Winter Chores, Charity Quilt, and Iowa Quilt

We had a bit of a surprise snow today, it seems our winter just decided to come a little late.  As I type this, however, the evening weatherman is telling me it will be almost 70 degrees by Tuesday. Iowa weather is so strange. 
I snapped this photo of Ryan coming in from evening chores, sometimes it seems like my life is just perpetually waiting for him to get in from chores! I tried to get a picture of the black and white cows against the white snow, but they were over the hill and not very easy to photograph from the house. 

The green bucket is the feed bucket for feeding the layer hens (with the red feed scoop sticking out the top), and the blue bucket holds today's eggs. We didn't have a lot of luck with the traditional wire egg basket, they tend to break eggs. Plastic is much more forgiving in this case!


I try to make quilts for our guild to give to charity, it is one of the directives of the guild that we create quilts for people in need. So I recently finished a disappearing 9-patch made of some garage sale scraps.

It's a variety of calicos, which are oddly coming back into fashion. What goes around, comes around, I guess. 

I used the opportunity to practice making feathers, and I know I improved through the practice. It's about a throw-sized quilt, and I'm not sure where it will go. But I hope whoever gets it likes it!


Last weekend was the semi-annual quilting retreat, where I finished my oldest UFO (UnFinished Object). I started this quilt in 2006 at my very first quilt retreat. I quilted it on my Bernina Activa 130, no longarm machine here!

It's a monster, at 109" square. But it's finally done! It has a lot of techniques that were my first time trying them. This was my first attempt at half square triangles, machine applique, trapunto, and hand applique.

It has 4 Iowa flowers as its theme: Wild Rose, Black-Eyed Susan, Virginia Bluebell, and Iris. 

Here's the black-eyed susan trapunto and a sample of the machine quilting. Lots and lots and lots of little loops. Did I mention lots? I quilted this thing for 3 days straight, about 15 hours a day, and I had started quilting it at last fall's retreat. I'm so glad it's done!!! I was calling out when I finished bobbins (and my fellow retreaters were great for cheering for each one to keep me going), and we estimated this thing took about 20 bobbins to quilt. 

The center medallion is a picture of the bridge in Madison county where Ryan and I were married. Here's the other hand applique themes:

I am proud of this quilt, but I also know my skills were not as good when I made it as they are now. It was never intended to be as big as it turned out, it just happened that way. As you can see, it's too big for my queen sized bed and is really intended for a king. So I'm glad to get it off my plate because I feel I can go start more new projects!

Little Power Outage & Tagging Lambs

I came home from work last Monday night to no power in our house. Sigh. I called the neighbors, but they had power. So I called the power company. While I waited for the power company technicians to come out, I stared at Hazel over the kerosene lamp we lit on the kitchen counter.
Side note: If you move to the country, buy kerosene lamps for this occasion! There is a reason they are so effective and widely used. They actually give off a bit of heat and a surprising amount of light! Flashlights are fine, but somehow the lamp is actually friendlier. 
Anyway, as we sat there and she colored with markers, I told myself, "If pioneer women could make dinner without electricity, why the heck can't I?" Duh. So I lit my gas stove with the matches I had literally purchased at the grocery store 2 hours before (how is that for irony?) and made egg rolls by lamplight.

Hazel took it all fairly well, although understandably was a little jumpy. 

Here is what my kitchen looked like when I turned the flash off on my camera:

We got the power back on at 8 pm, it turns out the transformer on our street they replaced a month ago threw the neutral connector. So it was sending surges of power through our lines and it blew every surge protector in the house (boy did they do their job!!). It also blew our furnace until it could be fixed the next day, our garage door opener, my iron, and my clock radio. Ryan's clock radio was just fine, go figure. But all is well again, and the power company will help pay for the stuff that was destroyed. It's just stuff, after all!


On farm-related subjects, we tagged lambs this weekend. I don't have any pictures of this process because both of us had our hands full of wriggling lambs!

After 3 years of raising sheep, we finally decided we should be a "real farm" and ear tag our lambs. And keep records! It's amazing! And pretty sad it took us this long, but this is a perfect example of the sort of thing that native farm kids would just do and know how to do. Instead, this farm has us! So it took two of us about two hours to tag about a dozen lambs. We'll get better at it in the future!

Lambing Season and Kindle Cover

Tonight is the coldest night of the year so far (and probably will be the coldest), so of course we have new lambs. We're up to a few now (6? 8? I'm not sure) and this year we've had better luck with female lambs. Of course, all of the girls are still black while the boys get decent coloring. 

This is a little ram lamb born a couple of weeks ago, with some girls around him. I think the black ewe gene must be a sex-linked trait that is carried by our black ram, Hades. 

So here is our newest mother ewe and her twins, who were fairly weak and small. Ryan bottle-fed them a little as a supplement because it's so cold out and so they would be strong enough to nurse on their own.

Newborn lambs are cute, but they're much cuter a week or two old when they're running around and messing with the chickens in the building.

It's a little hard to see in this fuzzy, cropped, dark (I lightened it, I swear!) picture; but this lamb is nose-to-nose with one of the laying hens. I hadn't ever seen that before, but three of the lambs were chasing the chickens around while the chickens got all flustered and fled to higher ground. It was hilarious! Lambs and puppies have more in common than I would think. 

Hazel looked on with fascination and delight while Ryan fed the lambs. She's extremely empathetic toward our sheep, and gets really really upset when Ryan has to move a ewe around (like by shoving her or picking her up to get her out of his way to feed lambs). Even though he's not hurting the ewe and she's not making any noise, Hazel freaks out every time he manhandles one. It's been that way since even since 6-month-old Hazel was in a baby carrier on my back for doing chores and Ryan was loading sheep into the truck for processing. Born farm girl, that one.


My latest sewing/craft project was something I saw on Pinterest (Ryan calls Pinterest "Lady Crack"). A gal made a cover for her Kindle out of a book. Love it! So, of course, I had to have one.

This book is one of the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books (Book 3 to be precise), and it fits a Kindle perfectly. I read these as a teenager, and this book suffered some water damage to the pages a couple of years ago when we had a leak in our sunroom roof. So no, I did not destroy a perfectly lovely book. I admit, that would break my heart a little bit. But back to my project! 

I made it with a combination of sewing and hot glue, using some scrap fabric I had lying around. It's really pink, but I like it. This pink fabric was what I had on hand that matched the bright pink and orange plaid of the book cover. 

I gave my cover a pocket, but I'm not sure why. I can only put flat things in there and I couldn't make it big enough for the Kindle, but I felt like it belongs. 
My truly favorite addition to this cover comes from Ryan's stash of stuff for his hobbies. He had some rare earth magnets that I employed to keep my cover closed.

And yes, I did do my homework; the magnets won't hurt the Kindle. Amazon uses magnets to keep their cover closed too. I maintain the faint hope that the cover will slow my toddler down the tiniest bit as she absconds with my Kindle hollering, "Mine!!!"

Snow & Fire

We had our second real snow of the year today. I know, the date is February 4th. It's crazy, but that's just the way the world works sometimes. We have something around 2 inches on the ground.
So do you know what these tracks in the snow are?

If not, then before I tell you I have to mention how a friend of mine refers to her cat. She calls him a "dirty little dirt cat." As soon as I heard that, I loved it. It applies fully to Nermal. He is a dirty little dirt cat, who believes he is a dog. 


But back to the tracks in the snow. Ryan and I went out to visit a lamb whose mother can't decide if she wants it and also toured the building. It's nice and warm in there! I'm so proud of Ryan for that one, he really did a great job picking the site, orientation, and construction method to make a great chicken building. He's concerned it will be too warm in the summer, but we will have to see. On the way back from the tour, we made those tracks. They are from the bottom and body of a snowman.

So maybe you can see why I was talking about a dirty little dirt cat. Apparently, Ryan and I made one!
Several years ago we made a bunny,

let's just say that this time Ryan stuck ears on our snowman and they were not big enough to be bunny ears. Hence our friendly neighbor guardian snow cat.

Guard us, o dirtiest snow cat I ever did see.


This week Ryan's been burning piles of brush near the house. It's been clear and impossibly warm with very little wind.

Here is a picture of the 6 or so ash piles he left behind. Each spot of gray used to be a pile of brush taller than I am.

And I took this picture this morning of the kidlet and her daddy. That's his oatmeal. Not hers, his.

It shows true love that Ryan is willing to share his food.

PFI Conference & Mr. Fix-it

Last weekend was the annual PFI conference, at which they asked us to present! I love presenting. I know it's weird, but put me in front of a crowd of people and tell me to talk about something and I'm happy. 

I know, I really look happy in this picture, don't I?

There, that one's better. Hazel had a ball playing around and trying to steal the show.

We were presenting our business plan to a panel of experts, one of which was a small business financial expert in from Connecticut for the conference. 

We got some good feedback and people said our session was good. Hazel did not do well traveling, however. She just really didn't sleep on Friday night at all! It made for a long Saturday. 


One of the questions from the audience was something along the lines of asking if we were handy since we were doing things on a shoestring and I'm an engineer. Ha! I laughed out loud. It was very inappropriate. But when I recovered, I basically said that we either didn't do handyman type things, or we bartered product for them. Seriously, our tractor hasn't had an oil change since we got it. It's a miracle the thing runs. But then our dumb soft maple tree tangled its branches in our TV antenna on top of the garage.
This called for drastic measures.

So here's Mr. Fix-it on our garage roof, working it.

Go Ryan Go!

And now we have ABC back. I guess we can be handy when we have to be. 

Roosters and Angel Quilt

Roosters are interesting creatures. Watching our roosters and their hens in our farmyard is a lot like having a fish tank. I don't know what it is about them, but just watching them hunt for tidbits, fluff their feathers, and cock their heads to look at things is fascinating. Everyone who comes on our farm always asks about the roosters, so I decided they needed a blog mention. 

This is our first rooster, he's the non-dominant one. He's prettier than our other guy, but really he's a weenie when you get down to it. He's supposedly a Cuckoo Maran, but we think he has some Barred Rock in him too. He doesn't really have much of a posse, and is a bit of a loner most of the time. He was hen-raised (that makes them a tiny bit wilder), and we bought him with a couple of other gals about 2 years ago. 

And this is the rooster I call our "stealth rooster." Now, I say that because he really shouldn't be here. He and many of 2010's hens are the Red Star breed, which are a sex-linked chicken breed. This means that when you have chicks, the hens will be red and the roosters will be white. This lets the hatcheries figure out very easily what gender the chicks are, because determining gender on a day-old fluffy chick is really hard. People actually make professions out of doing it. 

So do you see how he has a lot of red on his wing? Well, on a baby chick there is a high wing-to-body ratio. So as a chick, this guy looked like a gal. Hence, stealth rooster. He's a big boy, you can see him next to his hens. That's why he's dominant, and he has some wicked spurs on him too. 

We don't mind him, though, it's good to have a few roosters around. For the large part, they kind of keep the flock together. I don't think they do much to defend from predators since I never see any battle scars on them, but at least they're intimidating. I know Nermal's kinda scared of him. 

This is a quilt top I finished from a commission. I have a gal at work who has a quilt like this for her son and wanted one for her daughter. The hardest part of this was just that the small calico prints aren't really in style right now so I had trouble finding fabrics that were the same style as her existing quilt. The blocks themselves were simple, and there's some handwork for the angels' heads and halos. Each angel is a 6" block and the sashing is 2". My client (?) says she'll have her mom do the quilting, so this will probably go to her some time in the next couple of weeks.

I had two extra angels who didn't really fit in the main quilt, so I made a little doll quilt/wall hanging for her daughter. I think it's cute! And if I ended up machine quilting the big quilt (the original is hand quilted), I think I'd do something like this with the clouds. But I'd make the clouds a little bigger and I'd mark them out ahead of time so they end up in balanced locations. 


Lastly, Hazel pictures! These were taken by my dad and brother while we were in California for Christmas. 

Here I'm putting Hazel in her Christmas dress as she plays with her uncle David. David had this cute playhouse that is used to pack the solar cell kits his company makes. They decided to make their packaging also functional instead of a waste of a bunch of cardboard. So much fun!

She also figured out how to do somersaults there, but hasn't really done any since. 

And I love this one. These Mardi Gras beads became a new favorite toy (they came back with us), and my brother really has an eye for photography. Love the way he composed this shot!

Finger Paint & Failed Houndstooth

A few days ago, I made finger paint using an online tutorial. Oh my gosh, so much fun! Finger paint, like play-dough, is a magic material. It goes from liquid to proper consistency on the stove and is super easy and cheap. Love it! 

Now that we have the magical internet at our fingertips for recipes, I don't think I'll buy finger paint or play dough again. I did just buy some icing coloring (which is more concentrated than liquid food coloring and is a gel) and I think that will make colors brighter next time. Although Hazel's favorite part of finger paint was when I would take a cloth and wipe it off her hands. Toward the end of the activity she kept dipping her fingers in the paint and coming straight over to me for me to wipe it off. 


Before I made my Houndstooth table mat for a gift exchange...

... I tried a different method and had a bit of a fail moment.

It was generally concluded (by my quilting compadres) that although this was not houndstooth, it was cute in its own right. So off it went in the mail as a Christmas gift! Waste not, want not, right? Hopefully its new owner does not mind the distinct lack of houndstoothness that defines its existence.