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Dissecting Friday the 13th and Other Household Superstitions

HOLIDAYS

House Superstitions

For centuries, people have viewed Fridays and the number 13 as omens of bad luck. And when the two combine on the calendar, it’s double the trouble.

Of course, I’ve never bought into this idea; after all, I was born on a Friday the 13th (during a full moon at that!) and I think I turned out all right. Still, it’s worth examining the Friday-the-13th legend, along with a few other household superstitions that may interest all you handypeople and homeowners.

Friday has been considered unlucky since at least the 14th century, when Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales associated the date with bad fortune. Old wives’ tales mark Friday as a day of inauspicious beginnings—some sailors are still reluctant to begin voyages on this weekday. Then there are the religious beliefs: that Jesus was crucified on Friday, the same day of the week Abel was slain by Cain and Adam was urged by Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

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Reblooming Amaryllis

GARDENING | CARE
Amaryllis Bulbs

Courtesy of whiteflowerfarm.com

Far from a one-time treat, forced amaryllis bulbs in a pot with their big trumpet flowers are one of the bright spots of winter.

Since amaryllis are native to tropical environments, they love lots of water and humidity. To mimic those conditions, give your plant—foliage intact, flowers pruned—as much light as possible. Water often and fertilize twice a month.

Once the frost threat has passed, put your amaryllis outside for the summer in a sunny spot until the weather chills. Bring it indoors to induce a dormant period, keeping it in a dark place for eight weeks, withholding water. Then put it in a sunny window and provide lots of water… keep your fingers crossed for another bloom. Unfortunately, if the foliage appears first, then you have a stubborn amaryllis. Fertilize more frequently and try again next year.

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Hammer Time: The Art of Roy Mackey

PEOPLE & PLACES

As you know from my prior posts, I am as fascinated with tools for their purpose and usefulness as I am for their shape, design and—dare I say—beauty. Take the hammer as an example. Here’s a tool that comes in a variety of sizes and shapes from ball peen to claw and gets called into action for everything from hanging a simple picture hook to re-nailing a floor board or building a wood deck. Despite its relative light weight, a firm grip on the lower portion of the tool’s shaft provides just the right strike-action for the user to sink a nail, straight and secure.

Roy Mackey's Hammer with Nails

Roy Mackey's "Nails"

For Canadian sheet metal sculptor Roy Mackey, the hammer holds a similar, albeit more artistic, fascination. A couple years ago, thinking about the relationship of the hammer and the nail (how the one is always being driven by the other) led Mackey to create Revenge—a reworked Mastercraft hammer with the head impaled by a nail. Since then, he has produced a whole series of hammer-based sculptures by heating the tools and then stretching, splitting, cutting, combining, wrapping, molding, or re-shaping them into playful, inventive works of art.

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Add a Decorative Touch to Your Woodworking Shop

WORKSHOP | DESIGN

Woodworking Shop

There’s no reason why your woodworking shop can’t be easy on the eyes, outside and in. The one pictured above was created in order to write and research my book Bob Vila’s Workshop. We trimmed it out to reflect the Greek Revival homes and other structures common to the area it’s located in. (Adding to the old-timey feel of the place are the old doors and windows bought at salvage).

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Household Hints: Vintage Trading Cards with a DIY Theme

PRESERVATION

I am a casual collector of vintage paper goods and assorted ephemera. My stash includes vintage dictionaries and encyclopedias, postcards, baby scrapbooks, and handwritten recipe files. Recently, at a Saturday morning yard sale, I scored a different type of collectible—a Wills’s Cigarette Picture Card Album filled with 50 “Household Hints” trading cards.

I was curious about my $2 find and thus launched a Google rampage. I learned that “cartophily” is the hobby of collecting cigarette cards, and so that makes me a very part-time cartophilist. Cards, originally used to simply fortify packages of cigarettes, later became vehicles for advertising and artful trading cards. W.D. & H.O Wills, a division of Imperial Tobacco, was the first tobacco company to issue sets of cards. In 1895 “Ships & Sailors” inaugurated the card craze which lasted until the early 1940s.

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Outtakes: My Interview with Celerie Kemble

PEOPLE & PLACES
Celerie Kemble

Photo courtesy of Douglas Friedman

The week before the holidays, I had the chance to talk *color* with Celerie Kemble, the New York and Palm Beach interior designer whose most recent book, Black & White (and a bit in between), recently landed on shelves. Before long, however, Celerie and I found ourselves discussing, of all things, light bulbs.

With incandescent fixtures on the way out, designers—like the rest of us—are experimenting with compact fluorescents (CFLs), which are known for their sometimes harsh, cool, too-bright light. Not surprisingly, Ms. Kemble has found at least one way of modulating CFLs’ temperature…

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  • Kitchen >
  • New Knobs Give Cabinets a Lift

New Knobs Give Cabinets a Lift

KITCHEN | CABINETS | HARDWARE
Cabinet Knobs and Pulls

Restoration Hardware's Green Glass Cabinet Pull

One of the easiest ways to update your kitchen or bath cabinets—and add pizzaz—is to swap out the old hardware for new. You will have no problem finding an abundance of designs at retailers, from Home Depot to Restoration Hardware, which fit your style and budget. But, before you fall in love with a new pull, knob or handle, consider the following tips for selecting hardware:

If the plan is to replace existing pull handles with new ones, be sure to measure the distance between holes to make sure the swap requires nothing more than a screwdriver. Better yet, take the old hardware with you when you shop.

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Bob Vila’s $1,000-A-Week New Year’s Give-Away

CONTEST

Bob Vila's $1,000-A-Week-New Year's Give-Away

We know that some of your 2012 resolutions have to include a home improvement project or two.  That’s why we teamed with InComm—the nation’s largest provider of gift cards—to launch Bob Vila’s $1,000-A-Week New Year’s Give-Away.

Every week in January, starting today and running through February 1, you can enter to win $1,000 in InComm Do It Yourself Home Improvement gift cards, redeemable at some of your favorite retailers, among them: The Home Depot, True Value, Sears, Restoration Hardware, Sherwin Williams, and Menards.  Think of the DIY projects you can tackle with gift cards redeemable at multiple retailers and thousands of locations around the country.

To enter this week’s drawing and see official rules, click here.  And, remember you can enter once a day, every day throughout the contest period to increase your chances of winning.

To learn more about InComm’s Do it Yourself Home Improvement Gift Card, and a complete list of retailers where card is redeemable, visit the company’s website.

My Workbench Today

WORKSHOP
Bob Vila's Workbench

Photo: BobVila.com

Although I used to have a pretty big workshop back in Cambridge, things changed once we sold the place and became snowbirds. I’m not into any major projects down here in Florida, like building a dining room table, but I still need a place to do minor fix-its.

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