the other person will do some of what needs to be done and you can sidestep a chore, but when you are on your own you just have to do it.  I had a pretty good system of starting laundry in the morning and folding it all at night, of making meals and cleaning up with a certain rhythm, and keeping things fairly organized and tidy.  When Ian goes away for brief Army obligations now, I still fall back into those old patterns.  But lately my schedule has been rough and my work days long, which means the kinds of things that are important to me in running a house have kind of suffered.

So between Ian having just been out of state for a few days for more Army stuff, and my mom coming to visit soon, I had a lot of incentive to buckle down and try to get the house back in order.  I do what I think of as a Baryon Sweep (which is a Star Trek TNG reference for those who don't try to give house cleaning geeky connotations) where I start at one end of the house and clean thoroughly, pushing misplaced things into the next room until eventually I get to the other end and everything in my wake is clean.

Finishing Touch

I'm suffering the journal paradox at the moment.  I have a lot to write about, but no time to write.  I still need to say something about the violin convention in Cleveland, our trip to House on the Rock over Thanksgiving, and about the election.  But those things take time.

So instead, here is a post about painting my Kitchen Aid!  (Because that's easy, and right now I need something to be easy.)

Box of Violin Making

My latest project!  Behold my new toy!

closed cello box with neck for handle

box open for display

I have a lot of broken things at the violin store that I save for projects.  I've made a bow-quet, a cello lamp, a crayon box, a toy box, various sparkle instruments, ....  I have lots of other ideas that will be fun and interesting if I ever find the time to tackle them, but ever since I opened my store I have wanted to make a display inside a cello about how violins are made.

Perler Beads in High Gear

Our dining room table is usually covered in projects.  We sort through it all periodically when we have guests coming and need the dining table for, you know, dining, but most of the time it's more of a mail sorting station and an art project area.

For the past couple of months it's been dominated by perler beads.  I know I've written about them before, but for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, perler beads are little plastic cylinders that you organize on a pegboard, then iron to melt them together to form a single, flat, plastic piece.  Normally people make junky little things with them that nobody knows what to do with (I have some set aside for coasters), and the loose tiny beads get all over and are unpleasant to step on in bare feet.

My kids started off like everyone else making basic shapes such as hearts or circles, sometimes in patterns, sometimes with random colors.  But then they decided to start using the plastic shapes they created as building blocks for larger things, piecing them together into walls of small structures.  They create accessories for use with other toys like hover-boards or food or things from Minecraft.  Quinn even made all his Valentines out of perler beads for his class this year.

An (Unsponsored) Plug for Home Depot

I don't do sponsored posts, but I don't have a problem with mentioning products or stores by name that I have experience with.  We've had some pretty good experiences lately with Home Depot, and I want other people to know about their kid project program, which is one of the smartest promotional ideas I've ever seen.

Quinn, Mona, and Aden making Thanksgiving napkin holders

On the first Saturday of every month Home Depot runs a free workshop for kids.  They get an apron to keep, a project kit and space to work, and a pin to go with each completed project.  The projects are simple, like a small pin-board or a birdhouse, but they involve wood and glue and a hammer and nails, sometimes a screwdriver, and usually paint.  My kids have been doing this for about a year now.

Cello Lamp!

One of the best parts about having hired Robyn as my assistant at the violin store is that I am free to tackle projects just because I want to.  Having another luthier around who can do repairs has been almost magical.  I can leave a pile of rental instruments on the floor by my bench with a note saying they need to be cleaned up and put away, and when I come back the next day it's happened!  I'm not drowning in work every minute.  Which means now when I have an idea to make something that is purely for fun I can occasionally indulge instead of looking wistfully from the workbench all the time and wishing I could flex more creative muscle.

So I made two things for the new teaching studio space we are expanding the store into just to make it more fun.

Behold the cello lamp!

I wish I did not own as many broken cellos as I do.  Many a sad, sad rental story behind them.  (We no longer rent cellos because my heart couldn't take it anymore and it was getting expensive.)  Anyway, this was a 3/4 size cello with a giant back crack that really couldn't be fixed in any affordable manner, so I glued it shut enough with Titebond and then merged the whole instrument with a $17 lamp I found at Target.  I removed the fingerboard, drilled a hole in the top at the base of the neck joint, and ran the cord up through there and along a channel I cut all the way up the neck.

The only truly tricky part was getting the top piece of the lamp to fit securely at the top of the scroll, and I wound up running a whole extra piece of pipe through it but had to get it bent to the proper angle so it would stand straight when viewed from the side.  Luckily the electrician in the store across the street had a gadget for bending conduit pipes and was able to pop my lamp piece into the correct shape in a matter of seconds.  Anyway, I think it looks super cute, and now this cello gets to live on in some new fashion instead of ending up in a garbage heap (which is too depressing).

My other moment of purely for fun violin store prop creation was my 'bow-quet.'

Most people don't notice right away that all the stems in the vase are actually violin bows.


I have an inordinate number of broken bows that I will eventually think of enough creative uses for to justify keeping them, but this was the first chance I've had to do much of anything with finding them a new use.  My kids want to make bow-quets too with their own flowers, so this summer I might give them each a stack of sticks and a vase and let them go to town.


There were probably wiser uses of my time, but what's the fun of having ideas if you don't occasionally get to try them out?  Besides, it's my name on the window, and if the shop is going to represent me, it needs reflect my personality.  I'm proud of that cello lamp, and the bow-quet makes me smile.  This summer I may buckle down and see if I can finish the coat rack I have in the closet.  It has violin and cello scrolls for the hooks, but I wasn't able to focus enough to get it done when I had the idea for it back when Ian was still deployed in Iraq.  But he's home now!  And surely he wants to use all that Army Major expertise on helping me with yet another goofy project.

(He will, too.  Because he loves me, crazy projects and all.)

Home Depot Fun (Babble)

This post is primarily to give other parents a heads up about something fun to do with your kids that might be available near you.  This is not a sponsored post because aside from the kinds of normal purchases we make there from time to time, The Home Depot doesn’t know we exist.  In fact, we’ve had ups and downs with the one near our house.
But it turns out The Home Depot does something kind of cool!  Another mom who was in my violin store about a year ago told me about it, but today was the first time I was actually on the ball enough to take advantage of the program.


The first Saturday of every month The Home Depot runs a free workshop for kids.  It’s a new project every month, and they supply all the materials and tools and set up a work space with lots of people available to help.  My kids each got an apron to put their names on, and when you finish a project they give you a pin about that project to put on your apron.  When you collect ten you get a special star pin.  We ran into a little girl from Quinn’s class there, and she proudly showed us her collection of more than a dozen pins.

Today’s project was making little race cars.  Quinn was the only one of our kids who resisted going in the first place, but by the time he was done hammering the little nails and putting on all the wheels he was a happy guy.  Quinn hugged that small orange car all the way home.

Next month’s project is a small open box bird feeder with suction cups on it and the kids can’t wait.  The workshop was so much fun I wish I’d managed to get us out there for it a long time ago.  Mona and Quinn wore their aprons around the house all day, and I found myself making the absurd statement, “Take your aprons off before dinner because they might get dirty.”  But then what are aprons for?  I guess today the aprons looked so fresh and pretty it was hard for me not to be a little protective.  I should just let them wear those aprons all the time, though, now that I think about it.

Anyway, I’m always pleased to know about free and interesting activities I can take my kids to, so thought I’d share.  If the idea of watching your kid wield a hammer makes you as happy as it makes me, check it out!

Gimme an O, Gimme a C, Gimme a D... (Babble)

I think most of us, if pressed, would admit to having something we care about enough that it counts as an obsession.  Not necessarily to the point of a disorder, but something we know we attend to in a manner that is out of proportion compared to what everyone else around us seems to do.  I think this tendency can either be exacerbated or broken when one becomes a parent because having children forces you to reexamine many priorities.

I bring this up because I just finished working on my latest stack of photos, which is one of my running obsessions.  Many years ago after college while I was packing to move I began sorting through boxes and boxes of photos.  I was surprised at just how many images were of events that I was sure I would never ever forget, but then I couldn’t even pin down what year they were from.  I love having photos of people and places that interest me, but digging through heaps of pictures in boxes was unpleasant.  I decided right then that if I were going to bother to take pictures I needed to start marking them and putting them in some kind of order.  I went out and bought albums and spent a week sorting through all the pictures and labeling them and putting them where I could find them again.

I became extra diligent about this once I started having children, which is good because I apparently only make one model of kid and their baby pictures are very hard to tell apart.  I also paid attention to all the stories I heard from people who took a million photos of their first child and fewer and fewer of each subsequent child, so I made sure there is an equal number of too many photos of all my kids.  I’m not to the point of doing any kind of attractive scrap-booking or anything that elaborate, but all my kids have labeled and dated pictures in albums, and that makes me feel good.  I’m sure I’m messing other things up, but the photo thing I’ve got down and they can’t accuse me of not documenting their childhoods.

It’s funny to me when I think about how reluctant I was to get my first digital camera.  We bought one on a family trip when my regular 35mm Kodak bit the dust, and from the first shot I realized what an improvement it was.  I remember having the thought that I would miss the surprise of getting my photos developed and seeing what I really had, but from that initial photo of me and Mona where I could look at it right away and know if our eyes were open or the composition was off was terrific.

(Me and Mona in 2005)

I love having access to images (like that one) right on my computer, and that the information about the dates they were taken is so easy to find.  I used to sit with a calendar when I labeled Aden’s baby pictures and try to remember exactly which day we went to the zoo or museum.  Someday I hope to take some time to scan all my older photos into digital form, but that won’t be for awhile.  (That sounds like a good nostalgia project to do when my kids are much older.) 

In any case, I talk to enough other parents about how they never get around to printing out pictures, let alone put together albums, that I always feel a bit self-conscious about my obsession.  It’s just that I know how much I like having real photographs to hold and look at to help me remember things, and I think one day my kids will appreciate being able to flip through whole albums of themselves when they were young.

Anyway, one of the casualties of the readjustment period of having Ian home again was that I got obscenely behind in the whole photograph thing.  I try to be in a habit of emptying out my digital camera about once every month, so that way there isn’t too much to do.  And labeling photos (and sorting out doubles to mail to friends and family) is an easy activity for when I’m stuck in the house.  It’s the kind of project that I can do in the room with the kids while they do their own things and I can stop and start as they need me without a problem. 

But with Ian home I’ve been able to escape the house more, and those stretches of time to do my photo thing kind of evaporated.  So the stack of photos I “needed” to attend to went back months and was probably about seven inches tall.  It’s those moments where I’m drowning in photos that I wonder if it’s worth it.

That’s the thing about feeling a bit obsessed–you can’t just take it or leave it.  The photo thing is not that casual for me.  I can’t leave it.  So I stayed up late and sacrificed my day off for building my own instruments just to get caught up.  I like the feeling of being caught up.  The problem is I seem to choose any number of projects that never feel like they will be caught up, and I then I try to decide if they mean enough to bother worrying about them.

The other big one for me that seems to hang over my head all the time is that I write a letter to each of my kids on their birthdays about what they were like for the past year.  It’s a place to stick all their cutest quotes and record all their firsts and describe where they’ve been, who they’ve met and what they’ve done.  It’s a nice idea, and I like the letters I’ve written and tucked away to give them when they turn 18, but the process got really botched with the deployments.  There just wasn’t enough time for everything when Ian was in Iraq, and the letter project was hit hard.  Several of the letters are in rough outline form with chunks of detail that need serious editing, and it’s something I need big blocks of time to read through and sort out.  I sat down to write Quinn’s latest letter on his birthday this week (my baby is four!) and realized to my dismay that last year’s letter is still a mess.  I thought I’d at least gotten caught up with Quinn, but no.  It’s depressing.

And I know this is a pressure I’ve invented to put on myself, and that no one is requiring this of me, and I could just let it go, but I don’t want to.  It’s something in my head that I care about, and I feel as if with the right determination I could do it.

I wonder why some things we can let go and others we let have power over us.  I used to be particular about setting silverware correctly, but since having kids I don’t care.  I notice when it isn’t “right” but it doesn’t bother me.  Whatever weird arrangements of spoons Mona or Quinn lays out is fine.  Adjusting to life with kids has meant learning to relax my attitude about a lot of things, but the few places left for me to channel my more obsessive energies I am keenly aware of.

Does anyone else out there have obsessive arbitrary projects that they question from time to time?  Or am I just trying to make myself feel better by presuming other people do their own version of this too?  I’m curious to know.

The Small Light Project (Babble)

I really don’t know if this is a good quality or a bad quality, but I get fixated on certain projects and don’t let them go until they are done. It’s tempting to declare this a good thing, but now that my husband’s home and I can see myself partly in his reaction to the things I do, I’m not so sure. 

He was sort of stunned the other night when I took it upon myself to rearrange the attic before going to bed.  Our attic is really like a big closet next to our room, and it’s not like I went all out, but I wanted the things that belonged in there out of the hallway, and at this stage of my life I just can’t stand dumping things somewhere without a plan.  There were about half a dozen large empty boxes piled up making it impossible to put things in a decent place, so I cleared them out and re-stacked the remaining boxes so I could actually get in there and put the stuff in the hall away finally.  It was bugging me, and it made more sense to take ten minutes and get that done than it did to pile up stuff and have it add to a bigger problem later.  Anyway, from Ian’s point of view I looked sort of insane because it was late and I should have just gone to bed.  (From my point of view leaving it until morning meant it wouldn’t happen.)

It’s a good thing he wasn’t around when I worked on sealing the floor.  A few months ago I decided I wanted a few more coats of polyurethane on my bedroom, dining room, and living room floors.  I simply did a small section each night before I went to bed, moving furniture around as needed, and in a few weeks it was all done.  The only flaw in this plan was (and why my husband would have thought this was crazy) is my hair.  My hair is in everything.  I don’t how I’m not bald but my hair is everywhere.  And I’m so, so sorry, but just by reading this post my hair is probably in your house now, too.  Don’t ask me how, it just works like that. 

Anyway, I got pretty good at sanding out bits of my hair that got sealed to the floors as I worked, but I’m sure my DNA is now preserved as part of this home.  That was a nice, satisfying project that kept me occupied for awhile, even if it looked a little nuts to the people who knew I was doing it.

But whenever possible I try to find projects where I get to include my kids.  I’m still pleased with our big clock, and it felt good to put our mark on the new garage.  My latest project has been to solve the problem of the light over the china cabinet area in our dining room.


There is a pretty archway over the top of the built in china cabinet and buffet that was once wired for a light but that spot has been capped over for some time.  A friend checked the wiring and said it could be made to work, but would need a pull chain because there was no decent way to put in a switch.  So for awhile we’ve had bare wires there, which was annoying, and then recently a base with a bulb and chain, but no decent fixture that would work over the bulb.  It’s not an important thing, but that bare bulb kept drawing my eye to it every time I walked into the dining room, and I just kind of wanted that finished already.  We tried different light stores, none of which could accommodate the pull chain for some reason, and after not finding anything I liked for that space I decided the only way out was a crafty sort of solution.

We picked up a six dollar fixture at the hardware store that could be screwed into the base and the kids and I started sorting beads.  We have a ton of beads, and in fact one of the great organizational boons of this house is that there is a butler’s pantry that we use entirely for art supplies.  I love having abundant supplies available in the house so the kids and I can do anything we dream up but that stuff can get so out of hand.  It looked like an artroom dumping ground before.  Now we have it better under control, and that gate leg table from Ikea is awesome because it has six drawers and if we need to open up a surface just for an art project we can.  (Having enough space for our stuff finally has made such a dramatic difference to my sense of peace.)

Anyway, we went through the box of glass beads and picked out all the green and clear ones to match the stained glass in the dining room, plus a few other random colors here and there if the beads were extremely pretty.  It was fun to have Quinn on my lap picking beads out of my hand and telling me excitedly if they were green.  I put Aden to work on stringing some of the beads in an attractive pattern.

After the kids went to bed I struggled with trying to find a workable way to make the bead strands drape around in a nice dangly way, but that just wasn’t going well, so I finally hauled out the glue gun and wrapped the beads around the light cover.  It came out well, I think, and the kids are pleased that they helped with it.  It’s hard to take a picture of the light fixture that looks right, but this is a shot of it when it’s off:

And here is what it looks like on:

So that’s our small light project!  (The only kink is that if we leave the light on for a long time the bulb heats up the glue and it gets soft again, so I need to find a cooler bulb or a way to seal in the beads and the glue….  Or just not leave the light on for hours on end.)

Ian likes it, too, even though he’s still not sure why I had to stay up until midnight to finish it and why I was screwing it into place before the glue had even cooled, but that’s okay.  It’s not like he didn’t know I was crazy when he married me.  And at least it’s the kind of crazy that results in organized closets and working lights and shiny floors with only a modicum of hair in them.  I like having a home where the practical elements are also personal.  It just sometimes takes a touch of obsessive crazy to get that to happen.