Farmsitting, Wiring, and Reupholstery Work

It's been a busy week on the farm! Ryan went on a boy's weekend starting Thursday, so I've been tending the farm for 3.5 days. I know that man is overworked and underpaid, but I'll say it again! I am going to give that man a new job title: Bucket Manager. I learned that the state of our 5 gallon buckets around here are dismal. Half of them can only be used for feed and not water because they have holes in them, and most of the rest are missing their plastic covers for the handles. There are 2 decent buckets on the farm and the rest of the time I spent trying to figure out what to carry in what bucket! It's nuts! So I went to Theisen's tonight and splurged on two new buckets for $6. I meant to take pictures of the various sad and sorry buckets around the farm, but I'm afraid I failed at that so you'll have to take my word for it. 


On Monday Ryan had a bit of a run-in with our ram, Hades. Apparently Hades decided he didn't want Ryan around, even though he's usually even tempered and not a problem. I guess Ryan looked askance at one of his ladies, and that was that. Ryan limped for a couple of days, but was otherwise unharmed. Our video baby monitor that was in Ryan's pocket however, now looks like this:

We miss it! 


My stepdad has recently been a huge blessing with our new building. It's now almost completely wired (except into the breaker panel), and he has been down here 4 days in the last week and a half working on it!

Here he is putting on the exterior lights. 

Here's Ryan fiddling with something, I'm afraid it's pretty cluttered in the building right now with all the tools scattered about. 

So now the building has all 4 walls, roof, doors, windows, etc! The soffits are still open and so Ryan is going to shove some foam board up there before we have a local company come cover the inside with spray foam. It's going to be awesome!!
I actually helped quite a bit with the wiring (the lack of heavy lifting makes it something I can do) and had more fun than I expected. Wiring a building was surprisingly similar to wiring a machine at work!

Lastly, every time Ryan leaves for a guy's weekend, I try to tackle something on the home to do list so he feels like he comes home to a house that's better than when he left and so he feels like he can leave when he needs to. So here's this weekend's project! 
Ryan has a favorite chair. This monstrosity was actually in the house when we bought it, and he loves it. I failed to take a good "before" picture, so here it is after I took the arms and back off.

People would come over to the house and we would run out of seating around our kitchen island, so I would have to have people sit in this chair. It was embarrassing!

You can see the faded fabric in this one. It's, um, dated. 


So here it is after I reupholstered it!

I didn't do much to it, but I just recovered it so that it's clean and fabric actually covers all of the foam. I know, big deal. But I know that he is going to love it! Not to mention, I won't be embarrassed to offer it to guests anymore. At least until he and the cats wear this one out. 

Turkey Noises and Barn Quilt Progress

Turkeys really are interesting creatures. They're fun to watch, kind of like watching an aquarium. But one of the things that always struck me about turkeys is that they make a lot of noises, very few of which even remotely resemble "gobble." 
When they are really little, they predictably say, "peep peep peep peep!" Seemingly, always 4 in a row on the same note. Ryan and I now use this noise to indicate distress as one of our inside jokes; there was an occasion in Ikea where Ryan used that noise to mean "oh no, now what?!" and the rest is history.
But when they get older, the first adult noise they make is a bark. Then they make this contented little trill noise when they are content. In this video you can hear both of those noises.

They really only make a gobbling noise when they are in full adulthood, and even then it's rare. 
I took this video today, so you can see that the turkeys are growing well! It's been a very nice, mild fall and that has helped us. We process the first batch of these in a week or so! I think we're ready to be done with this season, Ryan especially needs a break from constant running around.

On the quilting front I have things in progress, as usual, but the barn quilt has looked like this for about the last two weeks:

 The yellow part is all painted, and the beginning of the pink is masked off, but that's it. It's not really an "I'm too busy" situation, more of a mood thing where I just haven't felt like finishing it. It's amazing how much dust comes down from our gravel road, it is well documented on the perfectly white paint. As a reminder, some day this thing will look like this:

Although the green is a little darker because it's what is left over from painting our sign.

And as is my recent habit, I end with a Little One picture (or two) of the day. Here she helps Daddy pick up fiberglass posts. The dog in the foreground is my mother's, we were watching it for a couple of weeks while she was traveling.

Our farm absolutely runs on these posts. Along with a little electric polyline, these things carry current all over the farm as well as hold the single wire to keep the cattle in (most of the time). Until they get too hungry and "storm the gate." 

Cast of Characters: Nermal

Nermal is our farm kitty. He was raised on the farm where we buy our feed and he charmed his way onto our farm. In some ways, he's a totally normal cat.

He's a little destructive. Here he got ahold of an egg carton.

Suffice to say, there wasn't much of that egg carton left. 

He's also a bit of a climber.

Here he is on the top of the bathroom door.

Then, of course, he likes to be in the middle of any quilt in progress. Quilts I'm working on are there expressly for his pleasure.

Even barn quilts in progress apparently count, as evidenced by his actions yesterday.

As of tonight, I now have the yellow painted on it, but as soon as it was marked up Nermal climbed aboard.


Somehow, he just knows.

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?

Calves and Hot & Cold spots

It's calving season here, and as of writing this I think we're up to three.

I say I think because calves are kinda little. They're shorter than the grass the cows are currently grazing, and they have a tendency to wander off. Can you tell there's actually two in this picture?

I think.


The other night Ryan and I were walking the field right after dusk and it was perfect weather to find the warm spots and cool spots on the farm. 

This is one of those things I never knew was real until I owned 40 acres. There are noticeable warm and cool spots in the landscape! And I mean they're about 100 ft in diameter and are probably 5 degrees cooler or warmer than the ambient temp. 

It's really pretty cool. I kept getting all excited when we hit a warm or cool patch and I'm pretty sure Ryan thought I was nuts.

As usual, I'll finish up with the little one picture of the day. Ryan always wanted to throw dry ice in a bucket of water because he heard it was cool. We had some left over from our locker date, so we did.

Our little lady grabbed a stick and spontaneously started stirring. All I could think was "double double toil & trouble." Halloween costume idea perhaps?

Slopes and Charity Quilt

We had another work day with some friends coming out to help with the building, and Ryan got himself in a bit of a hurry on Saturday morning getting ready for people to come out. He was frustrated with the water trailer not wanting to come off the truck hitch, and then when he finally got it off he misestimated the slope and we had a bit of a mishap.

We had a bunch of steel for the building roof in the back of the truck, so we couldn't have the tailgate up. Everything (500 lbs of feed, tools, 20+ 2x4's, etc) including the 20 sheets of steel slid down out of the truck and onto the grass.

Our friends, and their iPhone camera, were just in time to help pick up.

Do you see the cow in the background of this one? At least the weather was really nice, usually this sort of thing happens at dusk in a snowstorm in December.

Then we got down to the business of building. Jim and Ryan framed windows and doors while Drew trimmed the rafters to the right length and Michael, Adam, and I put purlins on the roof. I actually thought that was kind of fun, apparently childhood monkey bar skills have application in the "real world!" This pic was taken by Adam from the roof while Ryan and Michael go fetch tools. 


I recently did some scrap organization in my quilting area and decided I hadn't made a charity quilt for the year yet.

This one will go to Quilts for Kids, which is the charity my guild has picked for the year. It's about 36" square, and I have to say I like this one better in person. The border fabric doesn't look quite so busy in person somehow.


Last for anyone who stuck with me this long, Ryan sent this picture of my "Little Engineer" to me at work. He was repairing his chair in the kitchen, and she got the idea that she needed to figure out how to use the screwdriver too. 

 Sorry the pics are fuzzy. Ryan wanted to capture the moment so he didn't have time to focus, etc. 

 Totally made my day.

Morning Glories and Peach Jam

I don't have a green thumb. It's just something I have to get over and admit to myself and the world around me. I know as a Farm Wife (yes the caps are on purpose) I should have a fabulous garden, both flowers and veggies. But those of you who read this blog or know me (or both) know that I just don't. So instead, I love my volunteer flowers. The ones that reseed themselves, don't have to be watered, and are pretty. 
Go Morning Glories!!

While the blue ones may be nicer, these purple ones just keep coming up and taking over my porch. I'd be annoyed if they weren't so pretty! So instead, I encourage them. And by encourage, I mean in the fall I spend time on my porch with my daughter picking the seeds off the vine and tossing them back into the garden.

So as I posted a few months ago that our peach tree actually bloomed! It's taken a beating in the snow storms of the past few years, so it didn't make very many peaches. But I did google a white peach jam recipe, and found this one on a blog:
Peach Jam
So I made it today!

Yum. I've tried some, and it's delish.


Lastly, last weekend we went to Kansas City for my high school best friend's wedding. It was totally awesome, and then on Sunday we went to the Kansas City sculpture garden. So I'll close with some pics from the trip!

The giant shuttlecocks are one of the more famous sculptures in KC, although I don't think my daughter saw the artistic significance...

The sculpture in the background is called "sheep piece" because the sculptor's sheep liked to climb all over it. Love it!