Everything Else – Becka Rahn, artist

22 February, 2023

Construction Update: Waiting on the Snowstorm

beckarahn2023-02-24T16:23:13-06:00Construction, Everything Else|3 Comments

When last we checked in with our construction adventure, we had floors. We now have plumbing and electricity and paint and bookcases! The project is actually really close to being finished at this point. But then we had to wait for the snow.

So once we got all of the floors done, they immediately covered them all up with brown paper so they could continue to work without anything getting damaged. Then our carpenter came in and started doing the woodwork. The whole downstairs of the house has all of the original 1920s oak woodwork and we asked them to match downstairs with all of the new stuff. And it’s just gorgeous. They recreated the wide base mouldings and the trim around all of the windows. And the paint crew color matched the trim downstairs too. Even though it’s brand new construction, that little detail really makes it feel like it all belongs to the same house. I am never in to popular trends and I really don’t like the minimalist/modern/Scandinavian style that’s everywhere right now, so that meant creating custom mouldings and so on. We figure this is a once-in-a-lifetime project so we are doing it “right”.

This little nook is a fun detail. There was originally a hole in the wall here where the previous owners had a space heater. It didn’t pass inspection when we bought the house so they ripped it out and there was just always just a hole here where you could see the original chimney from the old furnace. Instead of just covering that up, we added this electronics nook. It will have a glass shelf inside and it’s got USB and regular outlets wired right into the side of the cabinet. So we can charge all of our phone/iPad/watch devices. It is right next to where the foot of our bed will be so it’s perfect to drop things off when you go to bed.

We also built in bookcases specifically for our board game collection. We have a lot of them and they need a deeper shelf than a standard bookcase. These took a little back and forth with our contractors because, not being big board game geeks themselves, I think they didn’t understand when we said they needed to be both extra deep and extra sturdy. We had them paint the inside of these a color called “Indigo Batik“, which so far is the one little pop of color upstairs. The shelves aren’t there in the photo because they are still working on them, but they will also be blue with a little oak strip across the front.

And finally the bathroom is finished except for a last little bit of grout and caulk. One of the treats that I wanted as part of this remodel was to get some tile from my friends at Clay Squared to do a detail in the bathroom. I love tile and as much as I would have loved to do the entire bathroom in one of their tile colors, that was a little out of our budget. So instead I got 5 boxes of their “seconds” tiles in two colors (Pesto and NorthShore) and two sizes and I worked with our tile guy to make a stripe pattern that goes all the way around the bathroom. You can see that in the photo up at the top.

We paired that up with some creamy white subway tiles on the walls and tiny hexagons on the floor. I couldn’t love it more. The last few tiles we added to the back of the shelf nook inside the shower. The electrician came back and finished the lights and the heat last week. We’ve had no heat at all in the space since October, so that has been really nice and cut down on the drafts downstairs. The plumber hooked up all of the plumbing so the bathroom is all ready to go. And both the plumbing and electrical got final inspections.

Today they were supposed to put in the rest of the windows but with 2 feet of snow on the way and lots of crazy wind we all decided that it would be better to wait for next week. So it’s been really quiet the last couple of days for a change.

8 February, 2023

Comparing Spoonflower’s Celosia Velvet vs Renaissance Ribbons Velvet Borders

beckarahn2023-02-08T14:00:55-06:00Everything Else|0 Comments

Edith from Renaissance Ribbons reached out to me a little bit ago with a question. She had read my post comparing Spoonflower’s Celosia & Performance Velvets and wondered if I would share my thoughts about the digitally printed velvet borders that Renaissance Ribbons makes. I thought it sounded like a great follow up to that post, so I asked her if I could share my thoughts here. Edith sent me a couple of samples the next day. (In the interest of transparency, other than providing those samples, this post was not sponsored in any way.)

First impression is that the Renaissance velvet borders are beautiful. Which is exactly what I would expect because their entire shop makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop. The color is rich and vibrant and the print quality is outstanding. There are very fine details in the two designs I saw and those are crisp and precise. The one thing for me that was unexpected was that the pieces were unfinished on the edges. Coming from a shop with ribbons in the name, I assumed that they would be like ribbon with a finished edge, but they are actually just cut pieces of velvet with a built in selvedge of extra color at the edge. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this at all, I was just surprised and this wasn’t mentioned in the descriptions of the velvets that I saw on their site.

How do they compare to Celosia Velvet from Spoonflower?

I started by laying out a piece of Renaissance Ribbons Border (top) next to a piece of Celosia velvet (bottom) that I had printed in one of my designs. The first thing I noticed was that the RR Border has a very matte finish compared to Celosia. At the bottom of this photo you can see a little of the sheen that my camera picks up in the Celosia. Other than that fabric finish, the colors are very comparable in the vibrance and saturation.

I flipped them over to take a peek at the back. They are both a woven fabric with a very similar look from the back side. The back of the RR Border is a deeper cream color, but the white parts of the design on the front are a nice crisp white. Unlike Spoonflower fabrics, which you can get in a variety of sizes, the Renaissance Ribbon borders come as a 5 inch strip, 1 meter long, which is ready for you to add into your project.

When I crumpled and played with the drape and hand of the fabrics, both were very soft. The RR Border has a little stiffer hand and has less drape than Celosia. I think this is a great feature in something designed to be a border. I would expect that to be pretty stable. Spoonflower says that the pile height on Celosia velvet is about .5mm and I would say that the RR Border is maybe half the thickness of that. I held the two up next to each other so you can see an edge on view. I also think a slightly thinner fabric is probably good for a border, which is designed to be sewn on to something else. Celosia is meant to be a little more like an upholstery weight fabric, so that makes sense that it needs a little more thickness.

Overall, I think these borders are a great idea and the two dozen or so designs they have on the site are all rich and decadent looking. You can’t design your own like you can on Spoonflower of course, but they have an impressive collection of guest designers (Kaffe Fasset, Tula Pink, Mary Engelbreit, Amy Butler) so there’s a lot to choose from in velvet or their other woven ribbons. It was fun for me to have an excuse to look at some digital prints from an entirely new source.

12 January, 2023

Construction Week 11: Floors & Windows

beckarahn2023-01-12T13:21:33-06:00Construction, Everything Else|Comments Off on Construction Week 11: Floors & Windows

This past week has been all about floors and windows! The bathroom floor tile is almost complete and when I talked to our tile guy yesterday, he was nearly as excited about the window as I was. It makes the room so much brighter. You can see that this isn’t finished yet. Everything takes lots of steps. But three of the new windows are in and they make such a huge difference. You can see we matched the style of the windows downstairs with the three dividers in the top pane. These will be painted to match the woodwork everywhere else upstairs which is dark stained red oak, copying the style from downstairs.

We only have some of the windows still. Two of them are still on order. Since May. And sadly, these aren’t exactly right. Some of these windows are supposed to have tempered glass in them to meet code requirements and they didn’t do that. (Not sure whether it was a mistake in the order or the manufacturing). Fortunately there’s a solution: a film you can add to the glass to which is acceptable instead of tempering. So that still has to happen. And they also forgot to make this window with frosted glass. Since it’s basically floor to ceiling, you would get a very good view of anyone stepping out of the shower. So that’s really not going to work. Fortunately they make the film in a frosted version too. So our contractor is working on tracking that down. It’s always something!

Another new thing I learned is that there is an inspection for everything. Yesterday’s was the shower pan/drain inspection. A guy in a safety yellow vest showed up and went right upstairs, ran some water down the drain to make sure that all worked correctly, signed off on something official and got back in his car and drove away. We’ve had two plumbing inspections, electrical, framing, structural. Honestly, probably a few more I don’t even know about. They are very efficient.

Right now you can’t see the beautiful floors in the rest of the room because as soon as they got them down, they quickly covered them up with heavy paper so they don’t get damaged while everything else is still happening. But I got a photo before that happened. We picked LVT or luxury vinyl tile that looks like wood. I picked one that was the closest match I could get to the original hardwood floors downstairs. Because I love the look of wood, but we really decided that real hardwood was probably not in our budget. We don’t have any carpet anywhere in our house. I just don’t like it and it’s impossible to keep clean when you also have a love for large labradors. I’ve started thinking about rugs, now that I have a better idea of what this new space looks like. If anyone has a place you love to get rugs, send me a link!

2 January, 2023

Construction Week 10: Drywall

beckarahn2023-01-02T18:08:47-06:00Construction, Everything Else|Comments Off on Construction Week 10: Drywall

Week 10 means we have walls! This couple of weeks has been the messiest so far. It is amazing how much dust drywall generates! The space looks so so different at this point. Since I last posted, they finished all of the rough in for the plumbing and electrical. The roofers were finally able to get here and put a permanent roof on the dormer and do all of that roof finishing. The weather had been holding us up a little bit. We had a temporary roof of plywood with a giant tarp on top of it. We had a big snowstorm come through with crazy winds and the tarp blowing sounded just like thunder for 2 days. So I am really glad that’s finished. We also have insulation. Which is incredibly important in winter in Minnesota. The whole house feels a lot warmer. There’s still a draft because the windows are all covered in plywood, but it’s an improvement.

We had a tiny bit of drama with the drywall delivery. A huge crane truck pulled up in front of the house but the operator decided that our neighbor’s mulberry tree was in the way, so he told our contractor that he was just going to “trash it”. Our contractor looked at him like he was nuts and explained that trashing the neighbor’s property just really wasn’t an option. So they drove off in a huff with all of our drywall still on the truck. They simmered down a little while later, figured out a different option and our crew carried all of those drywall sheets up the outside stairs. I am again glad that was not my job.

My favorite part of this few weeks was getting to see the real shape of the space. I told my dad (who was our architect) that I think it almost looks faceted. Because it’s an attic, there are angles everywhere. There are really only a couple of walls that go floor to ceiling uninterrupted. Most of the others are divided up by a sloped ceiling or an angle. I was considering painting some bold colors upstairs but I am now thinking that with all of those angles it might just need to be one color. I can’t wait to see how the light plays across everything once the windows are in. We finally have some of our windows about 8 months after we ordered them. Two more are still in limbo; we aren’t sure when they will be ready.

Today they’ve started to lay down the floor in the main room and the tile guy is here working on the bathroom floor to get it prepped for the tile. I’m excited to see how much lighter the space is with the maple colored floor and light creamy tile.

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1 November, 2022

Three Camera Tries: The Making of Our Halloween Love Note

beckarahn2022-11-20T21:52:43-06:00Everything Else|Comments Off on Three Camera Tries: The Making of Our Halloween Love Note

Want to listen instead of reading?

If it’s too much of a spoiler to know how our Halloween photo is made, I don’t want to ruin the magic for you. This is your warning to skip this post. But shooting our photo this year was an interesting creative challenge and I thought it would be fun to talk about how we made it work and what we learned about our cameras.

We have an unfinished basement (which is awesome) and as an artist I have to take a LOT of photos of my work. So we have a corner that is the dedicated photo studio. It has a large roll of white paper and big lights and a tripod set up most of the time. I’ve learned just what I need to do to get great photos in that space. It’s where we usually do our Halloween photos. The previous owners of our house had built a little workbench under the basement stairs full of drawers that we affectionately call our “Prop Shop” which is where we store all of the Halloween props and costume bits as well as all of the backdrops and props to photograph things for my Etsy shop and dress forms for photographing garments. It’s a great setup. In my last blog post I talked about how we are starting construction on a house project this week. That means that everything that used to be on the second floor of our house had to move elsewhere. The furniture, our bed, our collection of board games, the exercise bike, boxes and bins all are now living in what was my photo studio. There is no way to take a photo there.

So instead of building a set, we decided that the Halloween photo needed to be something that was just our faces because that was going to be easier to do in some other part of our house. We had a couple of ideas, but we knew that the light was going to be the most challenging so we decided to go with spooky skeletons and deliberately make the light cast dark shadows on our faces.

Our rule about Halloween photos is that it should be about 80% “real” and 20% Photoshop, where we use Photoshop to just put in those details that make it awesome. This photo is a great example of that.

We took two photos. Photoshop helped make my hair blonde and change the tan windbreaker I found for Andy’s costume into flight suit orange. And we put the two photos together.

So we started this skeleton photo with two photos also. We wanted to use just our faces, so I bought a black spandex hood that we could put over our hair and we put on black shirts to make it easy to “erase” the rest of us from the photo.

Then I built a “set” out of two pieces of foam core and a black tablecloth and put it on the desk. Andy’s office has a nice big north facing window and on the Saturday morning we took these photos it had great light reflected off the house next door. So that was our light source. We wanted the light to cast some kind of dark shadows but it was too dark, so we each held up a big piece of white foam core to reflect the light back on the other side of our faces. We each took the photo of the other and because the light was exactly the same, they look like we are sitting side by side. We agreed on “dead” expressions and big wide open eyes.

Here’s where it got interesting: it took three cameras to get the shot. We started with a little Canon point-and-shoot that we got just a few months back. It’s a pretty good camera although I am still learning its quirks and we thought it would be the easiest. But when we pulled the photos off the camera they were terrible. Blurry and grainy. (I realized this morning I can’t show you because we deleted them all.) That dark “moody” lighting we were trying to get was not something this camera knew how to do.

Next we thought we’d try my iPhone. It’s a pretty new phone with a great camera too and again, we were going for easy. The photo on the left is the one from my phone. It has so many “make your photos look amazing” algorithms built into it that it basically took exactly the opposite photo from what we were going for. It took out all of the shadows and made everything bright and “perfect”.

So finally we pulled out our big old Canon DSLR. It’s more than 15 years old, but it’s the camera we usually use for Halloween. That’s the photo on the right. Although it is overall pretty dark because we were working with very little light, just look at those beautiful shadows and the sparkle in his eye. That one was a keeper. Both of these photos are straight off the cameras without any tweaking. What a difference, huh?

Now you might be wondering, where are the skeletons? That was our cheat. Someone on Facebook asked me how much was masks and how much was makeup and the answer is none of it. I bought a skeleton vector graphic on Etsy and we Photoshopped it. We layered the graphic over our faces and carefully tweaked and warped it so it fit our faces exactly, matching noses and eye brows and chins. The layer is transparent and uses some color blending to make it look like it’s painted onto our faces. We erased our eyes from the graphic so you could see them just a tiny bit brighter. I drew the hands (referring to another graphic I found) and then layered a grungy paint texture over top of them to make them match the faces.

Although we had newer and “better” tools, it turns out that when we went back to the one we knew the best we took the photos we needed on the first try. It was very satisfying, after a frustrating hour of photos that were just plain wrong, to go down and dig out the other camera and say “there it is” when we got it right.

20 October, 2022

The Construction Project: Before we start

beckarahn2022-11-20T21:52:36-06:00Construction, Everything Else|2 Comments

A year ago in September, I was teaching a Zoom class and my husband heard a “whump” from the other room. He thought the dog had gotten into something upstairs, but when he went to investigate he found that a large section of our ceiling had fallen down. Our house was built in 1927 and is a beautiful Craftsman style bungalow, but the upstairs hadn’t been updated at all. So that nearly 100 year old fiber ceiling tile just gave up.

The downstairs is beautiful with all of the original oak woodwork and maple floors. Ours is very similar to this one with a little larger footprint and only a “half” story on the top level so the ceiling is only full height in some parts. Our upstairs is one big open room and was our bedroom and my husband’s work-at-home office during the pandemic. When we bought the house 20+ years ago, the people we bought it from (Harold and Olive) were in their 90s and were only the second people to own the house. They had “finished” the upstairs into what we figure must have been a family room with knotty pine paneling covering every wall and tons of closets and storage nooks. It was functional but certainly not pretty. We lived with it because (as any of you know who have lived in an old house), there was always something else more in desperate need of being fixed.

At first we stared at the piles of disintegrating ceiling tiles and dusty paper insulation and laughed. Because what else can you do? And then we tried to figure out how to fix it. We knew we couldn’t really do it ourselves, even though we are pretty experienced fixer-uppers. It’s an entire floor of the house. That’s more than a weekend project.

So we talked to friends and found a fantastic contractor. It took months to work into his schedule and talk about what we wanted to do. Then he was put on medical leave. So we had to get another contractor (also awesome) and work into his schedule. We pulled in my dad, who to our great good fortune is a retired architect with a love of old houses and creative problem solving.

Our “fix the ceiling and the insulation” project turned into a “what would happen if we cut open the roof and added a new dormer so we could have a second bathroom?” project. We had every intention of fixing up this space when we moved in so we had some money saved up (thank goodness) so that let us dream a little bigger than just fix it and we get to make it a new cool space.

Things I learned so far which I didn’t know:

You have to have a certain ratio of square footage of space to windows to provide light and ventilation to meet building code. We had not even close to enough. Because it’s one big room it has to have a lot of windows. Windows take 8 months to get right now. We ordered our windows in May and we are keeping our fingers crossed we will have them by the time we need them.
In 1927, walls of houses were insulated with newspapers sewn into booklets. We spent a lot of time crawling into the knee walls and rafters getting measurements so we could draw up plans and we pulled out fragments of December 1927 newspapers written in Norwegian (?).

You don’t want to have to figure out where to store the contents of an entire floor of your house for a year and a half. I just have one word for you about the state of my basement: yikes. Our basement is unfinished, so usually I have a “wet” studio for painting and a photo studio set up down there and it’s our space for working on projects like fixing computers or unpacking craft shows so things don’t have to be all over the dining room table. Next week I am rearranging, organizing and taking as many things as I can to goodwill to try and clear some space for the electrician and plumber to work. I can’t even tell you how nice it’s going to be to have the basement and upstairs usable again.

Asbestos abatement for those lovely floor tiles starts next week. Wish us luck!