Early Summer In Marblehead

Posted on | June 29, 2011 | 10 Comments

Warm muggy days and cool nights; I slip into my bed and pull up my beloved down comforter. Roses, foxgloves and clematis are in full bloom all over town. Long days make room for walks at the beach after work. I love you summer.

Category: marblehead

Learning More About HL Hinges

Posted on | June 27, 2011 | 15 Comments

We’re our moving along with our den renovation. The room is nearly painted and Greg has been working on stripping and sanding the four doors we found for the room. On Saturday, we headed up to Nor’East Architectural Salvage in Hampton Falls, NH to search for hardware.

On one of the doors we have the original HL hinge. HL hinges were used to help support the weight of a heavy wooden door and were common in the late 18th century. I found tales the HL stood for the Holy Lord and the hinges were installed to protect the homes from evil spirits. The tale was debunked by Colonial Williamsburg in an article I found from 2008 noted below:

HL hinges are a stronger version of simple symmetrical H hinges. They are useful for supporting the weight of a heavy wooden door. The key is the extra supporting arm that fastens to the door. This piece can be on top, in which case it would look like an HL, or on the bottom, where it resembles HG. Or it can be mounted on the other side as the mirror image of the two. Many colonists had little or no interest in religion, and no documentation supports the belief that their hardware or door panels had symbolic value.

We have one set of original HL hinges and we need three more. We found a few originals at Nor’East but they were $75 a set. Too steep for Greg so now we’re talking about weather to keep searching or replace with reproductions? Reproductions range in price from $15-$45.

One more dilemmia…each of the doors has holes drilled for knobs. I’ve found evidence that knobs did exist in the late 18th century but did they use knobs with HL hinges?

Category: house renovation

Packaging 101 With Sally + Joke

Posted on | June 24, 2011 | 8 Comments

My final post from my PDX trip! After Chelsea’s flower class in the am section of Summer School I signed up for Packaging 101 with Sally and Joke. I learned all kinds of tricks from these ladies including how to:

-Make your own stickers using a Xyron (ordering one pronto for my nieces). I made the dots from vellum and then into stickers using the Xyron.
-Making decorative flags using cute Japanese decorative tape and toothpicks.
-Creating your own cards and wrapping paper from designs you create on the computer.
-Paint stripes on a muslin bag to make a simple gift a little snazzier.
-And paint a message like “happy birthday or thank you” on paper to wrap a gift or a bouquet of flowers.

These ladies are incredibly clever and creative. The best part? They’re kinda geeky about their tools. Sally and Joke had amazing tactics for each project and I got the feeling they had tried each of the projects a zillion times figuring out the best and simplest way to achieve it. Love that passion! I just saw on Sally’s blog she will be teaching another class in July in Portland. Sign up early!

Stickers I made using the Xyron and flag using the decorative tape.

Papers and designs from Sally

Hand-painted wrapping paper with custom message from Joke

Packaging 101 classroom in Portland, Oregon

Danielle from BDRstudio painting stripes on her bag, love that neon pink!

My custom message on paper. The neon paint didn’t really work out as planned but you get the concept, right? If you look above at Joke’s examples you’ll notice white and purple look really good on brown paper and white on black paper.

Joke’s idea board. Love this shot because it shows the hundreds of bike racks and bikers I saw in Portland, really cool!

Category: diy, oregon

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