Reconnecting

Someone I mentor has been gently encouraging me to reconnect with this blog, so here is my feeble attempt to do so. 

The farm is going fairly well, we have about 30 head of cattle now and have stabilized at raising about 180 chickens a year and 50 turkeys. 

That may or may not be about to change as our poultry locker is shutting down after this season and we're not sure what we'll do about it. A new locker is opening up near Omaha, but at about twice the price as the current one. Regulations in this state are deeply unfriendly toward small poultry lockers, and federally inspected lockers require that you bring 5,000 birds at once (yeah, that's not happening!). Those are definitely owned by Big Ag.

I do continue to quilt, here is what is currently "under my needle" and in progress. It's a large quilt, which I am attempting to quilt to a level I am comfortable sending it to a show. 

I've also finished a few others since my last post, of course. Here is a scrappy baby quilt...

...that I made from the scraps of our new bed quilt. I hand-quilted the center of this one, so it took forever. I've been working on it since 2008 and finished it in 2018.

I made a charity quilt for Cradling New Life (love the power line fabric!!)

And finished up a hand applique project I call "boil the ocean", inspired by a trip to Hawaii (also started in 2008, I think!). 

I made a couple of denim quilts for gifts and to auction off for Ryan's campaign fundraiser:

And I participated in my first Quiltville Mystery Quilt by Bonnie Hunter (if you're looking for a positive, uplifting daily blog, hers is the BEST!), this is "Good Fortune". Not my usual style, but a lot of fun. The mystery aspect with weekly pieces to complete kept me going.

I completed a whole cloth silk quilt, which is a lot of lessons learned. I designed this pattern for my sister-in-law's wedding quilt, but that one was too busy to see the pattern. I have some red silk I'd like to remake this on, and do it better. 

Last, I've participated in the last two Cherrywood Challenges, themed "Prince" and "Bob Ross". I've made it into both tours of quilts, but not yet won a prize. That's my next goal, we will see what the theme is this year.

Family life is going ok, it doesn't ever seem to slow down. Ryan didn't win his campaign, he's currently contemplating when and how and where he will try again. 

He fairly promptly picked up a "part time" job as the general manager of the Iowa Food Cooperative, which is not quite as all-consuming as a political campaign, but not far off. 

We continue to ballroom dance, mostly at Red Friar's in Ames through the winter as our standing date night.

The kids also keep growing, H went to her first year at Clearwater Camp solo before we joined her at family camp. I swear she wasn't this unhappy at camp, I just timed my only pictures before leaving very poorly.

Z is more able to enjoy the Northwoods every year. 

Ryan's brother also got married this summer in Vermont, to a lovely woman who suits him well. This pic is Ryan's dad, sister, brother, and Ryan. Apparently I didn't get a good pic with the lovely bride!

And the kids started taking on more of the farm chores this summer as well (yay!). 

I think that's all the news that's fit to print for now!

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!

Date Night & Diaper Bag

A couple of weeks ago Ryan and I had date night. I was thinking, "Ah, we could go do something together. Relax. Get away from farm work for a couple of hours."
So what did we do for date night?
We picked up a hay trailer. From an hour's drive from home. And we had a babysitter for about 3 hours.

Sigh. Do you see the red thing in the foreground here? That's it. It really is pretty nice and well built, but we'll just chalk this up to things I never expected to do on date night before being a farmer's wife. 
On a related note, this picture is a little out of date and at this point we actually have steel on the roof of the building! You can stand in the building, in the rain, and not get wet. It's exciting.


Tonight I finished a new diaper bag for my daughter! I loved my old one, and I'm forever grateful a friend of mine made it for me, but I decided it was too small and was getting a bit beat up. So I got the pattern "Case Closed" from Stitchin' Sisters, and this is my result!

It might be too large, but I like it. After I packed it with what was in the other diaper bag, it didn't seem too big anymore... I modified the pattern heavily. The three pockets on the front exactly hold the pyrex 1 cup containers I use to transport her homemade baby food, which is a very custom need for us.

I tried not to go overly baby-like and not too floral, but Ryan may still feel it's a little feminine. Ah well, if he doesn't like it, he can make one!

I like the end result for a diaper bag, but I'm not sure how much I'd recommend the pattern. It needed a lot more diagrams, and the ones it had weren't very clear. I've definitely worked with better patterns, although this was my first bag I've ever made that had real structure and a zipper, etc. 


What do you think of it? Too feminine for any future boy babies, or OK?

Braided Spiral & Baby Shower quilts

Quilts! Plural! It's been a productive couple of days. First, I finished my braided spiral quilt, which I hope will someday go on Hazel's "big girl" bed. It's 60" x 80" so it's the biggest quilt I've made since my wedding quilt.

This fabric came from my mom's first cruise to Alaska in August 2008. I started it before I went on that same cruise with her in August 2009. So now in February 2011 it's done! It's machine quilted, and the lullaby Ryan and I sing to Hazel every night is quilted in the dark braid. 

I used the patterns wave chain and curvy key from Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Project. I absolutely love that blog for inspiration for freemotion quilting!! Since a friend of mine (Thanks Erin!) introduced me to it, my machine quilting has improved tenfold. 

This is the label on the back, with the words to Hazel's lullaby. It's a song from my childhood camp, composed by some of my fellow campers.

This is the back, I pieced it as I've been piecing quite a few of my quilt backs. I just like it when the back has a little bit of a surprise. It also saves me money not buying super wide backs to make it all one piece!


My second quilt that I finished is from Hazel's baby shower last year. The shower was on February 20th, 2010 and I finished it on February 7, 2011 so under a year is pretty darn good!

 This quilt is made up of 5" charm square blocks that attendees to the shower signed and added good wishes to. Then I put them together and quilted them.

I used heart flow between the signed blocks and left turn, right turn to quilt the border.

Next up: Grandma Hazel's quilt.

If anyone who reads this pokes around on that freemotion quilting website (or just plain has input), I'd love some thoughts on how to quilt this one. It's very imprecisely pieced so I was going to cover it with an all over quilting pattern.

Thoughts anyone? Curvy quilting? Straight? Both? Shapes? I'm currently a bit stumped!

Love,

A productive quilter itching for the next project

Hard day's night & My new favorite fabric website

Don't get pregnant and try to keep a garden. Remind me of this the next time I get pregnant!


But seriously, I'll probably do it again anyway. 


Back to business. This is what I did today. Here is the before picture with lovely model included:

Note the scale: most of those weeds are taller than I am.

And here is the after picture (no model this time, since I took the picture):

You can see our steps! You can see our sliding door! I even hauled off all the piles to the compost pile. I considered leaving Ryan to do that, but decided to have mercy on him. 

So for those of you who have followed my blog for a while, you now know why I don't have any lily pictures on here for this year. It's because they were choked out by vines and other crud until now.

I have also discovered my new fantasy website, called Spoonflower. You can design and print your own fabric! Yay! It's really expensive, but you can get an 8" x 8" test swatch for $5, and this is PERFECT for my I Spy quilts. These are quilts where you play the I Spy game with children using the quilt, and I've been gathering fabrics for one that has a different plant or animal block for every letter of the alphabet. The only problem is that "X", "Q", and "N" are really hard to find fabric for! 

Can you believe N is hard? I know! But think of animals and plants that start with N. You've got nuthatches, newts, nighthawks, and none of these have fabrics dedicated to them. So I have now created fabric using photoshop for a nuthatch and an x-ray fish, and will have to make one with quail on it.