Livestock & Deadstock and the Birth of a Quilt

"If you're going to have livestock, you're going to have deadstock." Those proverbial words were spoken by our previous landlord when we were renting a farmhouse and few acres. 


It was funny at the time, but of course, he's right. 

I think Ryan is planning on posting our full tally for the season so far, but I just know he called me at work to tell me another ewe died. He called her Awesome II (he's great at ewe names, by the way) and is fairly disheartened about it. We're also down to about 60 of our original 260 turkeys. They simply refuse to stop dying, mostly of cold and/or wet. 

On a happier and more cheerful note, I thought I'd post a picture of the "first step" of most of my quilts. 

In this case, I actually have fabric to go along with the doodle. Usually I don't even have that. But the only difference between this sketch and 90% of my other quilts in the beginning stages is that this one is not drawn on engineering paper...

A Special Guest & It's still wet out here

Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. This happened to us on July 30th, when we took Hazel to her first Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) field day.

Hazel's first PFI field day

So while we were standing around with some of the PFI staff, one of them mentioned that Temple Grandin was flying in a day early for her field day on Tuesday and they didn't know what do with her on Monday. Of course, I joked that she was welcome to visit our farm. Next thing I knew, she was coming to see our farm on Monday and I was feeding her dinner! Ryan's mother was reading her book at the time and came down, and so did a fellow farmer of ours who found out about it. We ended up having 8 people for dinner and a lovely time. Moral of the story: go to PFI field days!

Ryan, Temple, Janice, & Hazel

Have I mentioned before it's been a wet year here? 

Oh, I have? Well, it has. Very wet. We're just now starting to make the news, but I took some pictures even before Ames went under. 

Our yard. The "creek" was a path once

We have springs forming in our lawn.

By our old well housing

Note the flowing water. And the sand. 

Looking at the compost pile

If the picture looks "foggy," it's because the lens of the camera is fogging up due to the heat and humidity. Makes for a really quality picture doesn't it?

Our whole yard

This is the whole yard from the front porch. Again with the fogginess. Spot the cat says hello too. 

When I was looking through pictures the other day, I found one from 2008.

Yard in 2008

Yeah, remember 2008? Our other record flooding year? Someday, perhaps it will look this way again. In the meantime, watch out for the cattails.

Hard day's night & My new favorite fabric website

Don't get pregnant and try to keep a garden. Remind me of this the next time I get pregnant!


But seriously, I'll probably do it again anyway. 


Back to business. This is what I did today. Here is the before picture with lovely model included:

Note the scale: most of those weeds are taller than I am.

And here is the after picture (no model this time, since I took the picture):

You can see our steps! You can see our sliding door! I even hauled off all the piles to the compost pile. I considered leaving Ryan to do that, but decided to have mercy on him. 

So for those of you who have followed my blog for a while, you now know why I don't have any lily pictures on here for this year. It's because they were choked out by vines and other crud until now.

I have also discovered my new fantasy website, called Spoonflower. You can design and print your own fabric! Yay! It's really expensive, but you can get an 8" x 8" test swatch for $5, and this is PERFECT for my I Spy quilts. These are quilts where you play the I Spy game with children using the quilt, and I've been gathering fabrics for one that has a different plant or animal block for every letter of the alphabet. The only problem is that "X", "Q", and "N" are really hard to find fabric for! 

Can you believe N is hard? I know! But think of animals and plants that start with N. You've got nuthatches, newts, nighthawks, and none of these have fabrics dedicated to them. So I have now created fabric using photoshop for a nuthatch and an x-ray fish, and will have to make one with quail on it. 

5-a-day, odd bugs, and sustainability synergy

I have now finished my first quilt since Hazel was born, I call it "5-a-day." I created it for my quilt guild Block-of-the-Month and it is all paper-pieced blocks. I do like how it turned out, I've been wanting to use the Farmer's Market style fabrics ever since they came out. I actually have the pattern started for this and am working on finishing writing it up and getting it in digital format to distribute. I don't know if it would sell, but I'll try. I also tried using a different free motion filler in the background of each block, as you can see by my tomato close-up here. 

It's a long way from perfect, but I'm satisfied.

When I created the "peas" block, I expected it to be a hard block with lots of different pieces, but it ended up being fairly easy. It surprised me which blocks were harder or easier to design and sew.

We've also recently been invaded by some strange little bugs. They don't seem aggressive, nor do they bite, but they like wet places. This is the first year I've seen these little suckers and I just can't identify them. Can anyone help? For those of you who are not so much a fan of bug pictures, sorry!

I just want to say one more thing about sustainability synergy. We use cloth diapers with Hazel during the day and a disposable at night (so that she's not waking up because her diaper's wet). But I find it interesting that cloth diapers dry much better and easier on the clothesline than they do in the dryer. They always take 2 rounds through the dryer, and it doesn't get out stains. On the line it only takes them a little while in the sun to dry and the sun bleaches out the stains. This is not the only "sustainability" thing that is this way, but they always fascinate me when I find them. 


On a follow-up note, we had a big storm last night and the leaning tower of Reasnor stands no more. It will have to be re-erected.

Breezy Blues & the Leaning Tower of Reasnor

My best friend from college called me almost 2 years ago to tell me she got engaged (it was inevitable, and we all knew it was coming, but I was excited nonetheless!). So I immediately decided I was going to make them a quilt for their wedding. I called her and asked her what she wanted for a quilt. She talked to her fiance and said "Pinwheels and Blues." So after I spent a couple of weeks doodling ideas while in boring meetings, I came up with this pattern. I did hand quilt it, and I finished this quilt in March of '09 because I was so excited to work on it. Ah well, better to be done early than late! It is a throw sized quilt, and I paper pieced all of the pinwheels so I wouldn't lose the points.

Did I mention it's been a wet year? I think I may have...

Ryan did not take this picture on an angle. I'm going to rename our wren house "the Leaning Tower of Reasnor." Apparently the entire base is rotten, which is sad because the wrens were actually using it! Although I do love how the prior owners felt they needed a sum total of 3 posts just to hold this thing up.

Then again, maybe they were right.

Porch Toad & Loading Chickens

I almost stepped on this little guy on the way out my front door this evening, and was actually carrying the camera. So I'm sharing him with you. We live in a little valley, so we have water management issues. Lots of them. Like we have a swamp around our compost pile. That means we have frogs, toads, snakes, and all kinds of bugs. Everything has to lay low a lot of the time, though, because chickens hate snakes more than anything else and will go out of their way to kill them. Yet another thing you learn when you raise chickens: they will eat almost anything...

Tonight was loading time for our first batch of chickens of the season. We know a farmer who grabs 5 at a time, I'd love to actually see that because even in the dark they are squirmy little creatures. Ryan can only get 4 at a time, and of course I max out at 2. Curse small hands with short stubby fingers! We load them at dusk/night because they are MUCH more docile then, and we don't have to chase them all over their shelter nearly as much. That was something we learned our first year.

Last year I made a short post that 180 chickens is the max that fit on a trailer. I'm sticking with that; although the 180 chickens fit much better today than they did last year. We're hoping that's not because they will dress out small. Small chickens suck and don't make us much money.

On a side note, I apologize for anyone who follows me by a feed. I went through and put labels on all my blogs, so I suspect it will say there are lots of new/edited posts today. However, I thought it was useful to actually use the labels if only for my own organization!

Mulberry bread & mowing the lawn

We have a friend who comes and works on our farm in exchange for eggs, chickens, turkeys, etc. He is my very favorite person most days because he keeps Ryan working and motivated! Anyway, he has a myriad of food allergies that make it very hard to cook lunch for him. He is lactose intolerant and also allergic to soy, tomatoes, fish, and pesticide residue. This means honey and sugar are also out because of the residue unless they are organic and even then they are to be used sparingly. So here is what I made for him as a special treat: mulberry bread!

It may be the ugliest thing I ever baked. It looked like a purple-black miasma of goo when I was done with it, but it was surprisingly edible. I followed my A-to-Z bread recipe, which a similar recipe can be found here. I cut out all the sugar, though, and wouldn't advise that for anyone making this recipe. I thought the mulberries would add some sweetness, but the bread badly needed some sweetener when it was done. Ryan put honey on it and ate it anyway, but the man is a human vacuum so that doesn't surprise me.

One of my favorite reasons for living out in the country is that I don't have to mow the lawn all the time. There are no city ordinances or neighbors or anything. So I can let my lawn start to look like this:

This is particularly handy when we have 3 (not one, not two, but three) mowers on this farm and only the non-power-assist-push-mower-that-kicks-my-butt works.

But eventually Ryan decides that he cares how our lawn looks, so here it is after I mowed it with the mower deck all the way up:

This was made possible by Ryan's wonderful grandmother who took pity on our poor lawn and let us have her riding mower. Yay for the people in our lives who help us!!!