Dahlias, slippers, and steak fry

The attempt to revive my blog continues! 

Fall is always a busy time on the farm, Ryan took two cows to the locker this last week and we have a batch of chickens out on the pasture along with our Thanksgiving turkeys. Weather has been good this fall for all of them; honestly with climate change it's getting harder and harder to raise poultry in the summer. June is hot more often than not anymore. 

I'm literally watching this little guy out my window as I type this up, as he wobbles around on new legs from being born this morning. It's a rainy day to enter the world, little calf!

The dahlias have been awesome this year, we ordered some bulbs from Old House Gardens and they've done beautifully. Dahlias are annuals here, although you can try to dig them up and replant them. I know Ryan will try. In the meantime, I've ordered some for next year already. ;-)

Under my needle this last week I finished a pair of slippers for H, which she's been begging for since July and I haven't wanted to tackle. I used this pattern, which was ok. I shortened it by 1.5" in both pieces to change it to a size 4 for her.

I lined them in minky, which makes them super soft inside, but I think is part of why I had trouble getting them to fit together. The minky is so thick I probably should make the top piece a bit larger to accommodate the bulk. The pattern is also a bit wonky, but is nice for how well it finishes seams. I'm also continuing to quilt the lake-and-sky quilt, which is super slow going. 

As it's early fall now, the kids had an impromptu dance session on the driveway while I sat in an Adirondack chair and watched the sunset. Simply lovely.

I also took the following pic when some friends and their kids were over Saturday afternoon last weekend:

I adore this picture because those three boys are sons of these three (oh so young-looking!) handsome guys:

Can you match the kid to the dad? None of the three are actually in the same order in both pictures! This is something I never had growing up - lifelong friends starting in elementary school, and I think it's completely awesome. 

Yesterday Ryan and I went to the Polk County Democrat Steak Fry. I've heard there were over 12,000 people there, and I believe it. It was crazy. I think all of the major democratic presidential candidates were there, as well as most of the "minor" ones. 

If you look closely, you might be able to see a podium in the background of that photo, in front of the giant Iowa flag! I don't have a candidate I'm supporting at this point, I really haven't made up my mind. There were a couple candidates (minor ones) that I'm definitely not supporting after hearing them yesterday. A couple were a total mess! Those ominous-looking rain clouds you see definitely did open up and pour right at the end of the event and on the last candidate speaking - poor guy. Based on the crowd reaction, I think the caucus in Iowa will come down to between Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, but we will see. Iowa's famous for last-minute momentum. 

The steak was surprisingly good, even if it didn't come from our farm!

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!

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!

Long update: Stuck, little sewing projects, winter goings-on

Fair warning: this is going to be a long catch-up post, and is likely to be scattered. I'm on a business trip and have access to internet, which is a rarity. My workplace blocks this blog site (for good reason), so I just have to have extended access to unbridled internet to update it.

First, farm news. In early November Ryan was working on our drainage behind the house and into a kind of a creek we have there, and got stuck. And by stuck, I mean really stuck:

We ended up calling a neighbor to pull him out of all of the muck, the truck just wasn't even beginning to cut it.

He had a little helper working back there too (on a different day, a little farther up the slope):

Speaking of little helpers, I had one come with me on turkey deliveries too.

We ended up doing Ames turkey deliveries amidst fresh snow, and at that point in the season snow was still a fun novelty!
Last Saturday we did our business taxes, and only filed for a $200 loss for the business this year! That is awesome and means we're getting much closer to profitability. Without writing off our mileage and our depreciation, we did make about $6000 last year. Total sales are around $18,000 and were about 40% beef, 35% chicken, and 25% turkey. I usually like to tell you all how we are doing as a business, partially because I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we are a business. I feel like the business had a good year overall, and I'm optimistic as we settle into our new location.

For my sewing, I mostly worked on a bunch of little projects. First up, Ryan needed a new Dopp kit. He threw out his old one when he opened it up to pack it for a trip and found it covered in mold inside and out. I did some googling to find a tutorial, and sewed something up:

The purple bag on the left is my Dopp kit (purchased from Target). That sad, mopey creation on the right was my first attempt. Not so much a win. So I thought about it, changed some dimensions, and tried again:

Much improved. This one actually looks like something and functions (and doesn't make Ryan cringe when he looks at it).

I also made some table runners, here is one example:

The pattern is "Triangle Frenzy" if you're curious; it's easy and fun and involves cutting striped fabric into 60 degree triangles.

For whatever reason, I also seem to know a lot of people having babies right now, so I made another small baby quilt, this one is about 3 ft square.

It was inspired by a pattern called Hugs and Kisses by Tamarack Shack, but I didn't quite get it right. Ah well, it's done and when it comes to baby quilts, done is definitely better than perfect.

On the house front, we've continued to work on all of the finishing projects. We almost got the outside painted before it got too cold to work outside, so this picture doesn't have all of the trim done and I do know it. Sigh. I blame Iowa winters.

I do like the color a lot, and I will get the rest of the exterior done when it warms up again!

Recently I've been consumed with tiling our master bathroom surround. This was an all-consuming project and I am SO glad to have it done. We actually took our first shower in it this morning, so that made today a good day for me.

Most of the tile is just basic 6" off-white tile, but my one luxury here was these beautiful heron tiles from a company called Earthsong Tiles in Canada. It's a couple that does them by hand out of their home, and I just love them. Here's a closer look:

I also had a little helper working on cleaning grout with me a few days ago, she did a nice job helping!

My last house/crafting item doesn't classify well so it's going to go here. When my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I inherited a piece of needlepoint from my great grandmother. It's floated around my house in a horrendously ugly frame since then:

My apologies if this frame is your style, but it's certainly not mine. So I had it reframed and it's found a place in our bedroom.

I also had them frame it a little tighter to get rid of some of the awkward space around the embroidery, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

The kids are doing very well, and are happy and healthy. When fall color first started, we made some window decorations using clear contact paper.

The kids were much more into this than I expected, with H making houses and flowers and Z making storms and monsters (can you find them below? Some imagination required).

Then in October we took a family trip to Disneyland with my dad, stepmom, brother, and sister-in-law. It was a great trip and it was nice to all go somewhere together.

For Halloween we had a cowboy and a princess. Not a lot of creativity here, I'm hoping they forgive me when they're older. There was a lot going on in October.

For Christmas, we did our traditional tree hunt, which meant trekking into the pasture and chopping one down. It definitely had a very seedy look to it, but it worked! (and there's my ham of a daughter being a camera hog.)

H and I also took a ski trip in December where she had her first skiing experience. Here we are all ready to go:

And here she is at the end of her first day, tired but you can see the satisfaction and accomplishment in her face. She enjoyed it and did well.

And since this blog has been a little heavy on my daughter, we'll finish up with some pics of my son.
Z sandwich - Daddy, Z, Nermal!

And Daddy indulged him with a motorized toy train engine for his train track. It's like heaven for him. Those of you who know us well know that I have a general "no batteries" rule in my house for toys because all of their noises and lights drive me up the wall. I hereby pin this one on my husband and maintain that I'm still trying to hold the rule...

And finally, the last few days he's been sick and on Saturday morning we persuaded him to take a morning nap in our bed. We lured him in with cuddles and let him fall asleep, where I couldn't resist taking a pic.

Sleep well, little one!