Baby Marans (chickens) ...

The first two Marans chicks - cute!

Chicks are hatching, on their due date, even!  These are Marans chickens; they are black and white (my camera is not working properly, they really are black and white), soft and fluffy, and really, really cute!  These were the first two, so far six have hatched and three more have pipped.  Out of fourteen eggs, that's not too bad.  (The best average I have had yet, anyway!)

One has been pipped since early afternoon and doesn't seem to have made any progress at all.  I am steeling my resolve to NOT help him; I tried that with an earlier batch, and the four that I "helped" were weak and mostly died a slow, lingering death.  (Much as I hated watching them waste away, I couldn't bring myself to help them in that area.)  I have learned that opening the incubator frequently is a BAD thing, so I am limiting myself to once a day, to remove the chicks that hatched the previous day, and that is ALL.  If this chick has not made any progress by morning, I will attempt to help him then.  Hopefully by morning there will be six chicks hopping around in the incubator!  :)

On another note, I designed a quilt today to use a pictorial fabric I purchased four or five years ago.  The colors are absolutely beautiful, rich blues and greens and purples; the pattern is of birds, parrots, I think.  I am attracted to pictorial fabrics, but am not very good at using them.  I am getting better, however; I think I have a good design for this one.  When I get it together, I will post a pic.

Baby chicks and BATS!

Well, I have two newly hatched Moran chicks, with a third currently pecking its way out.  I have sixteen eggs, so hopefully there will be a hatching frenzy tonight!

There was a bat in my house today!  It was sleeping, hanging by its feet from the molding above the door.  Really cute, as long as it stayed sleeping ... Ben came home and scooped it up in a fishing net and let it go outside.  Well, he tried to let it go; it was clinging to the fishing net and didn't want to be "let go".  It finally crawled out and flew away.

I am still trying to decide which quilt to make next;  soooo many designs to choose from, sooooo many fabrics to select.  And, should I make a quilt to use up some of the fabric in my stash, or should I start working on a gift quilt (for Christmas)?  I probably should just dig through my stash, select fabrics to work with and get working; whilst my hands are busy with that project, I can be turning over gift-quilt options in my mind.  The key words here are "get working".  Just dreaming doesn't accomplish much.  I know; I have dreamed away a lot of this year.  But, does making quilts for nobody really count as accomplishment???
 

Just another day ...

I threw out two incubating eggs after candling them again last night (two weeks in, one week left before hatching!), and, I am pleased to report that neither was developing at all.  Well, I am not pleased that they were not developing, but I AM pleased that I correctly identified them as plain old eggs and did not disrupt the development of two baby chicks.  So, I now have sixteen eggs in the incubator.  Our hatch rate isn't very good, we may have to invest in a better (read, "more expensive") incubator.  Cross your fingers for these sixteen!!

It has been SO humid here all summer.  I have been picking blackberries, trying to get enough to have blackberry wine made for B (I, personally, am not a wine drinker), and my process has been as follows:  don jeans and long-sleeve shirt; wear visor; remove glasses (they fog up); spray pants, shirt, visor with mosquito spray; grab bucket and go to patch; pick berries until cannot take sweat dripping down face anymore AND/OR cannot take constant buzz of gnats and mosquitoes and other flying insects; come back to house; strip off hot, sticky, mosquito-spray smelling clothes; take cool shower and drink lots of water!  After three days, I collected two full buckets of berries.  (It is the end of the season; early on, I was able to pick a full bucket in less than an hour, but now I have to search a little harder.)  I delivered the berries to the wine-maker today; I hope B appreciates the wine!

Especially since he moved the steers into the far pasture, and so now, to feed them (which must be done daily), I have to haul two big buckets of grain from the barn out to the road and up the road to the pasture.  I have been just dumping the feed over the fence from the road, but I realize this is probably not a good idea.  In their constant quest for food, they might start nosing around this fence and knock it over, giving them full access to ... many, many acres of food, including our pumpkin patch and the neighbor's corn!

Last weekend B bought more pheasants (after the untimely demise of the chicks I hatched out).  Their pen is in the same pasture as the steers - we are hoping the steers will have a "keep-away" effect on any weasels/minks that might still be in the area.  Anyway, since I need to check on their food/water supply today, I will have to find a way in.  Some fences have gates that I can open, and some ... do not.  I have a feeling that this is going to be a two-shower day!

Jeans quilt ...

I finally finished a jeans quilt!  My daughter has been donating old jeans to my stash for several years, and last year I started cutting out circles.  The plan was to cut circles from the jeans, squares from scraps, and put them together with a square of batting.  This is a picture of the circles and squares: 

Circles cut from old jeans, squares from cotton scraps.

I was cutting out circles whenever I had a few extra moments (usually while watching T.V.).  My two-year-old granddaughter liked this part; she played with the circles whenever she was visiting.  (Once my dad, her great-grandfather, was sleeping on the floor and she covered him with circles!)

Eventually I had enough circles (around 200) to start putting the quilt together.  It was really kind of neat;  I sewed fourteen circles together to make one row.  I then sewed three rows together, and THEN starting adding the cotton squares (with batting underneath).  By doing it row by row this way, I could quilt the circle flaps down easily on my regular sewing machine.  This picture shows it almost complete:

Row of circles waiting for cotton squares

The next step is sewing another row of circles to the unfinished edge, and then insert the batting and cotton squares into this row.  What is really cool about this technique is the quilt-as-you-go aspect; the edges are finished as soon as the flaps are sewn down!





 

Back of jeans quilt - shades of blue!

Completed jeans quilt

Here is the finished quilt, front and back.

The edges of the circle flaps are unfinished, so they will fray and give the old-fashioned "cut-off jeans" look to this quilt.  I love it!!

And, since it is made of denim, it is nice and heavy and should be durable to use as an outdoor quilt.  I am planning on using it to place my grandchildren on (ages 2,1, and 6-months) when we go outside... I hope it gets a LOT of use! 

Quilting, then and now ...

Well, I spent several hours on the computer this morning job-hunting, and then, somehow, ended up with my quilt design software opened up and ready to go!

I started quilting when my first baby was one, over thirty years ago! As a sewer, I had plenty of scraps, so I made a twin-size scrap quilt, machine pieced and machine quilted. I then sewed a full-size top, using the traditional basket pattern with alternate plain blocks, and started hand quilting it. Instead of completing this top, I had three more babies and life took off from there!

I took up quilting again when my oldest was a senior in high school. I made a quilt (hand quilted) for his graduation, and then one for each of my other four children (all hand quilted - what can I say, I really like hand quilting!).

And then, the weddings started! As of now (seven years after the first wedding), I have made each couple a wedding quilt, all hand quilted, of course. I also made a double wedding ring quilt for my mom & dad, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The picture at the top of this blog was made for my oldest son and his wife.

Between all the hand quilting, I have been learning to machine quilt. Since all I have is my regular Viking machine, I sometimes have to quilt in sections, but .. I am improving all the time, hooray! I have made several sofa quilts for my house (much to the amazement of my husband, who says I always give everything away), and am now working to make a sofa quilt for each of my kids. (All ten of them - five originals and five in-laws!)

Last year for Christmas I completed one for my daughter and one for a son-in-law; this one is all flannel, snuggly and warm. You can't see the quilting, but there are snowmen quilted in the smaller rectangles, and snowflakes scattered around the rest of the space.

And this one, with the dragon applique, I made for my son-in-law. The son-in-law who is crazy about anything with dragons. (It is really not pink, the colors in the photo are not true, I don't know why.) This one is quilted with flame-like coils, in keeping with the dragon imagery.





And now, I am hoping to complete two more sofa quilts for this Christmas, one for each of my daughters-in-law. That is what I was designing this morning. One I want to make entirely of flannel again, which kind of means I should stick with four-sided pieces (no triangles, *sigh*), but the other just needs to be of greens and browns and can be whatever I want. :)

Those two quilts will both be machine-quilted (faster, and, I think, makes them sturdier for the heavy use a sofa quilt can receive). To alleviate my itch to hand quilt, I also am working on a design for another quilt for my mom & dad, per mom's request. She would like one in blues and greens; since blues and greens are my absolute favorites, I am happy to oblige!

Babies to the barn ...

Took the four baby chicks down to the barn today. They hatched a week ago, but I figured it would be easier to keep them watered and fed if they were here in the house, and, since there were only four of them, they fit in a box. AND, they are very quiet; if they were constantly peeping they would have been in the barn as soon as possible! But, they are growing VERY quickly; every time I check, their little food dish is empty and they have bedding filling their water dish, so, down to the barn they must go. Cute, cute, cute little things. Almost as cute as my granddaughters (ages almost three and one); they were here for the weekend and really liked the little chicks, too. The baby says "clu,clu,clu" when she looks at them!

I am going to try to candle the Moran eggs I have incubating. They were started ten days ago, but since the eggs are a deep brown ("chocolate" eggs!!), it will be hard to see any development. I think. I will have to try a few and see. I think it is WAY COOL to candle eggs and see what's going on inside. Noone else here seems to think so, but ... IT IS WAY COOL!!!