It’s still historical, and still of interest, whether or not the association with the founding father is direct, so it doesn’t particularly bother me that the two Bens get a bit conflated.  As often happens, it’s the small artifacts of life that catch my eye most frequently.  Here’s what I saw on the wall at the address in question:

Grandson Benjamin published his own newspaper, The Aurora, here in the late 1700s, and this was his wall file.  Butterick’s got nuthin’ on Ben Bache.  (You’ll need to click on the third picture from the left, directly under the large picture at the link to get the specific reference.  Heaven forfend a pattern site link should actually be useful.)

It’s ugly, it’s never been maximally useful, and it developed a loathsome drip.  We’ve always hated having a faucet that was so low — almost on level with the top of the sink — since it’s difficult to get deep pans under it.  I decided I’d rather replace it than deal with taking it apart just to fix the leak.

So I trotted over to Lowe’s and found a new one.  As it turned out, there weren’t many options for us;  at all of the hardware stores in our area, there were only two faucets that would work in our particular situation.  (I’ll explain that later.)  Most people won’t have that much trouble finding a replacement.  Figuring out which one to buy isn’t usually a problem either;  in general, sinks have standardized holes in the stainless or porcelain.  You just need to know the number of  holes, and the configuration.

I found a faucet assembly that would work, got the tool kit out of the basement, cleared out the cabinet, and reached in to turn the water off.  And couldn’t.  The valve handles wouldn’t budge.  Stymied at the first moment!  The first step for this home repair project, much to my surprise, involved these tools:

WD-40 is my best friend.  When using it, tap gently, or you’ll end up calling the plumber after all.  It took only a couple of minutes’ work before I was able to turn the handles.  With the water lines closed off, I crawled into the cabinet and peered under the sink:

Ours is a four-hole sink, but the 1970s faucet uses only two (you can see the water lines above, one hot, one cold, which go to the appropriate faucet handle). The fourth hole, on the far right, holds a brass plug in place over the hole where a sprayer would go.   Yeah, that sink needs replacing, too, along with the 1952 counter, but that’s a project for another time.

I reached up and unscrewed the rather weird little rods holding the faucet in place.  There was nothing else keeping the faucet assembly steady, so I went slowly, making sure that I could ensure that the assembly would end up resting on its side, instead of falling into my porcelain sink and chipping it.  If your sink is in better shape than mine, you might want to  hedge your bet a little and line it with a towel against damage.

Under the faucet was horrifying:

Blech!  Getting rid of this, alone, would have been a good reason to replace the old faucet.  Weirdly, all of these deposits and the grime scrubbed off very nicely — without even much effort.  I used a non-metal scrubber, cleanser, and polished like mad. It was beautiful when I finished, which apparently amazed me so much that I forgot to take a picture.

Once the surface was clean, I placed the new faucet assembly into the holes.  (I debated scrubbing off the rust underneath, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  There’s a stainless steel sink in our future.)  Here’s what the assembly looked like from the underside:

The new faucet is just set in place here.  The gray water hose on the left isn’t connected; it’s just sitting there.  See the threaded steel post on the right, just above the whitish connectors?  There’s another one on the left, though you can’t see it as well.  Those posts are what holds the faucet in place.  This is possibly the kludg-iest connecting system imaginable, but it’s also exactly the one that held the 1970s assembly in place, so apparently it’s got tradition going for it.

Here are the parts that get attached to those posts:

The little round tube is a spacer.  You twirl the rectangular bits onto the posts until they are braced against the bottom of the sink.  Wacky, no?  It does seem to work, although it looks pretty dicey:

You can see the rectangular bit, the tube, and the nut that holds them in place.  Once the faucet assembly is centered and firm, you re-connect the waterlines to the new assembly:

Because it uses a lever instead of two handles, the new faucet doesn’t use the right and left holes for the water lines; instead, all of the connectors go through the large, center hole that the 1970s faucet didn’t use at all.  The two gray vinyl tubes are the hot and cold water lines, and the patterned hose goes to the new sprayer, which replaced the messy cap that originally covered the fourth hole in our sink.   I checked the connections very, very carefully, and that was it.

The whole installation took less than an hour.  Here’s the new faucet:

Well, that’s what it’s supposed to look like.  Because we have a portable dishwasher, our faucet has to have an adapter on the end of the spigot; it was this that severely limited our choice of hardware.  It seems that modern faucets usually have some kind of fluted end, many with sprayers built into the spout, and we can’t hook our dishwasher onto any of those.  It may be 1952 in our kitchen, but the dishwasher is a critical part of our 2010 life, so fancy faucet tips were out of the question.

Our new faucet doesn’t look quite as nice (or maybe just doesn’t look quite as finished) with the dishwasher adapter on the end:

But it stands a lot taller than the old one, swings out of the way much more effectively, and, although we don’t use it, it’s a lot nicer to have a sprayer installed in the fourth hole than an ill-fitting blank.  (By the way, I did have to uncoil the sprayer hose under the sink and let it sit for a day before it un-kinked enough to allow us to lift the sprayer head.)

Because we realize that we’re likely to sell our house someday, I put the correct head into a plastic bag, labeled it, and taped it to the pipes under the sink.  That’s so that we will have it handy when the real estate agent explains that we’d better get the house in shape to sell it.

I found 12in by 12in sheets of ceramic (technically, these may be glass) tiles at a local hardware store, and cemented them to a thin layer of cork.

Here’s what one of those squares looks like:

I made four, so that we could use them in various configurations.  Here’s our table with the tiles arranged by twos:

Four in a row, down the center of the table, they look like one continuous set of tiles:

Using just three, with spaces between, looks completely different (yeah, it also looks different because my photographic skills need help; working on that):

One advantage to these mats is that they store very easily, as they’re quite thin.  We tend to keep two on the table, and two more on a coffee table in the dining room, which gives us a place to put cups or snacks if we’re sitting there.

Finding very thin cork for the backing was a little tricky; an office supply store had thin cork, but only in pieces too small for these tiles.  I found a roll at a local office/art supply place, and used an Olfa cutter and a steel ruler to cut it to size.

I tried several different adhesives before I found the right one; you’ll probably have to experiment, as what you’ll need will depend on your particular tiles, and the backing on which they’re sitting.

Attaching the tiles to the cork required some dexterity, since there are small spaces between each tile.  I had to put a drop of adhesive on the back of each tile; I managed this by doing the first row, and then applying adhesive and rolling the tiles onto the cork row by row.   I put weights (stacks of heavy cook books) on the tiles until the adhesive had set — in this case, overnight.

What I needed was some kind of handle. I probably should have crocheted a small ring and strung it from the bottom, but I’m just not up for crocheting right now. Instead, I put up a yellow and blue valance, and found matching colors in grosgrain ribbon for this trim-and-grab-loop solution.

The yellow quarter-inch ribbon is stitched over the blue, one-inch grosgrain. I had a sewing machine foot that I thought would make the job of sewing one to the other easy by letting me thread the narrower ribbon through the foot, but it turned out that the ribbon proportions were wrong. After a few practice scraps, though, I figured out how to feed the ribbons evenly by hand, and got a pretty good result.

I couldn’t find an adhesive that worked on the shade, so I had to figure out how to get the stripe to stay in place. In the end, I ran the ribbon completely around the shade, going through the slot at the bottom where a wooden slat goes to make the shade more sturdy. Underneath the trim, and just above the slat, I carefully cut two buttonhole-like slits, and ran the back of each loop through each one. That way, when I pull on the loops, the pressure is on the slat, not on the shade itself.

The horizontal ribbon strip is just pinned inside the slat’s sleeve. (Don’t tell anyone!) Logistically, it was too difficult to try to stitch it, and I was worried that I might need to tighten it up later. The loops are discreetly hand-stitched closed, since putting the entire shade under the sewing machine wasn’t an option.

Mr. Noile isn’t wild about the look; he says it’s a bit utilitarian, and he’s got a point. Considering the issues, though, I think it’s a good solution for now. And that dreadful fringe? Well, that’s for another day. In the meantime, I’ll just call it vintage, and appreciate its historical value.

First was this small valance for the upstairs bathroom. Neither of us is entirely crazy about having this wonderful print on a wall, exactly, but it does fit the personality of our 1952 bathroom just fine:

In keeping with my new-found resolution to use up as much stash as possible, the curtain is lined with a sheet that’s been kicking around, allegedly as ‘muslin’, for a few years. Instead of sewing a rod pocket across both fabrics, I attached the main fabric to the lining with enough of a seam allowance in the lining to allow me to make a pocket for the rod in in the lining alone.

Making the pocket rod a little snug keeps the valance in place (no lining creep in the top), and lets the main fabric fall directly from the rod. Unless a curtain is gathered, I really don’t like the way the rod pockets (and stitching) look when you can see them from the front.. This was a good way to keep the focus on the print, not on the construction.

(Yes, that’s an awful line on the blinds where my hand-cleaning stopped. It turns out that you CAN remove 30 years of accumulated dirt from fragile blinds — you just have to go very slowly, one slat at a time. I’ll be getting back to that one of these days. I got distracted by all the more necessary blinds that were breaking, and thus in dire need of immediate attention, on the other twenty-six windows in the house.)

The sewing room was meant to be Emma’s, since this unholy duo chase her all over the rest of the house. Somehow, though, Emma’s shelf gets co-opted now and then by Sally and Alex. There’s obviously no good reason to leave all the sewing room shedding to Emma.

These guys are Cat Angel Network rescue babies, too, but a little bolder than Emma. (And they’re siblings, too, so they’re a pack of 2 instead of a solo cat. Strength in numbers, yah!)

The problem seems to be the check spring, which keeps the thread from going too slack on the front of the machine on its way to the needle.  That’s it in the picture above — the part is both the spring (normally the thread would go under the spring), and the curved metal part it’s resting on.  The check spring is catching and grabbing the thread where it shouldn’t, for some reason.

The jacket I’m working on right now is linen, so the fabric isn’t particularly demanding. As a result, I’ve been able to use my Pfaff through the expedient of bypassing the check spring, and tightening up the tension discs a bit. It’s working for this woven fabric, but the next garment in the queue will be made of silky polyester, so I’ll probably have to go back to my Singer Fashion Mate for it.

Whatever’s wrong doesn’t seem to affect the buttonhole function (in spite of the fact it’s tension-related), and I really can’t do quick, simple buttonholes with either of my other machines. So I’ve now finished the buttonholes in my black Vogue 8499 pants, and am getting on with my next garment — a Vogue jacket.

So my Pfaff is home, but it and I are kind of in limbo while I figure out the next step. Which may be ordering the part on the Internet, and slapping it in. I haven’t decided yet if this is a less-than-bright move, but the motivation level is high. The fortnight I went without this machine was not fun. If my kind-of-local shop can’t fix it, and I send it away, it could be months before I see it again. That would not be good.

Update 5/26/08 — Added photo.

. . . than the space where my much-loved Pfaff used to be? Thursday night, as I attempted to sew the last eight inches of the hem on a Kwik Sew top, the tension went all wonky. Irretrievably, unfixably wonky.

I’ve owned my Synchrotronic 1229 for 25 years, having acquired it new shortly after it was manufactured in April of 1983. (Shown here as the disaster multiplied. How about that tangle of thread on the left, eh?) I bought it because it did four things beautifully: the needle stops the minute instant power is cut; the walking foot feeds tricky fabric beautifully; it has a hands-free reverse stitching feature; and the machine edge-stitches with a precision that is amazing. For all these years, it’s done these things, and more, perfectly. Predictably. Wonderfully. I love this baby! So Thursday night was a bit devastating. A quick Internet search revealed a Pfaff dealer only 45 minutes away, which helped. After I called Friday morning, I felt even better — the technician was trained by Pfaff 22 years ago, and periodically since. That’s my era! My baby won’t leave the shop, and I should have it back in two weeks.

Not that it’s going to be a good two weeks. On the plus side, I do have a couple of options, at least for sewing wovens. The Singer Fashion Mate 237 that I picked up in California a few years ago will pinch hit, and, if I want, my 60-year-old Singer Featherweight is available, too. But nothing is quite as versatile as my trusty Pfaff; I’ll be feeling a bit of pain, even though I’ll still be able to sew. My spouse was sympathetic, but not really dismayed. He pointed out that I’ve been wanting to re-make my duct tape dummy, and that this could be the right moment. That’s a pretty good idea, especially since I keep putting it off in favor of actual sewing. We’ll see. Two weeks? I can probably survive two weeks, right?

Update:  It’s fixed!

Emma is a Cat Angel Network rescue baby with a traumatic history. It took a year to get Emma to this point of bliss, purring in her own window on her own shelf, with her own human and the hum of a sewing machine to keep her company.

This week, IKEA came to the rescue. I found this chair, called “Snille”, and discovered that it fits my body perfectly. It has a primitive height adjustment system — turn the seat until it’s where you want it. I won’t miss a fancy hydraulic lift, though, since I don’t expect to be raising and lowering the seat regularly. For a total price of $19, I can live with it.

Snille wouldn’t have solved my problem if IKEA hadn’t just begun selling special casters for hard floors. Oddly named “Paragraf”, they’re about $11 for five. (They’re mentioned on the IKEA site, but only as options for other chairs.) When I snapped them into the chair frame, I was a initially dismayed, since it was a little difficult to push the chair. Once I sat in it, though, it sailed across the floor; apparently the casters need some weight pressing on them in order move smoothly.

It was a real surprise to find a chair this cheap that works so well, but I’m very happy with it. It’s easy to zip between my machines, and even over to the cutting table. Good thing I don’t have a long hallway; I’d be racing up and down it just for fun!