Category: Potpourri

Dogs & Cats Available for Adoption

Dear Friends,

My friend Santwana Dasgupta died on Monday. It was shock. In addition to leaving a big hole in my heart, she left behind her beloved pets. A couple of her friends have taken the lead on finding new homes for them. All the animals are in temporary situations that are very good. The next step is to find permanent homes. The organizers don’t need funds or referrals to rescues. Just potential forever homes. 

If there is anyone out there who is looking to add a well-loved pet to their family, please read further. And please share this notice wherever appropriate. I’m sure there’s the right situation out there for all these guys, we just need to find it.

I will update this page as I have new information.

I miss my friend.

Rebekah

3 Dogs Available for Adoption

Contact: Erica Klein

For Erica’s contact information, please send me a message here.

  • Totti is a 5 year old, about 65 pounds. Quite tall, white with orange.
  • Maggie is 8, looks like a thin white lab

Maggie and Totti are bonded and we’d like to keep them together but will consider separating them. They get along with dogs, cats, children. They are crate and potty trained, single owner their whole lives, well loved and cared for. Full vet records are available.

  • Chico is a wheelchair special needs dog. He is about 25 pounds and very loving, friendly, and happy. He blended right into the pack with Totti and Maggie. 

3 Cats Available for Adoption

I don’t have much information about the cats yet. But if anyone is interested in knowing more, including the contact person, send me a message here.

This is what I do know:

  • Indoor cats
  • One cat, black and white, loves humans and ignores other animals.
  • The other two cats ignore humans and dogs.
  • The cats can be separated.

Weaving an Acapulco Chair

When I scored a free Acapulco chair on Craigslist, I didn’t know what it was called. So, I couldn’t easily find a tutorial to help me fix it. It was a good case for using the reverse image lookup on Google. Once I had the right search term, I could find some instructions for re-webbing the chair. The best ones I found were in Spanish and were clear enough for this non-Spanish speaking person. The worst tutorials touched on a pet peeve: time lapsed videos without any verbal instructions.

Acapulco chair needs repair
Free Acapulco chair needs to be fixed.

Given how I’ve been weaving seats onto other chairs where I was crocheting craft cord onto the frame, I wondered if I could do something like the chair my neighbor saw. Here’s the picture that Jill sent to me:

Woven Acapulco chair. Round woven chair and matching woven table.
Woven chair and matching table

After some trial and error, here’s what I did:

Woven Acapulco chair with retro vibe.
Macrame Acapulco chair

The trick was to figure out how to keep the back of the chair from resting on the frame, which would have been uncomfortable.

Back of Acapulco chair does not touch the frame.
The back of the chair does not touch the frame because a “bridge” holds up the vertical strings.

The solution was to start with a horizontal “bridge” that would hold vertical strings up off the frame. In this case, it is the black band of color on the chair. I made a guess as to the best position for the bridge. But I wouldn’t know if I got it right until I could sit on it.

After the bridge was in place, I added the turquoise vertical strings. This required making spaces between the crochet knots along the frame because 1) the bottom of the chair was wider than the top of the chair, and 2) all the strings travel through a center hole with limited space. Though I tried to do the math and sketch this out on paper, figuring out how many and where to put the spaces took a few tries. Once I figured out how to do half of it, I could mirror the pattern on the other side. In the end, I was able to fit 20 vertical strings onto the chair, which was plenty.

Close up of Acapulco woven chair seat showing the spaces between the knots with strings, which are the knots without the strings.
Spaces between crochet knots

Making the spaces between the knots wasn’t hard. But it’s like a lot of things. If you’re out of practice, you can forget what you did. The tip that I would give to my future self would be to check to make sure that everything is in the normal position to start another loop once you’ve made your extra space (or two, or three). Another way to think of it is that a “space” is a knot that doesn’t have a string associated with it. This needs to be a full knot. If you make a half knot, then your string will not drape over the top of the bar in the ready position to make the next loop. And yet another way to see it is that you’re going through the same motions of making a loop around the top of the chair, except you don’t actually go around the top of the chair.

The final step was to weave in the remaining horizontal strings, in this case the yellow, red, and turquoise under the black on the back and the turquoise on the seat. This was a matter of making sure that both the back of the chair and the seat had enough room on the arms for the loops. To make everything meet up just right in the middle, I worked each side together.

If you are trying to weave a chair like this and you have questions, let me know. My basic advice would be to start by weaving a standard lawn chair first.