A Chandelier for the Kitchen

A few years ago, I made a chandelier for the kitchen.  The story is a typical one for me.  Start with good (and cheap) intentions, then the project turns into so much more.  The town in which I live has, what we fondly call, 'big trash day.'  Twice a year, residents can put out just about anything on the curb and waste services will come and pick it up (we are not allowed to do this other times of year).   An entire industry of scroungers trolls the neighborhoods looking for useable, fixable, or recyclable items.  I've found some great things while walking the dogs.   One day, I found a chandelier in a box.  It had a nasty white/gold spatter paintjob, but the fixture was pretty.  I painted the whole thing black to resemble wrought iron, attached some blue glass bead flowers and metal mesh, then took the fixture to the cabin.

My intention was to wire it into the ceiling and be done with it.  Not so easy!  The ceiling was wired for a fan/light combo and when I reached up to look at the wires, I got a nasty zap.  The porchlight stopped working at that point also.  (I'm not stupid, the electricity was off, something was seriously wrong.) Well, its been a year, and my father's friend, an electrician, came out to look at the problem.  After four hours of back and forth with the wires (kitchen on, porch off, porch on, kitchen off, et cetera), the problem was finally resolved and the fixture installed.

Ahhhh, light in the kitchen at long last.  The chandelier is not too fancy, but adds some class to the room.  The beaded flowers sparkle and I know I'm going to be cleaning out cobwebs, but its worth it. After all the time and hassle, it would have been easier to buy a new one.  However, I know for sure I have the only chandelier like this!

Making a Kitchen Cart

A while back, I received a few marble top tables.  The table part was uninspiring, but the marble!  I have always wanted a marble slab for the kitchen, but this stuff is too heavy to move to IL, so I kept it in reserve for use at the cabin.  Marble is the best surface for rolling pastry and making candy. If you don't mind a stain or two over the years, it acquires a wonderful patina..

The cabin is small (if you've been following the blog, you know this), and counter space is at a premium. I have a rolling cart with a butcher block top in IL and use it constantly.  One day, the idea to make a similar cart with a marble top popped into my head.  The result is shown at left - pretty simple, but very useful.

One downside of the open cart is everyone can see my extra sodas and ugly pans, so I covered the sides of the lower shelf with some old shutters.  I bought a few sets for $1 each in IL, boxed them up and flew them to NM (thanks again, Southwest Airlines!).  They were trimmed and painted before attaching with hinges.  

The toughest part was painting all parts of the shutters.  Note to all, spray paint is the way to go!  I sprayed the primer, but brushed on the final coats of blue.  It was time consuming and looks sloppy, but the shutters are down at knee level, so I'm fine with the result.  

Wine Bottles to Windows Part 2

window in progress

Last fall, I finished a few more small windows for the cabin.  My usual modus operandi for special projects is to ship raw materials to Albuquerque, transport down south, then work in peace.  While at the cabin, I have to use what I have on hand because anything I might need is 250 miles and 4 hours away.  As a result, my work is 'unique.'

The goal for this project was to cover the 14" square window in the living room and work on the tiny upper windows of the kitchen.  I've shown my process in a previous post; nothing too different here.

waiting to be installed

I know, I know, the end results shown here are a bit messy, but I'm happy with the result.  I'm especially pleased with the green windows.  They  will be installed near the ceiling and provide a bit of subtle light.    

The main components of these windows are wine bottles (see the previous post on cutting).  I wanted clear glass in the living room and so had to drink a lot of not-so-great wine in clear bottles to get the glass I wanted.  One hint for beginners to stained glass - don't start working with lots of circles.  Fitting pieces to fill the spots between rounds is a hassle (I hate cutting glass), and I usually end up using a huge amount of solder to fit the gaps. Be warned, this is not good technique. 

One more window to go!  Stay tuned...

Merry Christmas and Happy Artwork to All!

Happy Holidays! This lovely mosaic is made of bottlecaps (amazing I know!) and I created it using the steps outlined in a previous post.   If you take a step back, you can see how wonderful the mosaic really is.

The mosaic is a gift to my brother in law who has a thing for Our Lady of Guadalupe.  I tried a number of images, including the classic with the Virgin floating on a cloud surrounded by roses, but this version was so pretty it quickly became my favorite.

Some of you may be horrified of the idea of The Virgin Mary made out of bottlecaps, many of them beer caps, but to me this artwork is spot-on  perfect.  The idea that beauty can come from unexpected, and sometimes mundane, places is very appealing to me.  And then there is something perfectly New Mexico about artwork like this - spirituality from simplicity.

Creating the Bottlecap Mosaic, Part 2

In the last post, I described the process for creating the mural image.  In this post, I'll show how th individual tiles were made.  All 24,000 caps were sorted into milk jugs and various sizes of plastic bags.  The point here is that all the caps had to be separated so I could find the appropriate cap for each spot in the mural.  When I was ready to create the tiles, I was surrounded by all my jugs and bags arranged by color.  Although this photo of my workspace on the porch doesn't look too messy, it also doesn't show the piles of stuff under the three tables.

The mosaic had been output as images of smaller tiles, each numbered by row and section.  I followed the image printed on the output sheet, selecting and arranging caps row by row. Once a tile was complete, the caps were moved to my magnetic display board (covered with plastic wrap).  The magnets kept the caps aligned and in the correct orientation during the next steps.  In retrospect, and FYI if you want to try this yourself, making the board was an incredibly useful move.  The project could not have been done without it.

The caps were cleaned with window cleaner (to remove dust, storage grunge & rust), then polished with rubbing alcohol (to dry them and remove any oils).  After a few minutes, the tiles were sprayed with a UV protective acrylic sealer.  Even though the samples at the cabin show no signs of fading after one year (see previous post), I wanted to make sure the colors last as long as possible.  The cabin is in a very dry climate, but protection against rust seemed like a good idea.  Just in case.

After 24 hours of drying time, a piece of tulle (for ballerina tutus) was placed over the caps.  Four dots of glue (equal mix of Elmers and Eileens Tacky Glue) were dropped onto each cap through the tulle.  Because I sealed the caps, regular glue wasn't adhesive enough to hold the caps in place.  As I've mentioned in previous mosaic posts, the glue/tulle combo keeps everything in together during shipping and installation, but allows for easy removal of the tulle at the end of the project.

Once dry, each tile was labeled (tile#, top, bottom, right and left) completely.  The entire mosaic fit into one large box and it was shipped to NM.  Next step installation!  Stay tuned...

Creating the Bottlecap Mosaic, Part 1

You may have been wondering about the status of the mysterious bottlecap mural.  I know! I haven’t said much about it in a while. After many months, nay years, progress has been made!  Earlier this spring I had collected about 30K caps, enough to have all the colors I needed.  I spent a lot of time sorting & cataloging the caps, then selected a design. 

I decided to utilize an oriental carpet design because I didn’t want anything that looked too ethnic or strongly geometric.  I scanned this image from a book, cropped it a bit, duplicated it and created a final mosaic design that would be about 6 ‘ tall and about 14’ wide. 

The next step was using the freeware software package Andrea Mosaic. The software was designed to do photomosaics (perhaps you recall their popularity ~10 years ago) and requires a target image and a database of photos from which to recreate the image. 

I photographed each unique cap on a grey background (to simulate adobe), then edited all the images to a square format.  Andrea Mosaic allows you to set how many times an image can be repeated, whether or not the same image can be adjacent, if rotation is acceptable and the graininess of the final mosaic.  

I spent about an hour tweaking settings to give me a mosaic with a good balance of detail and color blending.  The software will break your output into pieces so you can work with smaller sizes (very helpful for large mosaics), so I printed out pages that would correspond to tiles about 10x14 inches.

The tile shown here is typical output and if you look closely you may be able to recognize some of the brands of beer, cider or soda.  The next step was creating the tiles. That was a lot of work and I'll describe the process in the next post

Stay tuned!

From Wine Bottles to Bathroom Windows

My father put tiny windows at the top of all north-facing walls in the cabin (the bathroom is shown here).  I won't go into the explanation of why he did this (theoretically it makes sense), but these little openings have been a hassle for years.  Because the walls are adobe, the sill is about 1 foot deep.  Not only does a window have to be placed on the inside, but also the outside of the wall.  

For years, I've put off the dealing with the windows because 1) I didn't know what to do with them, 2) tiny custom windows are expensive and, 3) I was hoping I could figure out a way to open the widows.  After years of stuffing the openings with insulation and layers of hardware cloth, I've had it. Rodents love these windows and use them as doorways, but the main problem is spiders and insects.  I love the little guys, but I don't like the resulting cobwebs/beetle leg/dust bomb combos that result  

So, what to do when you're cheap and in a pinch? Use what you have and be creative.

I love the look of tudor style windows with rondels of glass.  Along those lines,  I've seen some amazing stained glass done with bottle bottoms and glass plates and I thought I could do something similar.  Rondels are expensive, but bottles are free and readily available.  Shown at left are some wine bottles that Paul ad I cut (see previous post) for this project. I was concerned about the thickness of the glass, but what the heck, give it a try and see what happens. 

By the way, I am not an expert at stained glass.  I've dabbled in it, but I am very much an amateur.  If you want to try something like this, start simple, have all the appropriate safety equipment and don't expect perfection in the beginning.

In this window, I wanted to combine glass nuggets (from any craft store) with the green glass.  The first step was covering all the glass edges with copper foil tape, then arranging the glass pieces on a board, pinning them in place, and last, soldering. Shown at left is the arrangement of glass pieces on the board.  

As usual with my projects, I deviated from normal procedures: here, I was not creating a perfectly flat window to be inserted into a frame.  I won't describe the installation process in detail, but my main concern throughout was maintaining the correct dimensions of the window opening.

At left, I'm holding the window after all the pieces have been tacked together with solder (the silver bead-looking things) on the wrong (outdoor) side. Shown here is the front side which has not yet been soldered.  There is still a lot of copper visible and all of that is covered with solder in the next steps.  At this point, the window (about 12" square) is quite heavy just from glass alone.

Shown here is the front (indoor) of the window after soldering is complete.  Okay, it looks pretty sloppy, but this doesn't concern me because the window is 8' up and no-one is going to be looking at it up close.  Because I didn't cut glass to fit between the bottle bottoms, a lot of solder had to be used to fill the spaces. This is a heavy window!  At this point in the process, many stained glass artists would treat the solder to darken it.  The process uses some nasty chemicals, takes more some more time, and didn't think it would add much to the final appearance of the window. 

The installation required two frames attached to the window opening itself.  One about 3" inside the sill and another flush to the edge.  The stained glass panel fit between the two with some rubber weatherstripping along the edges for an airtight seal.  The window itself is set back 3/4" from the face of the wall.

The view shown here is with the bathroom light off and the sun shining in.  The little yellow light at the bottom is a set of beer bottles stuck into the adobe wall when it was built (another artistic addition from my father) in the 70's.  I like the way the glass from the two types of windows complement one another.


The next windows (two in the kitchen) will be made out of clear glass bottles.

Stay tuned!

Sometimes a little grey is good

When facing the kitchen shelves with aged wood, I didn’t want to fuss with mitered joints.  I didn’t think it was necessary.  A small detail however, is that a lapped joint shows a bit of clean, non-aged wood right at eye level.  What to do?

I remembered reading about aging wood using tea, vinegar, and rusty nails.  Having all those items at hand in the cabin, I set to work.  At the time I couldn’t remember the proper order of treatments, and I don’t know if it really matters.  The basic concept (familiar to anyone who works with natural dyes) is mixing tannins with iron to create a black pigment.  On wood, the color is grey and it really does match aged wood.  The surface texture will differ, but for a tiny bit of wood, at an edge, this is a great technique.

In the photo above, you can see the effects of two applications on one half of an aged wood scrap; I used one application for my shelf. I also treated the top and bottom surfaces of the shelves (1/4" plywood).  The surfaces are a smooth grey and match the color of the edge closely enough that the entire shelf seems like one very thick board.

I’ve found a recipe online similar to the one I recall from the past.  If you try the technique, play around with the number of applications of each solution to get the intensity of grey you need.  There is a strong vinegar smell while the wood is moist, but disappears when dried.  The solutions are relatively safe, but even so, I wouldn’t leave them around kids or pets; they can be safely poured down the sink when you are finished.

Adventures in Shelving

Work in the kitchen is almost complete.  One of the last steps is installation of shelving.  Because the room is so small and relatively dark, I decided against upper cabinets and chose to have a single row of shelves across the wall.  I have to wait until the on-demand water heater is installed to put in the long shelf, but recently, Paul was able to work on the shorter shelf.

All walls in the cabin are solid adobe, but the south wall (along which the plumbing runs) has drywall covering the bricks.  This was the simplest way to deal with covering pipes and had the added benefit of creating a plumb surface along which the lower cabinets could run and providing an easier material into which shelves could be installed.

I don’t like the look of thick supports under shelves, but thought that something would be needed for support.  These shelves will hold all the dishes, so there is potential for a heavy load.  I bought some lovely cast iron brackets (see my Pinterest page for a link), but was still concerned that more support would be needed.  Better to go overboard, than have all my bowls crash down.

After consulting various online sources, Paul and I designed a variation of a torsion shelf based on two websites, one from popular mechanics and the second from a blog.

The first step was creating the hollow shelf.  A frame was made from scrap 1x2's, screwed and glued securely (you can see some finger wipes in the photo).   A skin of 1/4" plywood was glued on the top and bottom.  I wasn’t concerned about perfect alignment (although Paul was) of the various parts because I wanted to face the edges of the shelf with a strip of aged wood (see previous posts about the sunroom).  The aged wood would visually create a thick board, match the vigas, other finishes in the cabin, and just add to that casual, ‘rusticity’ that you see in old adobe homes.

A cleat was screwed into the studs on the wall.  As with the frame, the cleat was scrap wood.  It fits inside the torsion shelf and doesn’t show, so it doesn’t have to be attractive.  It does have to fit snugly, so Paul spent some time sanding to get the shelf well seated on the cleat.

The shelf is then slid onto the cleat and securely screwed onto it. This photo shows the prefitting, before the aged wood was added to the edges.  Interestingly, the adobe wall to the left is so out of plumb that when the shelf was level, it looked decidedly unlevel. We had to fiddle with it a bit to make it look good to the eye.   Ahhh, the joys of working in an adobe home.

Most torsion shelves are sanded and painted before the final install.  Visually the shelves appear to float and have a very modern look.  We installed cast iron brackets before adding the aged wood to the sides.  A side benefit of the torsion shelf is that we didn’t have to worry about the brackets not being screwed into a stud.  We did use expansion bolts (just in case) and the result is a very sturdy shelf.

What a nice shelf! Of course, it would be even better without the junk on the counter and through the house.

A Perfect Use for Reclaimed Lumber

A few weeks ago, Paul and I spent some time installing the aged wood (a.k.a. my Moms's old goat pen) in the sunroon (see previous post).  I thought it would be a quick process (measure, cut, apply), but Paul is much more a perfectionist than I am.  I repeatedly tried to convince him that everything in the cabin is rough and/or crooked, so level, straight, and beveled were not necessary.  I won part of the argument and he won another part. In the end, it took the better part of two days to do the window casings & sills and about 2/3 of the walls.


We put in a narrow shelf up high for some art work.  The pieces selected for the shelf and window wills were all boards that had been extensively chewed by one of my mother's favorite horses.  It's tricky to see in the photo above, but the sills have wonderful rounded, organic quality, each is different and there are more than a few tooth marks.  It was a unique way to incorporate a bit of family history into the project.




Paul was pretty adamant about beveling the edges around the door, and although it took a bit of thought to figure out the correct way to cut each board (many incorrect cuts were made!), the extra effort was worth it.  The door looks elegant and rustic at the same time.





The boards were all 1" thick (back in the days when a 1x12 was actually 1x12!), and although beautifully aged and silvery on the exterior, there was no decay on the interior.  The wood was purchased 17 years ago (the building of the goat pen coincided with the birth of a favorite horse), but when we cut into it, it smelled fresh and piney.  I honestly don't know if you can get good wood like that anymore. Quite a few knots had fallen out, but this gave us the opportunity to hide bits of old regional topo maps behind the wood.  We now have quite a few 'Easter eggs' hidden through the room highlighting local rivers, mountains, and towns.  Some of the wood has beetle damage and large splits, but it was slapped onto the wall no questions asked.  With a project like this, you never really know how it will end up, but I think it looks great and I can't argue with the cost (zero!).