New eggs, laundry stand, and Luna

It's fully winter here, except that this year the world mostly forgot to do winter. The expected high tomorrow is over 60 degrees, and it's February! So strange. We've had less than a foot of snow all winter so far.

Nevertheless, we've had winter activities. In farm news, our laying hens started laying and have been producing about fifteen dozen eggs a week. Hooray!

Sometimes Ryan gets a little help sorting and cleaning them all.

For the house, we built a stand for the washer and dryer. It was a nice weekend project, and I really like the result. Before:

In progress:

After:

I especially love the space underneath that fits our laundry baskets.

I also want to show that we've not only kept an orchid alive in the window of our bathroom shower, but we got it to rebloom!

For quilting, I've done a few smaller projects. First, we didn't have Christmas stockings for the kids, so I made some for our kids and also our nieces and nephew.

They were fun to make, the one farthest back in this picture is mine that my grandmother made me long ago; I used it as a template.

I also made a denim quilt with regular quilting cotton in between the denim, which I love. It looks like stained glass and is very comfy.

A fellow farmer friend of ours had a baby (shout out to Prairie's Edge Farm!) and I had a small quilt in progress, so I finished it for her and sent it off.

It ended up "busier" than I would have liked, but it will work. I backed it with super soft fuzzy fabric.

H did some sewing of her own, and made an Elsa dress for her doll. Maybe not a "beginner" project, but she was persistent and willing to take direction and help from me and she did a nice job.

In family news we're attempting yet another dog. The border collie decided to herd a car, so she didn't make it. We installed invisible fence and adopted a Great Pyrenees. Here she is the day we adopted her, two months old.

We've named her Luna and she's going to be quite a bit bigger than this. She was born in September, so she still has a lot of growing to do. Here she is chewing on a stick:

In family life, H and I took our annual ski trip again in December.

She got to the point that she was going down real hills (instead of the learning hills for kids) and went down about 7 different slopes up about 4 different lifts at Breckenridge. Go girl, go!

Spring goings on, bird quilt, and Christmas Lone Star quilt

Things are going well in our neck of the woods, it has been much warmer out, after a very long, cool, dry spring. When I was working on staining the windows to our bedroom, this was my view. I had the window open (because of the fumes) and I'm pretty sure the cows were trying to figure out what I was doing:

The new calves have also been chasing one another around the farm, here the four youngest played their own version of cow tag:

Back in March, Ryan spent a lot of time chainsawing the scrubby timber out of our pastures and spent most of that month burning piles. Our pastures are now starting to look like someone cares about them again after more than ten years of neglect.

Ryan's also been trying to run a water line past our building, which means digging in the cow's area. The one in this picture is watching him dig raptly.

It's been a rough spring for chickens, we had an illness or bad ventilation or something and we lost about half of them. They are also growing very slowly, so we are going to have to miss our June deliveries. :-( Hopefully we'll be back on track soon.

Taking a walk the other day, I also took a picture of our house from the back side, so I thought I would post that too. The fence in the foreground between the trees marks the eastern edge of our property line.

The garden is also filling in nicely, here are our lilies and roses next to some violas. Ryan has done a very good job of starting and cultivating the garden, it looks great.

I also got a garden planted, here is what it looked like on May 15th. It now has a few things growing in it, but a raccoon got into it and seems to have eaten all the carrots. Many of the seeds were also very old, so were not viable (which I expected). 

In quilting news, one of the nice things about posting infrequently is that I get more done in the interim. 

I call this one Murmuration Minuend. A murmuration is a group of starlings, and a minuend is a quantity from which another is subtracted (so in 5-2=3, 5 is a minuend). 

It was not inspired by the poem "Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, but that poem does capture my thoughts very well. This is a modern quilt style and I have entered it in quilt shows and hope to find out soon if it makes it in. 

I also finished my Christmas lone star quilt, which I started when I was pregnant with Z. I named it Christmas Star-light after a starlight mint.

The construction on this quilt is not amazing, but it will do. I think a Lone Star quilt is on the bucket list of many quilters, myself included, but I can now say I've attempted one. I might try to do another someday and do the construction more carefully, we'll see. In the meantime, I'll hang this one at Christmastime.

Recently my 18-year-old sewing machine has been showing signs of dying, piece by piece. So my father gave me an early Birthday/Christmas present and bought me a new one. It's a Bernina and I'm thrilled with it. It has a lot of features I've been drooling over for a while, but it also feels almost exactly like my old Bernina to sew with. I haven't decided what I'm doing with the old one; perhaps I'll pull it out when H is ready to sew. 

Speaking of H sewing, she and I actually had a little sewing session earlier this spring.

She made a small blanket and pillows out of couple fat quarters and loved it.

H also insisted that we participate in Earth Day this year, so we did so by going and collecting garbage out of our ditches. 

H has also started losing teeth, but so far she just lost the one. No other loose ones yet!

One of Z's favorite activities recently is making cookies with daddy. They do it about once a week, although I think in this picture he may have been helping make a cake for the birthday of a friend of ours instead.

Ryan and I have been dancing at the Red Friar's Dance Club in Ames as a monthly date night; it's been very helpful for us to have a night out once a month through the winter. I bought the dress I'm wearing in this picture when I took a trip to Singapore in February to visit my Dad, who is a professor there for a couple of years.

I'll leave you with these pictures of H, this is her on Friday at her last day of school:

As a point of comparison, here she is on the first day again:

Roofing and butterfly rainbow quilt

Well the world (aka my family) is asking for more house pictures and kid pictures and whatnot, so I know I'm overdue (again) for a blog post. Here is the latest pic of our house that I took on Thursday afternoon:

The funny looking dome chimney type things are our sky tubes, which are like round skylights. It helps with leaking and some of the other issues skylights often have to make them round instead of square. So the roofing is all on, that is a steel shake shingle Metro Metal roof in Oak. It really looks like "regular" shingles, I'm happy with it. 

Here's an inside pic, we're rapidly getting to the point where the inside is more interesting than the outside as things start to happen here.

You can see the sun tube in the upper left corner (and the box in the center), there are a total of three of them. As you can kind of see, we have HVAC, plumbing, and electrical rough-ins about done. Next is spray foam insulation on this coming Thursday, and then drywall on the Wednesday after that. 

Previous pics of the house between blog posts, in chronological order:

Siding about done

Roofing about done

The octagon window on the north wall of the garage. This window has a bit of a story, it is one of the (many) windows I bought when I was an intern at Pella Corp. We've moved it, and all of the other windows, together all over the place and it's come to symbolize the whole window experience. I like it, it's quirky, and I know it's not that unusual to have an octagon window. But my framer didn't want to put it in, and the rafters didn't have the spot for it in the gable where it was supposed to be. Our siding contractor actually put it in for me because I insisted it go in. It doesn't sound like drama now, but trust me, it was. :-)

In sewing and quilting news, I ended up having to redo H's slippers because the previous ones didn't stay on her feet. These have some elastic in them, so they're working better. 

I also had a quilt retreat, so I was able to make some progress on some projects. I finished a quilt for H's bed, which is very much to her taste. 

I actually like how it turned out, it's not as garish as I might have feared. It's very 4-year-old girl, but you're only a little girl once, right?

I quilted in spirals of butterflies, which was pretty fun to quilt and I think will wear well.

I also finished a smaller art quilt, but I'm not sure if it's really done yet. Here it is in progress without binding and without some lining enhancement I added because some of the colors in the flowers bled when I soaked it to block it:

I'll post a pic when I decide it's finished as well, the blue you see in the picture washed out because it was just there to mark the design.

On a more personal note, I drove by our old house today and was surprised to see the house still standing, actually. I suspect it will soon be torn down, and all other buildings (and a lot of the trees between them) are already down.

I also received the diploma for my MBA in the mail, which feels good to be done.

The kids are doing well, both growing all the time.
H at the butterfly garden:

Z looking fabulous (note the shoes):

Z building a tower (I seem to have more pictures of Z than H this month):

Z playing with trains:

Four generation picture with Ryan's grandpa and dad (yes, it's an iPhone in Z's hand. Please don't judge me, visiting a nursing home with a two-year-old is a challenge I am happy to use modern technology to alleviate):

Ryan and I also went ballroom dancing last Friday night for a date night and had a fabulous time.

And here's what happens when the kids work their way into the picture:

So until next time, I'm glad it's getting warmer out, and good luck with your own happy chaos!