iron-ing

in which our plucky heroine does something hard and something fun...

I mostly hate making phone calls. Not as much if I am phoning a friend, though even then I always feel hesitant, not wanting to "be a bother". But having to call businesses with an inquiry or a request has never stopped being a "grit my teeth and do it"
There were two calls on my current task list today, and I made both of them before noon. Yay me!

I also started the task of decluttering my actual paper file cabinet, to move towards the goal of using the upper drawer as a "home" for important paperwork that tends to get misplaced. I do really well putting things away into their proper homes, IF they have homes. Since I made a "house key home" quite a few years ago, I no longer misplace the house keys, etc. The file cabinet upper drawer is full of random nifty hardcopy, but I pretty much never go there to use it, and it can be culled hard. (The bottom drawer is where I store my blank paper of various sorts, tracing paper, graph paper, art paper of different weights etc... that drawer is functioning well)

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~ paint it black ~
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after ebonising, and beforehand

So, remember yesterday when I mentioned using iron infused vinegar to ebonise tannin rich wood... well... instead of just waiting for the steel wool to react, I also took some rusty rebar and stuck the ends in the jar (outdoors of course) and let it sit overnight. In the meantime, I slathered the oak escutcheon with strong tea and let it dry in the sun, because why not?

After then applying the almost clear vinegar liquid, the color change was quite rapid though not instant. A second coat darkened the wood surface even more; the only light areas are inside the deeper pores of the surface (the original oak scrap had some sort of wood finish, and while I sanded the surface to remove it, the pores are rather deep) Had I been able to start with totally unfinished wood, it would all have become black! So, I call the experiment quite successful.