Well, a shawl collar is sort of an adjustable scarf that is attached to the neck of a sweater. If it’s really cold, you just flip up the collar and it will cover the whole back of your neck and you will be toasty and warm. If you get overly warm, then you can just fold down the neck and you’ve opened up more breathing room. Great stuff.

I’ve been working on a sweater for our grandson (yes, he’s lovely and has started to walk, thank you for asking) and wanted to build in a shawl collar because as a little person, he has the challenge of being able to maintain his body heat since the ratio of ‘skin area’ to ‘body mass’ is such that he’s throwing off BTUs like crazy all the time and I can’t get him to keep his hat on for anything (see, there is THAT issue with hats too – I can’t imagine he worries about ‘hat hair’ since he has so little hair, but…). Now, I could have just put a v-neck into the sweater, but I don’t like the look of a shawl collar put into a v-neck, so I bound off the center 2″ of stitches. Here is how I did this: Your mileage may vary in terms of sweaters you are making.

Once you’ve got the top of your sweater done (this one is an ‘in the round’ item, but you can do this with a ‘knit the front and back separately and sew up the shoulders’ sort of sweater also), pick up the stitches around the neck according to your pattern or your usual method. I use the ‘pick up 5 and skip one stitch all around’ method. Now, before you start knitting or purling or anything, you need to remember that this collar will, at some point in its lifetime, be folded down so that the inside can be seen. So you want to use some sort of stitch pattern that will look the same on the inside and the outside. I used knit two/purl two ribbing here. It’s not my favorite ribbing but it does look the same on both sides. Another stitch pattern that will work is garter or moss stitch. One of the reasons I used ribbing however, is that I wanted this collar to pull in around the baby’s neck to keep him warm. Garter and moss stitch doesn’t do that; those stitches give you sort of a flat piece of material. But again, it’s your choice. As you can see from the photo, I’ve left the bound off stitches in the middle free and I’ve done a collar about 4″ high (you want a collar that is tall enough that when it’s flipped up, it will reach the bottom of the wearer’s ears – so that when it’s folded over, it gives a nice, luxurious roll.

Take the bottom short edge of the collar and bed it around so that the very last bound off stitch at the end is matched up with the inside edge on the opposite side of the bound off stitches in the center of the sweater. Pin and then firmly sew/graft the bound off center stitches to the short edge of the collar (see next photo).

So, you have one side secured – see the other side sort of flapping there. The next thing you do is flip that over, matching the bottom of the short side of the collar to the bottom of where you sewed the other side of the collar down. Do not stretch it so that the edge of the collar matches the other edge at the other side of the bound off stitches of the sweater. I’m not sure what it is, but it always deforms the collar and give me a nasty result. Now, having said THAT, I’m admitting that I am a lazy tyke and I could, should I wish, make that end of the collar more triangular with several short rows which would lengthen that end of the collar. This would enable me to have extra fabric to match up that other corner and it would look very nice indeed. But I’m lazy and I did not do that; I just flopped the collar down and sewed it down (see the photo at the top). It doesn’t meet the corner – it’s a couple of rows in and that is ok.

Now, what if you want a REALLY luxurious shawl collar (and don’t want to worry about right side and wrong side stitches). Then you knit your collar twice the height, fold it inside and sew it loosely to where you cast on the collar stitches. Then you do the bottom edges of the collar to the middle cast off stitches. That is a very very warm collar indeed and is the sort of thing that you see on sweaters designed to be worn out of doors. For an inside sweater, a single layer is enough.

Aunt Toby believes in magic, oh yes she does.

But, as usual, I digress, but not much. One of the truly annoying things of retail life is the absolutely shoddy way that knitwear is put together, gloves, mittens and hats especially. In this case, I am concentrating on the bitter end of the whole deal and it is the same whether we are talking about the end of knit hats, gloves or mittens. What is done at least 95% of the time is that the manufacturer has the operators take an end of the yarn, thread it with a needle through the stitches, take a couple of hand stitches (maybe), and then snip the end off close.

Nice, neat and tidy, but the end just won’t stay inside; it’s not anchored TO anything and the stitches at the end of the finger top, the top of the hat or the mitten end are just hanging there, like beads on a string. If the yarn end somehow works its way out, or gets caught on something, or a child or a pet finds it and plays with it and pulls it, voila! The string for the beads comes out and there you are with, as you see in the top photo, live stitches just hanging there in the wind…waiting to slip down, down, down, unraveling as they go. Oh the horror!

And a complete waste of money for the consumer because then you have one glove or mitten that is ruined (or a ruined hat), and the other half of the pair is still ok but it won’t match anything and there you are. Both of them end up in the trash. Waste. Aunt Toby hates waste. I still have, and wear, a pair of leather palmed wool knit gloves of my departed Pop, who darned them numerous times. They are still better than 90% of what I could find on the market today.

The glove was brought to me by our elder daughter. The annoying thing is that I will probably be brought these gloves again – what I should do is undo and perform the operation I am going to demonstrate here on the other 9 fingers to avoid this but I wanted to get this up in a post for readers today. The one finger took about 5 minutes, tops and most of that was hunting through my yarn collection to find something that was close to the main color of the gloves. If I had not been concerned with that, I could have done the deed in probably a couple of minutes. It is worth doing – saved a pair of gloves for ED at a time in the winter season when we still have at least 8 weeks of cold weather.

Tools:
Set of double pointed needles (I’m using US size 2′s here; it depends on the size of the yarn in the item and the yarn you will be using to do the repair)
Darning needle with a big eye

Material:
In this case, I’m using DK weight yarn in the closest grey color I have to the gloves.

Step 1: Pick up the stitches on the double pointed needles. I found 12 stitches, so, I put 4 stitches on the first needle, then 4 on the next and 4 stitches on the last one.

Step 2: Find the end of the yarn the manufacturer used to string the stitches and keep track of that. Making a slip knot in the end of the yarn you have found that matches, grab hold of the manufacturer’s yarn and holding the two together, do whatever stitch is opposite to the stitches on the outside of the item you are repairing. In this case, this is standard ‘knit one row; purl the next one – that’s the wrong side’, so I’m purling as I go. I’m weaving in the manufacturer’s yarn end and my yarn end for a couple of stitches while I go. Do a couple of rounds.

Step 3: Cast off. If you do not know how to do casting off, go here:Casting off
Otherwise, do a standard cast off (slip the first stitch, knit or purl the next, pull the slipped stitch over; knit or purl the next, pull the stitch before over the new one and so on) until you come to the end. You will have what I have here – a row of cast off stitches (the line that looks like a braid) and one ‘live’ stitch left on the needle with a longish end of yarn. Take the end of the yarn and pull it through the live stitch, and pull the whole deal off the last needle.

Step 4: Neatening off. Turn the finger inside out and pull the yarn end through the hole. Thread that through the darning needle. Put the pointy end of the darning needle through the cast off stitches one by one and pull up tightly; sew a couple of times through the end and make a knot.

Done. Neat, tidy and it will not come out – even if the end somehow works it’s way loose, because you put the end through the last ‘live stitch’ (see Step 3), the cast off stitches will stay cast off.

And why bother to do this? Because you CAN and it’s worth doing, if for no other reason than it took a little bit of time and you did it yourself. Always a good reason to do things.

But, I digress (as usual). This is NOT about the button-down shirt.

Men’s shirts that are considered dressy (i.e., not a button-down collar) and nicely made today usually come with that item that you see sticking out of the pocket on the undercollar in that shot above. It’s called a collar stay. In the UK, they are referred to as ‘collar stiffeners’. Some men refer to them as knuckles, bones, collar sticks or collar tabs. I noticed recently the DH had a shirt from what used to be considered a very high end shirt manufacturer which had them built right into the collar and you could not take them out, which means that this particular shirt can never be taken to the commercial laundry or dry cleaners because the heat of the commercial pressing machines would ruin them. That is another point: Shirts with removeable stays should have the stays …removed… before you take them into a dry cleaner or laundry (or, for that matter, if you wash them yourself at home since those little celluloid buggers will shimmy out of the pockets faster than you can say “Where’s my…”). Just take them out, put them someplace where you will remember where they are (always the challenge – but putting them in the box where you throw your change on your dresser would work), and when the shirts ‘come back’ or are finished drying, put them back in the collar to shape it up properly.

Now, there are all sorts of stores and sites out there that will sell you replacement stays in everything from celluloid to very nice engraved metals, which is a rather unique gift for someone if you can’t think of a thing to get for the guy in your life (or yourself, goodness knows) who wears non-button-down shirts. Just do a search on ‘replacement collar stays”.

But enough of the digression. The point here is that I am laboring over the nice wool challis shirt for the DH, inspired by Gary Cooper, and one of the options in the pattern, strangely enough, is a collar with a pocket for collar stays. This is something I’ve never seen in a commercial pattern and is probably seen as being too fiddly for a home sewer to do. Is it fiddly? Yes. Beyond the skills of a home sewer? Nyet. No special equipment is needed and actually, it was sort of neat to do up the example for you. The one thing you’ll want to have on hand is a collar stay(and you or the guy in your life might already have some of these laying around that got taken out of shirts already). If you don’t, take a firm piece of card stock, a 3×5 card or a business card and cut a piece that is 3/8″ wide by 2 3/4″ long and make one end cut into a point. That’s your test stay.

This collar requires THREE different pattern pieces (and I’m not even talking about the stand which we discussed the last time): The upper collar, an under collar and something they are referring to in the pattern as ‘under collar 2″ but which I’ll call ‘the pocket’.

This is the under collar pattern – I redrew it for you on white paper to make the markings easier to see. As you can see from the photo, there are markings for folds and stitching.

This is the pattern for ‘the pocket’, which basically covers the end of the collar. I have the feeling in commercial shirt making, they don’t use the same fabric as the collar itself and probably use something lightweight but strong or even a type of non-woven interfacing.

Step 1: Cut out your under collar piece and mark the folding and stitching lines. Cut straight down at the ‘v’ and press down both edges on the undercollar.

Step 2: Apply ‘the pocket’ piece and baste on or just pin onto the undercollar. Stitch down one of the lines and using either a collar stay or your ‘test stay’ (see photo), line it up against the stitching line you just did and make sure that the markings for the other stitching line are on the other side of the stay so that when you are all done, you can actually get the stays into the collar. Trust me on this one because I had to rip out my stitches and do this twice. Once you’ve tested and corrected any markings for the other stitching line, do the second stitching line. TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: The collar stays I’m using came to me through Put This On(which is a site I adore and which I feel does a great job in educating guys on clothing and style) as a ‘thank you’ for supporting their video program. They are not available for sale. Sorry.

Step 3: Put together the now two-piece undercollar/pocket and the upper collar, right side to right side (and ‘the pocket’ is on the WRONG SIDE, ok?), sew the outer edges with the appropriate seam allowances, trim the corners and edges down to a really narrow allowance. Turn right side out, steam press, and see! Voila! a pocket, with stitching, and you can put a collar stay in it. And take the stay out! Genius.

These are the directions from the pattern with the diagrams to help you also. The next step will be to attach the collar to the stand, which we’ll take up in the next episode.

The rest of it could, one might presume, look like the proverbial ‘hot mess’ and no one would be the wiser. But it also means that those items – the collar, the center front with it’s button band (whether it is integrated into the front pattern piece or a separate and applied band), the cuffs and the placket where the cuffs open on the sleeve all have to be perfection. And not only technical perfection, in that the sewer has performed all the steps to produce a perfect looking product; but they have to fit smoothly and perfectly to the person wearing it. A collar band (aka ‘the collar stand’) that is too big, or too small, cuffs that swamp the wrists (or get caught on a large wrist watch), and messy buttonholes on the front band just ruin the look of a man’s shirt. There is no way out of this. It is not the same as with women’s clothing where design details (fancy collars, ruffles, pin tucks, seaming and so on) can distract the eye from an imperfection. With men’s shirts, the item itself is so spare, the design itself so boiled down to its essence, that what is seen must be perfect, which is daunting to say the least.

Aunt Toby is very aware that commercial patterns have issues. One of the major problems is that as the grading on the sizes goes up, everything gets graded up. At some point in the deep, dark past, it was decided that as people got taller, everything got bigger and as people got larger, everything got bigger, which ignores the fact that the distance between a person’s shoulders and their chin does not necessarily get longer. It is not as if people who are 6’2″ tall have more bones in their necks than people who are 5’8″ (everyone has 7 bones in their necks by the way). But obviously no one listens to me because the neck band in this particular pattern (which covered three sizes) just kept getting bigger in the width and bigger in length. What to do? What to do?

Well, I’m a big believer in going with what works, that is, I took out one of the DH’s shirts and, as you can see from above, I measured the neckband on the collar in both the width and in the length. It was 18 1/4″ long and 1 5/8″ wide. And that is without seam allowances. I’d already cut out the neckband in fabric and backed it with my super-duper sew-in interfacing and I measured that.

Ye gods.

As you can see, I have marked not only 1 5/8″ width on the paper I placed on top of the neckband, I also marked the two seam allowances of 1/2″ each and we still see a whole lot of challis real estate hanging out there at the top – it’s almost 1/2″, which might not seem a lot but on a man’s shirt, all of these little items just keep adding up. The collar would be attached to the top of the stand (I have not even measured that yet; I’m sure that will be swimming out there as well) and that would add even more extra fabric. Not a good look.

Gary Cooper didn’t have extra fabric hanging around his neck.

The length of the band was out there as well. Even if I used 5/8″ seam allowances (which are the standard in commercial home sewing patterns), I would need a band of only 19 1/2″ which would sew up to one that would be 18 1/4″. This band is 20 1/4″; if I sewed it up with 5/8″ seams, it would be 19″ – 3/4″ too big which would hang around my husband’s neck like some sort of clown costume.

Whole lotta trimmin’ going on…

Cooper, for all of his being known at the time for his Western and frontier movie roles (which he got at the beginning of his career due largely to his riding and other outdoors skills from growing up on a ranch in Montana, though he and his brother were also sent later as teens to a boarding school in England for several years before he came home to attend college), certainly did not come from a poor or un-schooled family and for all the roles that required him to say “M’am” to actresses such as Dietrich, was very well read, was a trained artist and was, in his own way, as concerned about his appearance and the message it sent as Cary Grant was (though for different reasons). And he was seen at the time as a guy who dressed well and who cared about it (which at the time was no big deal; everyone dressed as well as they could afford to at the time; ‘clothes make the man’ was something everyone believed). The photo above was shot while he was touring in Australia entertaining US troops during WWII (which is why I can use it copyright free – it’s courtesy of State Library of Queensland) and he’s signing an autograph for a military fan.

If you look closely at the photo you will notice that the collar on his shirt is, to our eyes, quite long (the standard at the time was between 3″ and 4″ for collar points and men chose their collar length based on how tall they were). And though this photo does not show it, collars and cuffs at that time were quite soft (in relation to what had come before in terms of removable collars which were very stiff, either because they had been starched or made of celluloid). I asked my ‘men’s shirt and interfacing expert,” Pam Erny of Fashion Sewing Supply about this and she was quite clear on this. At the time, this was pre-fusible interfacings and shirt makers either used self-fabric (that is, they used the same sort of fabric that the shirt had been made of) or they used a similar weight of shrunk muslin or other fabric to back up the collar, cuffs and placket. At this time, it was pretty standard for men’s shirts to be starched as either part of the washing process or in the pressing process so having a fabric interfacing that would behave pretty much as the outside layers would in the washing the pressing was probably seen as the right way to go. This would change later with inventions such as ‘Sanforize’(tm) and other fabric labor-saving treatments; at that point, resin-based interfacings came into being basically to replace having to separately starch collars, cuffs and plackets.

But, as usual, I digress. Back to Mr. Cooper, a soft collared shirt and making a new shirt for the DH (who goodness knows has been patiently waiting for me to make HIM something for a change). A couple of years ago, I bought some wool challis on the internet. Now, the moment I saw this fabric, it reminded me strongly of the sorts of printed shirts that you can see in photos from the 1930s and 1940s for men. Men’s clothing in that period actually was far less conservative than it is today and men’s shirts were actually available in far more colors and fabrications than they are now. Additionally, since at that time central heating was not as widespread (nor were buildings and homes insulated very much at all), wool came in far more weights, weaves, knits and fabrications than we find today and people were used to wearing wool in pieces of clothing that we don’t often see today (for example, Viyella was a very famous and valued brand for both men’s and women’s shirts, blouses and dresses and this was a combination of wool and cotton).

But, back to the challis. Now, the background color is pretty much spot on, but I still can’t decide if those reindeer are black or navy blue. The fabric also has a puckered texturizing treatment in it which, when I had washed it in the hottest water my washer can produce, became even more pronounced. This would make a very jazzy shirt for the DH for sure, but I felt that to be fair to the fabric, a more 1940s period look would be in order. It would be a more casual shirt than he usually wears, though he’d be able to wear it with dark dress pants with or without a plain dark tie and either a tweed sportcoat (a la “Coop”) or a corderoy sportcoat or sweater. And yes, I have shown the fabric to the DH, who is quite intrigued and it will be interesting to see how the fabrication works out.

The pattern is one from McCalls from 1977. designed under license with John Weitz (who actually was a very interesting guy: John Weitz ), who did a fairly extensive run with McCalls in terms of their men’s pattern line.

At this point, I will close here because I will be using Pam Erny’s recommendation for interfacing for this to give it the right look, a sew in product that I am getting from her but which has not arrived yet (I’m haunting the post box). Once I get that, we’ll be able to take this project forward.

Onward!!

THEN, you’ll remember the windows in the basement.

On the other hand, when it comes to losing energy, basement windows are basically horrible. In general, they fit so badly into the sill on top of the foundation (a topic we have discussed before), are usually of the awning type and close and seal poorly so they are a major contributor to energy loss in a home. People are very very cognizant of replacing windows and doors in the living spaces of homes, insulating in walls and attics but the basement is Terra Incognita as far as energy savings is concerned which is really a mistake.

Now, one of the things to remember about this time of the year (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) is that doing any sort of energy saving work from the outside is practically worthless. Sealants such as caulk or foam need 55 degree temperatures to stick and cure. So, you will be needing to work from the inside and with any luck, your basement is 55 degrees. If it is NOT, then the technologies that you can put to work becomes more limited.

There are basically two items in the equation of losing energy with a basement window: The window itself which includes the frame in which the window is installed, and the sill. Whenever you have two independent materials coming together or laying on top of one another, you have opportunities for energy loss. The sill is on top of the foundation, so there can be energy loss between those. The window frame sits on top of the sill and is surrounded by the rest of the foundation so there are opportunities for heat loss there as well. Between the window itself and the frame can be cracks and crevices which can leak energy. And we won’t even discuss whether or not there are cracks in the window or if the caulking around the glass pane (or panes) is old, chipped, or cracked which would further increase the air exchange.

If you have a warm basement, you’ll be able to use silicone caulk and a caulking gun (or expandable foam) between the foundation and the sill and the sill and the window frame (see the diagram at the top). If you do NOT have a warm basement, then what you can do is (while wearing gloves), tear off bits of fiberglass insulating batting and with a thin bladed knife or putty knife, cram as much of it as you can between the foundation and the sill and the sill and the window frame, all around the window. This will take care of that part of the equation.

For the window itself, at this point in the year (since you can’t take the window out to do any repairs until spring), the best thing to do is to seal it off with heavy plastic. Now, the quick and dirty (and not terribly efficient) way to do it is to close up the window as tightly as it will go and then staple heavy plastic around the frame. If you want this to be more energy efficient, cut lengths of wood lathe and using a staple gun, staple through the lathe and the plastic into the frame. In the spring, you will have the job to tear off the lathe and the plastic but it does give a better seal.

A better insulation job, though can be done later if you do one thing: Anything you get shipped to you that is wrapped in bubblewrap (the bigger the better in terms of bubble size), as long as the piece is as big as the window frame, keep it. Just shove it into a plastic bag and hang it in a closet. Then late next fall, when it’s time to seal up the basement windows again, do the following:
1) Examine the windows and repair any window caulk, broken glass and so on.
2) Make sure there are no leaks around the window frame and the sill and foundation and re-caulk or re-foam as necessary.
3) Use the bubblewrap instead of plain heavy duty plastic or, tape together a layer of bubblewrap and heavy plastic the size of the space you need to seal off and staple THAT unit to the window frame. Bubblewrap produces a superior job in terms of acting as a barrier against heat loss through the window glass and it’s worth it. The plastic usually only lasts through one winter season but it’s worth saving the bubblewrap to do it.

Now, some readers might be saying to themselves, “This is madness. It’s winter already; how much energy can I save at this point by doing this?”

Every little bit counts, folks.

At least until they are old enough to know that ‘crash’ is not a good sound.

But sometimes there are other items that we never think about that can be dangerous just standing there.

The DH and I had always wanted a small table (sometimes referred to as a gallery table; in some homes this is referred to as ‘the table we throw the mail on’) under a mirror in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs at Chez Siberia. With the addition to the Greater Chez Siberia Household of a grandchild a year ago, we ditched that idea for a small chest of drawers for TG (‘the grandchild’) and his ever growing collection of clothing, toys and little bits and pieces. We found a lovely one made in Pennsylvania out of oak and put it under the mirror to great effect.

Except for a couple of things. First, the floor there (like the floor in several other places in the house at Chez Siberia) is not exactly horizontal. And second, there is this huge floor grate for the forced air furnace, which further complicates the whole ‘where do the feet on this chest of drawers go?’ issue. So, even under the best of circumstances, the chest was, shall we say, not exactly firmly placed on the ground. Finally, as TG started pulling himself up on furniture, we had horrific images of his pulling this chest of drawers over and on top of himself. Not safe. not safe at all.

Now, there are a couple of options with something like this – we could have tried to even up the floor, which would have reduced the ‘tippiness’ issue, but still would not have eliminated the issue of TG using it to pull himself up. So, we decided to eliminate the ‘pulling it over on himself’ issue entirely by fixing the chest of drawers onto the wall itself.

The DH found a piece of oak trim from the rest of the work done on the house that was about the size of the top of the chest of drawers. Now, we debated on whether we should put a piece of oak that would go completely across the wall there, like a chair rail, but since we could not find a piece that long, the decision was made for us. But for someone else, that would be an option. In our case, the decision was made to screw the piece of wood directly into the studs in the wall (which is very old fashioned plaster, with lathe, metal mesh, and a sand finish), put screw eyes into that in appropriate places and match the places just under the top of the chest of drawers and put in the actual screw hooks so that the chest of drawers, for the moment, can be afixed to the screw eyes. We figure that with the wood actually screwed into the studs, the chances of TG being able to pull the chest of drawers over on himself by pulling himself up on it are pretty small. And when he is older and wiser, we will remove the screw hooks off the back of the chest, and unscrew the piece of wood out of the studs, patch the holes in the plaster, do a bit of camouflage painting and no one will ever be the wiser.

And the TG will NOT have one of those horrible stories to tell his children 30 years from now about how he lost his teeth when he pulled a chest of drawers over on top of himself.

Here are the tools and materials the DH used on this job.

Piece of oak trim – this is 1″ wide by about 3/4″ deep and is frankly a scrap left over from work done on the house; I think the carpenter ripped this himself.
Stud Finder
Wood Screws: 2, 3″
Screw eyes: 2
Screw hooks: 2, 1.5″ brass
Drill with appropriate bits.

Step One: Putting the wood in the right place. First, using his stud finder, the DH found two studs in the wall and marked them. Then he put the chest of drawers would be and put the wood just underneath the top of the chest of drawers on the wall and made marks so that he’d know where the wood was going to go.

Step Two: The DH measured in from the outside edges of the top of the chest of drawers to the corners, which is the strongest place and where all the internal reinforcement would be. He then measured in from the edges of the piece of wood and marked them THERE – those are the spots for the hooks and the hoot eyes as appropriate.

Step Three: Taking a drill and a pilot bit and with a helper holding the piece of wood trip in the appropriate place, the DH drilled through the wood and into the studs on the wall. He then started the wood screws in the holes and screwed the piece of wood in the appropriate place on the wall.

Step Four: Put the screw eyes into the spots marked on the wood and the screw hooks in the corresponding places on the back of the chest of drawers. Hooked the chest of drawers to the screw eyes installed on the piece of wood.

No toddler is going to move that thing.

This year, it was a red, long sleeved sweater, in wool.

I felt I was not being picky. It is not as if it had to have this style neck or that style neck. It is not as if I was wedded to a cardigan versus a pullover. But I wanted real, honest to goodness, red.

Not burgundy, deep rose pink, wine, or rust. Red. English ‘the redcoats are coming; the redcoats are coming’, fire engine, scarlet woman red.

In wool.

It makes no difference if you look on the internet, in the stores, in catalogs, or bargain basements. I can find six shades of pink and six shades of reds with varying amounts of blue in them. And we will not even discuss how much wool gets used in what I could find. The best I could find was a horribly shortened cardi with 50% wool in a weight so light I could have used it for underwear.

People, it’s winter. Long sleeves, a length that will hit me at least at hip level if not below the rearend, and some honest to goodness warmth here.

One of the ‘helpers’ at a JC Penney advised us to sign on to Pendleton and look there. Even at Pendleton’s prices (which give me a nose bleed), no such luck.

So, I faced one of two choices: buy the one v-neck pullover I found (which had 21% wool in it and was a reasonable price at 50% off) or cough up to get red wool and knit myself one. Guess what – I’ve been looking at that situation also and I can’t find scarlet 100% wool yarn for life or limb (actually, scarlet is a tough color; trust me, when I used to dye my own fibers, the closest I ever came to getting it was a batch which ended up the color of tomato sauce. Something to do with iron in the water). If I wanted a red cashmere sweater I could find it. If I was willing to wear a guy’s sweater that was red and made of wool, I could find THAT.

I could, I suppose, just throw in the electronic towel and give it up until scarlet comes back into the fashion color spectrum and snap up the first (at full retail) all wool red sweater I could find, but I refuse. I wear red a lot. I wear red with brown, black, grey, navy blue. Not green.

So, I got the 21% wool pullover, and felt slightly resentful for about 5 minutes.

Annoying, I tell you. Annoying.

Now, we’ve worked with batts before and one of the real weaknesses of fiberglass batts is that they are NOT impervious to mice (well, at least we think they were mice; we’re hoping they were not chipmunks or anything, ahem, larger). And once mice (or whatever) start to tunnel through that stuff, the whole R-value just goes to heck.

I am still trying to figure out how mice can tunnel/chew through fiberglass and survive, or perhaps they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good (that is, opening up nice warm places for field mice to hole up for the winter). But the DH figured that there needed to be some sort of ‘sealing up’ of the batt needed to take place, just to keep the mice out. Now, we already know that sheet plastic will not stop mice (they are almost as effective as rats at chewing through plastic, Rubbermaid(tm) containers and so on) and though something approaching extruded wire mesh (like window screening) would stop them, it would not stop moisture from getting to the fiberglass and once fiberglass gets wet, it holds moisture next to wood floor joists like a magnet (which promotes mold and rot).

So, we’re going with 1/4″ plywood. We’ll give this a test right now and unscrew it later and see how the area has done. In the meantime, here is our own DIY star, the DH, showing you how he does it. In this demo, he’s working in the front NE corner of the house, which is probably the coldest spot in the entire house, which makes the room above it (where I am sitting right now) rather uncomfy at the floor level.

Step One: Measuring

Step Two: The Insulation

Step Three: Measuring and Cutting 1

Step Four: Measuring and Cutting 2

Step Five: Installing

Again, the list for what the DH was using for this:
Measuring tape
R19 Fiberglass batt
1″x1″ board as his straight edge
Retractable craft knife
Protective gloves
1″ wood screws
1/4″ plywood cut to the same size as the fiberglass batt
Electric drill with a screw-driver head on it.

The sill?

Yes, my little wombats, the sill. This is the big piece of wood that is put on top of, and is connected to, the foundation of the house and is the starting place for building the house (hopefully your home has a foundation of poured cement or cement block but if you live in a REALLY older home, it could be laid up stone, in which case, you have a whole different issue to deal with and you might want to check out “This Old House”, and the old house forums on the internet). The floor joists of the first floor are attached right to the sill and the subfloor and the finish flooring are attached to the floor joists.

But, Aunt Toby is getting a bit ahead of myself. To return to the sill. The sill is one of those places where the chances of cold air leaking in and the warm air escaping out are quite good; the top of the foundation is never, ever flat and smooth and the sill plate (or the timber) itself is not perfectly flat and smooth either. So there are all sorts of little cracks, crevices, etc. for there to be air exchange. In an older home, you cannot completely eradicate those little holes (unless you somehow find every single one of them and spray the living daylights out of them with that closed cell spray-in foam which has its own set of issues which we are not going to go into here), so you have to do your very best to seal them off.

Today, we are going to discuss and the DH will demonstrate how to insulate the sill in our back basement (the ‘new/old’ part of the house), using two-inch foam board. This part of the house has been cold since the day we finished the addition for the following reasons:
First: the furnace, although big enough theoretically to handle to extra space, is in the opposite corner of the ‘old/old’ part of the house in the basement and the duct runs have to go all the way across the house, through the basement wall and all the way across the ‘new/old’ basement to the floor registers before warm air from the furnace can go up into the dining room upstairs. Since there is a basement wall separating the new and old parts of the basement, there is this physical barrier to any of the heat in the old part of the basement coming into the new part of the basement.

Second: Since the duct run is going through this new basement, which is in effect, unheated, the duct is exposed to the relatively cooler (and in some cases, much colder) air of the new basement, so it is very easy for the warm air in the duct to be chilled inside the duct before it can even get to the floor register upstairs. We solved a good bit of that issue by insulating the duct work with big fiber glass bats and duct tape.

This project has actually been going on for a while. Last year, the DH and our son put two layers of foam board in between the floor joists (that is, if you were standing in the new basement and looked up, you would not see the wooden subfloor because it would be hidden by the insulating board) and started the process of insulating the sill in that part of the basement. The goal for this holiday season, when the DH has some time off, is to get the rest of the sill in that part of the basement insulated. He is also planning to do some insulating on the sills in the front, old, part of the basement, using a different technique, which will be the next post.

For the moment, however, we will be discussing and showing you how we did the blue foam board. For this operation, here’s a list of what the DH used:
2″ foam board insulation – this is something that you can find literally at your local hardware store or lumber yard.
small serated knife
straight edge
Roll of household aluminum foil

Step One: Measuring

Step Two: Cutting

Step Three: Installing