2017 in summary - picture heavy!

Strap in, this is going to be a big post! My life went totally off the rails in March when I got my second promotion in 6 months to a Director job. It's demanding and crazy and I love it. But it means things like blogging took a serious nose dive. So I'll try to put this in some sections and you can skim past anything that doesn't interest you. ;-)

Farm
The farm had a decent year this year, the only major weather event was that it was dry. That means hay prices are really high and Ryan is scrambling to find some that's not ridiculous. 

We also had a major hailstorm in June like nothing we've seen before. It was like someone was firing a machine gun against the side of the house. Between the house and barn it did about $40,000 worth of damage and we're still working on getting that fixed (insurance covered it). It even dented the metal roof of the house, which is supposed to be able to handle "class 4 hail" (whatever that means). Here's a picture of my lilies right after the storm:

But our beef and chicken are still awesome and I can occasionally convince Ryan that we can eat some of it instead of selling it all! ;-)

Quilts

I have still made time for quilting because it's vital to my well-being to do so! 

I made this one for a fundraiser for my son's school, if you look at the quilting it is a "deconstructed pocketwatch". It is about 40" x 50" or so

 Detail:

My modern quilt guild issued a paint chip challenge, which is where you draw three paint chip colors out of a hat and have to design a quilt using those colors (we could add white and black). So here is what I designed, which I really like but Ryan is not a fan. It is a modern take on waves crashing on a rocky beach, like the ones you find in the NW, like in Oregon. It is smaller, about 3 feet square.

There was also a Riley Blake challenge, which is where they sent me some fabrics to make a quilt out of. I liked the fabrics, but this quilt ended up way too busy. It's very small, about 30" square. It needed more places for they eye to "rest". 

I was blessed with a new nephew this year, so I made him an I-spy quilt. This one is about 50 x 60".

This one might have been my favorite quilt this year. I made it to benefit the United Way at work and a co-worker bought it. It's a decent sized wall-hanging, about 45x55". 

This one is a pattern from Gudrun Erla using her strip ruler. I intended it for our bed originally, but Ryan said it was too busy so I finished it differently and gave it to my stepdad. It is queen sized. 

I also made another little baby quilt with boats on it, but it doesn't have a destination. There's a strip of minky fabric down the center that is super soft.

This last quilt was created for my main quilt guild challenge, which was called "Pretty Pink Petals." The quilt had to be 30"x40", have a pieced background, have applique, and have pink flowers. So this is my quilt "Pretty Pink Pedals." Ha!

Another member of my household also finished her first real quilt! She did most of the work, including the rotary cutting (closely supervised), piecing, and all of the quilting! So so proud!

Family

So that brings us to family goings-on. 

Z loves Lego, and here he's playing with them at the science center. 

Ryan and I went to Sunset at the Vineyard at Penoach Winery several times over the summer; it's probably my favorite Friday night activity!

This was also the first year I took Z to family camp with us, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

And of course we saw the eclipse. We drove down to the middle of nowhere Missouri to watch it in the line of totality, and it was 100% worth the 4-hour drive!

And I have two big kids in school, with their obligatory "first day" picture:

H loves being a farm girl more and more each day. She's started collecting eggs with daddy sometimes and here she is being a quintessential farm girl, including night gown and muck boots. 

 Here are the kids at halloween. I had Mario and Wonder Woman. I made Mario's overalls, but the Wonder Woman dress was purchased (I made the bracers). 

Lastly, the biggest impact on family life was that Ryan decided to run for the Iowa House of Representatives in Des Moines. He announced in August and hasn't hit high gear quite yet for campaigning, but has been working on some of the behind-the-scenes framework and attending lots of local meetings and events. 

We hope you have a great new year, I look forward to what 2018 will bring!

New placemats, costumes, and completed hearth

As usual, life got away from me and so did the Fall. We had a very long warm Fall here, which is unusual but was generally welcome. Ryan has been starting the chicken building by pouring a concrete pad, I believe more on that can be found on his blog. He brought me in for some of the two-person work, like leveling out the top of the wet concrete.

 I hadn't ever done that before, it was interesting to do! Just add it to my list of "Skills I never thought I would have."

The 6-month-old calves tend to come investigate every time we're out there, they're very curious what we're doing in the hay lot. There was another one in the following picture as well, but I couldn't capture them all in the same shot. 

In September we went to the Apple Festival at Penoach Winery and tended a booth for the business. It was an OK day, but I'm not sure if we will do it again.

With Thanksgiving over recently, I was proud to get my turkey boiled down for stock already! I took a picture, primarily for posterity.

In sewing/quilting news, I went to upload pictures and discovered I've completed more than I thought I had in the last few months. I sewed myself a new laptop bag for work because the one I had was worn out and the one I could get from my company was just less interesting to me.

I lined it with some pretty pink fabric and edgestitched it in pink as well to add a personal and feminine touch.

I also finished a quilt from the scraps of my lone star Christmas quilt that is serving as a seasonal throw on my couch.

Also in quilting, I replaced the placemats that I made 6 years ago, and this time I made 16 of them!

They're a bit of a modern aesthetic and I also made matching napkins and a table runner.

Lastly, it was Halloween season and for the first year I really did it justice (in my opinion). H wanted to be Tinkerbell, which means she needed wings in addition to her costume. Here is the picture I found online that I used to base the wings on:

I did some work with a couple of wire coat hangers to get the basic shape:

Then I got some white tights and stretched them over the frame:

Then I tightened them up and sewed it in place, and attached some elastic:

The last step was to draw the swirly patterns on the back with silver puff paint that I had on hand.

I also made some shoe covers out of fleece and big white pom-poms. 

I picked fleece because I don't have to hem it and it has a bit of stretch to it. I also made both kids' costumes out of fleece. 

Z wanted to be Mario (the kid loves Mariokart if I haven't already mentioned it) so we bought the hat and the red sweatshirt and I made the overalls out of--you guessed it--more fleece. His mustache is a piece of felt taped on.

Ryan decided to also get into the fun with his blue Carhartts and a hat of his own. 

H has shown an interest in sewing, so she is sewing an Elsa dress from the movie Frozen for one of her dolls (with heavy help). I'm trying to get her to do as much on her own as she can, so here she is cutting out the pattern.

I also finished the hearth project that was mentioned a couple of blog posts back, and it looks awesome. I'm not sure when it will get a wood stove, but it will at some point.

I've been working a lot more than previously and took this mirror selfie on a business trip, so I thought I'd include it on this blog since I usually post about Ryan's work and not my own! ;-)

The kids are doing well in school, Z is enjoying Montessori. His spatial reasoning is especially good. 

I also failed to post first-day-of-school pictures, so here are some:

We all hope you have a happy early winter season, perhaps I'll get another post in before Christmas!

Driveway and Steampunk

So recently we decided we weren't going to be able to make much progress on the driveway at the pace we were going. Here are some pictures Ryan took in early November after he did some more dirt moving.

He was making some progress, but the little tractor's backhoe was badly underpowered for the amount of dirt that needed to be moved.

A lot of the work was in taking down the trees, which Ryan did do. So we hired a local guy to dig the driveway. One Monday Ryan went out to the site to do more tree clearing and found this waiting for him:

So with the right tools, the guy did it in about a day. I feel fully vindicated by the whole process because everyone kept telling me how crazy this driveway was going to be, and it was going to be steep, and yadda yadda yadda. But I did the math (those of you who know me are not surprised by this) and suspected it would actually work quite well. You can see the road off to the left in the picture above, so you can also see that the driveway isn't parallel to it. Yet I think it's perfect and it avoids the dreaded waterline the county decided they didn't want in the ditch.

Here is the equipment the guy used to dig the driveway; he's not messing around:

I was mad at Ryan for not taking a picture of his little tractor next to this monstrosity of a backhoe just to show how big it is.

We also now have gravel on this driveway, but we haven't been back out to look at it. I'll post pictures next time. Everyone seems to keep asking me whether we will pave it, and the answer is definitely no. This is one of those country/city things, I think. Not only would it be expensive (the driveway is something like 200 feet long), but you actually don't want a paved driveway if you are going to drive a tractor or other equipment on it. It's hard on both the driveway and the equipment tires (and those suckers are PRICEY!). 

Now back to the old place, we discovered that cattle will eat fallen leaves if they are raked into a bit of a pile. That and loaf in it. Here a mama and relatively new calf had a very autumn moment together. We don't manage our herd access to bulls very closely, so we basically have calves at any given time. We had one born just a couple of weeks ago. So far our cows have done very well with this, which is nice. Cattle have a long lead time to beef, but they are some of the easiest animals we deal with.

Sheep also spent some time in the front yard right before moving to their winter pasture. I love that sheep mean you really don't have to mow the yard. It's extremely easy to see where the manicured yard idea came from, because after the sheep our front yard really does look like someone mowed it. I think we had the mower out about 3 times all summer. The yard is a little brown in this picture just because the sheep had been there too long. You can also see cattle in the background on their winter pasture; we have quite a herd going. 

Another thing that happened this month was that I turned 30. Not much of a milestone, but a little one just the same. A lovely friend of ours hosted a joint costume birthday party for me and her husband (who turned 30 about a week before) and we decided to go steampunk. (Don, before you ask me what steampunk is, click the link and Wikipedia will tell you....) We were more "steam" than "punk" generally.

I had great fun making a costume. Ryan found this duster on Craig's List and made his fake gun out of a variety of parts. I made him a vest and kerchief. Z we just put in a vest we happen to own, he wasn't very steampunk. But at the age of one, he wouldn't keep any of that stuff on anyway. I'm wearing a corset I got years ago from Forever 21 and has been hanging in my closet, along with a basic button up shirt. Then I made a hat and used some safety pins to pin up the skirt I wear with my renaissance garb over a petticoat I'll be wearing under a bridesmaid dress for my brother's wedding next month. 

I also made a necklace out of odds and ends from Michael's craft store, among other places. 

Here is the skirt pinned up. This worked pretty well, but the petticoat was definitely needed as well (and is under the skirt in this picture). 

And here's a closer view of the hat.

Here's H, who is actually wearing an Alice in Wonderland dress my parents had custom made for me at about her age. It's a little big for her, but it was OK and I steampunked it up a little bit. The hat had some cards (a queen of hearts, a 10 and a 6 in nod to the mad hatter) and feathers on it, along with a white rabbit. She's playing with a key and glass vial I had at her waistline, and there were a few gears scattered throughout. She LOVED wearing her hat and would not take it off. 

In other crafting, I tried my hand at ombré dyeing. I have a quilt idea in mind, but couldn't find an ombré long enough, so I decided to make my own. I rigged up what can only be termed a "contraption" in our kitchen sink to do this, while Ryan looked askance at me and tried very hard not to ask. I used supplies from Dharma Trading Company, and I have to say I highly recommend them. Good prices, fast delivery, good tutorials. I actually decided to mix up super concentrated dye, then lower the fabric a little at a time while also adding water. I think it worked better than trying to mix in dye and raising the fabric up out of the water if that makes any sense. I took enough pictures for a tutorial if anyone wants one (leave a comment and I'll post one). 

And here is the result! I'm very happy with it, it will suit my needs perfectly. I didn't need perfectly straight lines because I'll be cutting it up for a quilt. I just needed a smooth progression. Hopefully you'll see the quilt someday too!

Ryan also insists I post a picture of my Thanksgiving schedule.

Is this unusual? Don't other people do this? I save it every year, and then pull it out the next year and rewrite it. I still inevitably forget to put something on the schedule anyway, this year it was the stuffing. It doesn't take long, though, and I so far have always managed to remember it. We had a small Thanksgiving this year, with only seven adults and only my two kids. It was kind of nice to not have 16-20 people in my house, though. 

As usual, the kids are growing well. Here H is showing me a "friend bug" she caught. She has named box elder bugs friend bugs because they are slow moving (translation: easy to catch), do not bite, are common, and are surprisingly long lived in captivity. She doesn't much like spiders, but she could catch friend bugs all day.

Z celebrated his one year birthday, and Ryan's parents brought us a cupcake for the occasion. He basically posed for this picture. 

It's like these two pictures of the kids are the same pose! They are each a variation of "Look what I have, Mommy!!"