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!!!

Weasels attack ...

Very, very sad day. Two days ago we had over forty pheasants in the coop, and today we have none. NONE. We have always had raccoon problems on this farm; the chickens will be merrily rambling about and then one day I will notice a pile of feathers and the next day another pile of feathers, so B sets traps, catches the 'coon, and the chickens are safe for another bit of time.

But, weasels??? Evidently weasels are great to have around, they eat rats and mice and other annoying things. Until the rats and mice are all gone; then they will raid poultry barns. And kill everything off in one night.

So, the good news is we have no more rats or mice. The bad news is we have no more pheasants.

Vacation Bible School ...

I am in charge of the music for Vacation Bible School, which started yesterday. I was excited about being asked to help; I have been out of work for a year and starting to feel kind of ... worthless, so being needed is definitely a boost to my self-esteem.

I am good at organizing things, making lists and planning schedules, but not so good at leading the participants. Well, I am actually GREAT at leading as long as my followers follow, BUT as soon as someone departs from my plan, then I just do not know how to get back on track. So, I was really looking forward to working with the other volunteers, watching and learning how they handle the variances of a group of kids.

And, it has been fun! I have learned it is okay to change the plan mid-stream (which I knew already, of course, but, changing the plan is never IN the plan!), and I have learned that we do not all need to do everything. By that I mean that while I am teaching the songs to the kids, the woman in charge of outdoor activities can be outside setting things up, and someone else can be organizing supplies for the art project, etc. So, we don't need to come really early and stay late to prepare, which is nice.

I have become more involved in the art projects, which I also enjoy. Yesterday we planted seeds (turnips, of all things! Turnip seeds were the only seeds left at the store Sunday night!!) and today we made God's eyes. Tomorrow we will be face painting, and Thursday ... I don't think we've planned that far ahead yet!

I am spending time in pursuit of a new job, but it is nice to be useful now, as well. God bless the volunteers!! :)

A new chicken ...

One baby chick hatched today! This is from a batch of only ten eggs, hopefully more will hatch today or tomorrow. Since we no longer have a rooster (it attacked my two-year-old granddaughter, so that rooster was Sunday dinner), all of the eggs may not be fertile. (We gathered eggs for five days after the rooster was dispatched.) I candled them after a week and they seemed to be developing, but I never checked them after that, so we will have to wait and see. The one hatched chick is really cute!

I do have another incubator set up with eighteen eggs that should be fertile; they came from my son, who does have a rooster, and they are only two days old. So, in three weeks I will be waiting for them to hatch!

My hatching record is not good so far; out of close to 300 pheasant eggs, I successfully hatched out only about fifty, in three separate batches. Supposedly chickens are easier to hatch (pheasants need high humidity as well as the correct temperature), so I certainly hope I hatch more than my current 10%!!

Wow, I just went outside to get the dogs in, and it is HOT. According to the thermometer, it is 92 degrees IN THE SHADE. HOT!!

Grandmother duties ...

Baby Bradley has arrived, cute as ever! He just keeps growing, he is bigger every time I see him!

Grandma (that's me!) was asked to babysit on Monday while the kids go canoeing. Of course I said yes, I will LOVE to. Then I canceled a meeting I had on Monday and rescheduled it for Wednesday.

My question is this: why, when I am unemployed and my days are filled with empty hours, is it on the day I actually have something planned that I have the opportunity to see my grandchild??? Much as I love my children and grandchildren (and I do, I love them all very, very much), sometimes it seems as if there is no ME anymore, just wife, mother, grandmother ...

Ah, well ... the days may be long but the years are short. Bring on the babies! :)

Bradley ...

My son and his wife are coming home today for a visit, bringing my six-month-old grandson with them! He is so sweet, so happy - I can't wait to see him!

Today will be spent cleaning the house (I tend to put that off until company is coming), airing out the upstairs guest rooms and putting fresh sheets on the beds. AND, setting up the Pack'N'Play for Bradley!

Maybe I will squeeze in a little time to add more squares to my jeans quilt. One must take time to relax, right ??!

Pictures for previous post ...

As a new blogger, I didn't know how to put pictures where I wanted them, to I only added two to my original post. (I am a blogger! My kids would be impressed!!)

Now that I have learned how to move pictures around, I am going to add some now.


This is the sofa quilt (60 * 72) I made for my older daughter for Christmas. Because it is made of flannel, I needed a simple design. It is machine quilted with snowmen in the smaller rectangles, and snowflakes scattered everywhere else. It is a very snuggly, warm quilt.








I have one son-in-law who loves all things with dragons, so I designed this quilt just for him. It is really NOT pink, the coloring in the photo is off for some reason. It has a 5" black border all the way around, which really frames it well. It is machine quilted with swirls, kind of like dragon's fire-breath. He really liked it - he told my daughter that his quilt was way cooler than Ann's (the receiver of the flannel quilt), and he was really glad his mother-in-law supported his dragon habit!

I Am, I Said ...

I have been unemployed for over a year now. Last summer was GREAT, kind of like my college days (many years ago), with the summers off. I completed a hand-quilted quilt I had started in January (the green/brown quilt on the right). And in three months I made a hand-quilted, full-size quilt (with chickens on the back, shown above turned over to the right side) for my middle son. In three months!! Life was good.

Last fall was GREAT; I have five kids, all married, so that makes a houseful for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was nice to have time to focus on them without work interfering. I was hoping to make a sofa quilt for each couple for Christmas, but I only finished two. (I also made a wedding quilt and several baby quilts, all machine-quilted.)

After Christmas, my first grandson was born. (One of the afore-mentioned baby quilts was for him - incorporating Sunbonnet Sam as a fisherman. I used this block in the quilt I made for his father when he graduated from high school. Both quilts were extremely fun to make!)

And now, it is summer again... I am working on a jeans quilt, using up a box of worn out blue jeans my daughter gave me. It is pretty neat, I found the idea on line. When I figure out how to post links, I will do that.

And when that quilt is finished, I want to make a petroglyph quilt! We went to Las Vegas for my niece's wedding this spring, and toured around Arizona and Nevada a bit - Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Red Rock Canyon, AWESOME places!! One of them (Red Rock, I think) had petroglyphs, and I think they would be really cool in a reverse applique quilt. Since a petroglyph is made by carving into the rock, the upper layer of rock is removed; in reverse applique, the upper layer of fabric is removed, revealing the bottom layer. Get it??

Well, that gets me caught up, I guess. Happy quilting!