So, I had this trunk.

I wanted to store yarn in it, but I didn’t want the yarn to catch on any of its particle board walls (which were a little rough).

My first plan was to line it with cedar closet paneling from Home Depot, but when I got to the store, I discovered that the paneling was not, as the web site had implied, actual cedar, but was just a sheet of hardboard veneered with a cedar print. So much for that plan.

So I decided I would hit my remnants at home, and line it with fabric. I knew I had fleece, which I planned to use for batting — both to make it nice and soft on the inside, but also to ensure that any splinters from the particle board wouldn’t work their way through the lining. Then I figured, I had some blue fabric I could use to line it.

I got home and raided my fabric stash, and discovered, to my pleasure, that (in addition to the plain blue cotton I had been thinking of using) I had in there a yard of purple velveteen I’d picked up sometime. I eyeballed it a little and decided to use that to line the trunk.

First, I started by gluing the fleece to the trunk with ordinary white glue. I used about a whole bottle of Elmer’s school glue. (I was going to staple it in, but the staples didn’t want to go in, so I gave up and went to glue instead.)

Yeah, that’s safety orange fleece. It was left over from a project I never completed, which was some sort of vague idea of a warm and cosy, yet bright and obvious, jacket for cold-weather biking. It was really the most obnoxious shade of orange you can imagine. But, it was going to be hidden beneath other fabric so I didn’t care.

Then I started gluing the velveteen in. I cut pieces for the ends first and glued them in place, planning to have a single long strip the width of the trunk for both the long sides and the bottom (and the same on the top), which would overlap and hide untrimmed edges.

I had been trying to keep the edges neatly lined up with the brass edging on the trunk, using hot glue instead of white glue to ensure a good adhesion, but even so, sometimes there were little gaps. So I decided to edge it with some lace I got in a grab bag (and frankly had had No Fucking Clue what I would do with a whole spool of royal purple scalloped lace, so that worked out well for me), again using the hot glue gun.

Burned the crap out of my fingers a couple of times because the glue would come through the lace when I was tamping it down, but it all worked out well in the end. For now I have a swanky purple velveteen trunk! Just the thing for storing fuzzy yarns in:

But that was not nearly enough of a project for me, today. Despite the fact that I really only finished with the trunk at about 8 PM, I decided that what I really needed to do was to continue with my game plan for dinner: homemade spanakotiropita. In case you’re not familiar, that’s spinach cheese pie — layers of phillo dough, each individually brushed with butter, then cooked spinach with eggs, feta cheese, and sautéed onion, then more phillo. Phillo is a right pain in the ass to deal with. It’s paper-thin, and the sort of paper it’s thin like is the onionskin they print Bibles on. It dries out incredibly quickly — like, between the pile of dough and the pan 16 inches away — so you have to keep it covered at all times with a damp towel. And it’s so thin you have to be careful not to tear it with your pastry brush. Still: it’s delicious, and worth the bother. (Probably.)

One thing I noticed while chopping up my spinach:

Oh, excellent, because I was worried I accidentally got the really high-fat spinach.

Then, there was more spinach that would fit in my pot. There was so much spinach I had to cook some of it down and then add more. There was spinach everywhere, especially when I was trying to stir it and accidentally flung bits of it on the floor. There was a ginormous pot of spinach on my stove! No one could ever eat this much spinach!

(Well, until it’s surrounded by delicious feta cheese and enveloped in delicately browned, flaky, buttery phillo, anyways.)

And since I know everyone was dying to know how my little wool dyeing experiment — oh, hey, forgot to blog about that, didn’t I? So I handpainted some rovings:

And then I steamed them and let them dry and they looked like so:

From there, I went first to the very tediously, very carefully split and predrafted pencil roving:

And then I spun some up (just a little bit to see how it looked and felt; I was spending most of my time on MS3 this week):

And hey, speaking of MS3 — hey, look, ma, I finally made it past Clue 1:

Before I had my little mission to Mars to go out shopping in search of trunk modification supplies today, I had thought I might actually get finished with Clue 2, but then, you know… craft happened. Still, I think I might have a fighting chance to get to Clue 3 by this weekend. When, you know, Clue 5 comes out. Oh well, all’s fair in war and knitting.

But now: my delicious baked spanakotiropita should be cool enough to cut myself a chunk of it, and a glass of delicious Rheinhessen Auslese awaits it, and me. Hooray!