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!

Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101

I have a phrase I like to use when I do home repair around here:
"Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101." 
It's kind of like the way classes in college are numbered. If English 101 is the intro class, English 102 will be just the tiniest step above it. Not the intro, but no expert level. So our house was previously owned by people named Fisk.
They were do-it-yourself-ers. 
I say that with a bit of tongue-in-cheek because, well, in many ways I'm just as cheap about my home repair. 
So there are some things that they did that are.. um... less than perfect. Not that they started with perfect materials mind you, since this house was built in 1868. But here's a good example.
This is our coat closet:

It is a folding door with a rail at the top. When we moved in, if you closed the door all the way the little guide would often slide off the rail. This would be Fisk 101. So I employed all of my handyman style skills to fix it.

Can you see my fix? Here it is from the back.

Oh yeah, check that bad boy out. That's a shim that's been broken off so it's not too long. I unscrewed the rail on one screw, slid in a shim, and rescrewed the rail in through the shim. (rescrewed; is that a word? Hmm... spell check doesn't think so.)
And that would be Marquardt 102. Pretty good, huh?


So recently we decided we hated the storm door on our house. Chances are 90%+ that it was purchased at an auction for $20 or less and it showed. Darn thing was a pain in the keyster. (Huh. Keyster is also not a word. I'm full of these tonight!)
Here's the old door

What you can't see is that I've ripped out the bottom screen because our cat clawed it to death. If you've never seen a screen clawed to death, consider yourself lucky. It's ugly. Not to mention the screen totally loses its purpose in life. I've also already replaced the broken latch on it once, and the entire open edge was coming off so it made a horrible cracking noise every time the door opened and closed. 

Turns out if you replace a screen door, it's not a super easy process. It involves, like, drill bits and stuff. 
But two days later, here's what we have!

I feel the need to say "voila!" Maybe this one was actually complicated enough to be Marquardt 103. Or even Marquardt 201. Anyone want to hire a contractor? No job too small! 


So I invite you to share. Do you improve the things the previous idiot did to your house with things that are only borderline less idiotic? Or do you hire someone?

Lady in Red & Talking to Sheep

As I helped Ryan herd sheep tonight--this consists of standing in a spot he dictates and just being generally intimidating--I looked down at my red shirt and red polka dot farm boots and thought to myself, "this is probably not what Chris De Burgh was thinking when he sang 'Lady in Red.' "

While I do actually own a red dress that cleans up ok, this is not it.


My daughter's newest, best trick is that she makes sheep and cow noises. Not "baa" and "moo" but "me-eh-eh" and "maaahw." Altogether more accurate. Considering her current words are "Mama," "Daddy," "ball," and an occasional "num-num" in reaction to food she likes, she's soon going to make more animal noises than words. She's working on turkey noises too... 
But here's a video of her talking to the sheep for your viewing pleasure.

Bad Summer Night Poetry

There's a party in my garage,
and everyone's invited.
Turkeys, chickens, garden tractor
coexist united.

In amongst the concrete mixer, 

a brooder design is working well.

But can you tell turkey from chicken

in a building hotter than heck?

Cicadas and crickets harmonize
in a sky marbled pink.
They tell me "go and get a camera!
Then just stop and think."

So I leave you with the sound
of an Iowan midsummer night.
It's time to go in and wash the eggs
before I get a mosquito bite.

Garden Update & Weathervane Table Topper

At the beginning of the season I said I'd keep you updated on my garden, so here we go. As a reminder, this is what my garden looked like at the beginning of the season.

Cute, huh? Well, I have to preface this next picture by telling you that this is actually a better-looking garden than any I've ever had. Keep that in mind. I took this picture of my garden tonight.

There are wax beans on the left here, and some sage on the bottom right. I think there may also be thyme in here...

This is the end of our broccoli (we actually harvested two little heads of these!). 

This bed was largely spinach. It was yummy, I just didn't really replant it. There's some zucchini in the top left.

There's a stripped out tomato in the back of this one. I think bugs got it. 
So the moral of the story is that I'm just not very good at this gardening thing. But I'm still planning on retrenching. I'm not giving up on gardening yet. Someday I'll be that 60-year-old farm wife with a wonderful garden. I'll let you know when that happens.


I also finished up the little tabletopper that was my giveaway prize for a little giveaway I hosted in March. It will be the design I put on my barn quilt whenever I get that going.

Traditionally I would hang it this way (square), but I'm contemplating hanging it on point, like this:

Do you have thoughts?


Lastly, for those of you who want more pictures of my little girl on this blog (Don, I'm talking to you), here I am reading to her. We do this a lot, and she will grab a book and then climb into my lap and sit down. This particular book is from my childhood and is about moving, but the little girl in it has a little gray cat on almost every page. Therefore, my daughter has decided that this is the "find the kitty" book and she finds that little gray cat on every page of the book.

Raspberry Hunting & Poll Ending

Yesterday Ryan mentioned to me that there was a small patch of raspberries in the pasture that he had the sheep graze around that might be ready for picking. His directions to find it went like this: "You know that one big soft maple with the overhanging branch that's about to fall off? Follow that branch and it's the next tree west of there."

After a couple of clarifying phone calls to Ryan, I found the small patch.

I had the baby on my back in her Chicco carrier for a little outdoor adventure.

This picture's actually a little out of date, but it's the one I have on file.


Anyway, we got to the raspberry patch and found a very unsurprising surprise: Poison Ivy. It's all over the place on our farm. So now it's time for a little game! Can you spot the poison ivy vs. the raspberry plant? Hint: the poison ivy has a 3 leaf pattern. Oh, wait. So does the raspberry plant.

Well? How did you do?


Here's the raspberry leaves:

And here's the poison ivy.

So the poison ivy and the raspberry and I played a game of "touch this, not that," only complicated by the whole "raspberries have thorns" thing. Everything good is worth working for!

A meager harvest, but completely delicious. There weren't enough to make anything with them, so I just ate them. Perhaps in the future our patch will be big enough to make jam!


On a separate note, my poll ends tonight and so far it looks like my readers want to know more about my farm and home life. I definitely think people who read this blog at this point generally know me personally, so they are more interested in my daughter than I thought people might be. I will try to adjust accordingly. In the meantime, thanks for reading!