March 5, 2017 – Old trick – measuring with your hand

          When I was a young bride my husband and I went shopping for something in a lumber store without a tape measure.   I watched him spread the fingers on one hand and measure a piece of wood from his thumb to small finger and run it down the board and he was satisfied the length of timber he had selected for our purpose would suffice.

          Immediately when I got home [while he was working on the project] I measured my extended hand and I have known that hand measurement for years.  It comes in handy when I am looking at bolt cloth and the tag doesn’t tell me if it is 45 or 54 inch or if something is on sale in a sales rack and the size is missing, I can easily measure across a flattened waistband and deduce if it is worth the trip to the ladies changing room.  I’ve even measured furniture on surprise sales to see if it needs to be looked at more closely or not.

          In my early days here in the county, I worked for a remnant cloth shop that had wooden bins of different types of fabric. Often a patron would ask – do you think there is a certain yardage?  I wouldn’t hesitate to pull out the fabric and do a quick from hand/wrist to shoulder measurement and deduce the rough yardage.  The first day it took me only a matter of moments to verify the distance between my shoulder and one particular set of fingers and a certain bend of my wrist to come up with the 36 inches on a continual basis.  [It was a private satisfaction when I came within inches of a measurement of many yards from the “guestimate-out-stretched-arm” method compared to the cutting table ruler.]  I bet none of my patrons knew that smile was not at them or from a happy disposition, but on my getting so close to the actual measurement.     

          I still don’t remember that first project, but I do remember the spreading of his hand as a measuring tool.  And, I must say, my husband had beautiful hands then - something that I admired and had caught my attention when we were first dating.  All these years later they are still beautiful hands. 

He was in management in the last 3/4ths of this career, but prior to that he worked his way up from the plastic shop floor into management and those hands have seen their share of hard, dirty work.   He knows how to fix lawn mowers, and other handy man things, so his pretty hands can sometimes get rather dirty – but he always is fastidious about getting his hands clean after a project.

So, why am I telling you all of this?

The other day I noticed patio cobble bricks were on sale and I forgot to take my tape measure with me to be certain I was picking up the same size I had gotten a few years back. They seem to have more of a variety now and they are slightly different sizes.  I am extending a walk from the patio out into the lawn so that my husband doesn’t have to swerve in to cut too close to the current walk at the same time avoiding a bush that likes to jump out and scrape up his arm.

          I didn’t hesitate to spread my hand and measure the cobble bricks to verify they were the same size.  I have an 8 1/4^th inch spread . . . something I have known now for as long as I have been married to my husband; its a great old trick.