Spring goings on, bird quilt, and Christmas Lone Star quilt

Things are going well in our neck of the woods, it has been much warmer out, after a very long, cool, dry spring. When I was working on staining the windows to our bedroom, this was my view. I had the window open (because of the fumes) and I'm pretty sure the cows were trying to figure out what I was doing:

The new calves have also been chasing one another around the farm, here the four youngest played their own version of cow tag:

Back in March, Ryan spent a lot of time chainsawing the scrubby timber out of our pastures and spent most of that month burning piles. Our pastures are now starting to look like someone cares about them again after more than ten years of neglect.

Ryan's also been trying to run a water line past our building, which means digging in the cow's area. The one in this picture is watching him dig raptly.

It's been a rough spring for chickens, we had an illness or bad ventilation or something and we lost about half of them. They are also growing very slowly, so we are going to have to miss our June deliveries. :-( Hopefully we'll be back on track soon.

Taking a walk the other day, I also took a picture of our house from the back side, so I thought I would post that too. The fence in the foreground between the trees marks the eastern edge of our property line.

The garden is also filling in nicely, here are our lilies and roses next to some violas. Ryan has done a very good job of starting and cultivating the garden, it looks great.

I also got a garden planted, here is what it looked like on May 15th. It now has a few things growing in it, but a raccoon got into it and seems to have eaten all the carrots. Many of the seeds were also very old, so were not viable (which I expected). 

In quilting news, one of the nice things about posting infrequently is that I get more done in the interim. 

I call this one Murmuration Minuend. A murmuration is a group of starlings, and a minuend is a quantity from which another is subtracted (so in 5-2=3, 5 is a minuend). 

It was not inspired by the poem "Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, but that poem does capture my thoughts very well. This is a modern quilt style and I have entered it in quilt shows and hope to find out soon if it makes it in. 

I also finished my Christmas lone star quilt, which I started when I was pregnant with Z. I named it Christmas Star-light after a starlight mint.

The construction on this quilt is not amazing, but it will do. I think a Lone Star quilt is on the bucket list of many quilters, myself included, but I can now say I've attempted one. I might try to do another someday and do the construction more carefully, we'll see. In the meantime, I'll hang this one at Christmastime.

Recently my 18-year-old sewing machine has been showing signs of dying, piece by piece. So my father gave me an early Birthday/Christmas present and bought me a new one. It's a Bernina and I'm thrilled with it. It has a lot of features I've been drooling over for a while, but it also feels almost exactly like my old Bernina to sew with. I haven't decided what I'm doing with the old one; perhaps I'll pull it out when H is ready to sew. 

Speaking of H sewing, she and I actually had a little sewing session earlier this spring.

She made a small blanket and pillows out of couple fat quarters and loved it.

H also insisted that we participate in Earth Day this year, so we did so by going and collecting garbage out of our ditches. 

H has also started losing teeth, but so far she just lost the one. No other loose ones yet!

One of Z's favorite activities recently is making cookies with daddy. They do it about once a week, although I think in this picture he may have been helping make a cake for the birthday of a friend of ours instead.

Ryan and I have been dancing at the Red Friar's Dance Club in Ames as a monthly date night; it's been very helpful for us to have a night out once a month through the winter. I bought the dress I'm wearing in this picture when I took a trip to Singapore in February to visit my Dad, who is a professor there for a couple of years.

I'll leave you with these pictures of H, this is her on Friday at her last day of school:

As a point of comparison, here she is on the first day again: