New placemats, costumes, and completed hearth

As usual, life got away from me and so did the Fall. We had a very long warm Fall here, which is unusual but was generally welcome. Ryan has been starting the chicken building by pouring a concrete pad, I believe more on that can be found on his blog. He brought me in for some of the two-person work, like leveling out the top of the wet concrete.

 I hadn't ever done that before, it was interesting to do! Just add it to my list of "Skills I never thought I would have."

The 6-month-old calves tend to come investigate every time we're out there, they're very curious what we're doing in the hay lot. There was another one in the following picture as well, but I couldn't capture them all in the same shot. 

In September we went to the Apple Festival at Penoach Winery and tended a booth for the business. It was an OK day, but I'm not sure if we will do it again.

With Thanksgiving over recently, I was proud to get my turkey boiled down for stock already! I took a picture, primarily for posterity.

In sewing/quilting news, I went to upload pictures and discovered I've completed more than I thought I had in the last few months. I sewed myself a new laptop bag for work because the one I had was worn out and the one I could get from my company was just less interesting to me.

I lined it with some pretty pink fabric and edgestitched it in pink as well to add a personal and feminine touch.

I also finished a quilt from the scraps of my lone star Christmas quilt that is serving as a seasonal throw on my couch.

Also in quilting, I replaced the placemats that I made 6 years ago, and this time I made 16 of them!

They're a bit of a modern aesthetic and I also made matching napkins and a table runner.

Lastly, it was Halloween season and for the first year I really did it justice (in my opinion). H wanted to be Tinkerbell, which means she needed wings in addition to her costume. Here is the picture I found online that I used to base the wings on:

I did some work with a couple of wire coat hangers to get the basic shape:

Then I got some white tights and stretched them over the frame:

Then I tightened them up and sewed it in place, and attached some elastic:

The last step was to draw the swirly patterns on the back with silver puff paint that I had on hand.

I also made some shoe covers out of fleece and big white pom-poms. 

I picked fleece because I don't have to hem it and it has a bit of stretch to it. I also made both kids' costumes out of fleece. 

Z wanted to be Mario (the kid loves Mariokart if I haven't already mentioned it) so we bought the hat and the red sweatshirt and I made the overalls out of--you guessed it--more fleece. His mustache is a piece of felt taped on.

Ryan decided to also get into the fun with his blue Carhartts and a hat of his own. 

H has shown an interest in sewing, so she is sewing an Elsa dress from the movie Frozen for one of her dolls (with heavy help). I'm trying to get her to do as much on her own as she can, so here she is cutting out the pattern.

I also finished the hearth project that was mentioned a couple of blog posts back, and it looks awesome. I'm not sure when it will get a wood stove, but it will at some point.

I've been working a lot more than previously and took this mirror selfie on a business trip, so I thought I'd include it on this blog since I usually post about Ryan's work and not my own! ;-)

The kids are doing well in school, Z is enjoying Montessori. His spatial reasoning is especially good. 

I also failed to post first-day-of-school pictures, so here are some:

We all hope you have a happy early winter season, perhaps I'll get another post in before Christmas!

End-of-summer gardens, creatures, and outings

It has been a fairly dry summer at the farm, much to Ryan's chagrin. Pretty much every storm that has come through has petered out right at our farm and then fired back up once it's past us. For example, last night there was heavy flooding about 10 miles east of us in Des Moines, but we got 0.3" of rain, which is amazing! Farmers really do live and die by rainfall amounts, we pretty much never miss the weather on the 10:00 evening news! There have been some truly lovely sunsets, though.

There have also been a couple of nice rainbows.

We had a turkey that didn't get out of some of the rain a couple of weeks ago, and a cold wet turkey is not likely to survive. So we brought it into the garage to warm up and dry off. This is almost the only thing my hair dryer ever does!

The turkey made a full recovery once we had her dried off and we were able to take her back to the flock.

I also told you I would update you on my garden, so I took a picture of my garden this morning. "Horribly neglected" is somehow insufficient as a description...

The yellow cherry tomatoes decided to go nuts, and I did a bad job of harvesting my radishes (they are off to the left of the picture, out of sight). It's still a more successful garden than any I've ever had, so I will continue to get better at this garden thing. 

My morning glories did grow well up my back porch, this is the first year that some of the variegated variety have shown up!

I took a picture of a very large garden spider hanging out by our pumpkins (which are not in the garden)--she's a beauty, but didn't feel like posing for me.

Also in critter news we adopted a puppy. This is our fifth attempt at a dog since starting a farm (with varying types of failure), but is our first attempt at a puppy. She's a border collie mix, we think mixed with rat terrier since she is not shaggy enough to be pure border collie. She's very smart, but also very puppy-like and we've been working on house training and getting her to not herd the children around. 

We took the kids to Living History Farms a couple of weeks ago, where they got to see some of how people used to farm. They aren't quite old enough to really make the connections and see how things are the same and how they are different from those farms to ours. 

At the fair this year the kids were old enough to start playing more, including the tunnel of squash (?) that they put up near the agriculture building. Here they are running out of the tunnel:

I'm biased, but I think those are pretty good pictures of both of them!

H and I just got back from our annual trip to Clearwater Camp's family camp, where we had a great time! The weather was just perfect.

We did some fishing, here I caught H right at the moment she had touched the fish and is currently saying "Eww!"

And we also tried archery for the first time, with some help from a counselor.

'Til next year, beautiful North Woods!

Hearth and Garden Growth

On Father's Day, Ryan pulled Father's Day privilege and insisted I work on a house project that wasn't on my priority list but was on his. So I worked on the hearth in our living room. We purchased the slate a couple months ago and sorted it for the pieces we liked best.

Here it is after putting on the cementboard:

And we discovered that the hearth was just a little larger than would be an even distribution with the tiles, so Ryan came up with another pattern. I like it better than just a standard grid!

It's still waiting for grout, but I'll get there soon. It's also waiting for our custom dragon tile, which will be here in a couple months.

My garden is looking well. I planted all of the seeds we had of varying ages, so of course all of the rows next to eachother came up instead of something logical, like every other row. But the rows that came up look pretty good! Here it is a couple weeks ago:

And here it is tonight, the watermelon is growing nicely on the left. And yes, the radish on the right has totally gone to seed. I don't like to eat radishes, they're just satisfying to plant because they grow so quickly. The chickens are also looking at me through the garden fence, can you spot them?

It's lily season, so my new double tiger lilies are blooming. Aren't these cool?

Also a plant (but not in the garden), we're indefinitely babysitting my mom's jasmine plant. If she ever decides to reclaim it, I'm going to have to get my own. This thing smells divine and is super happy in my house. It had almost 200 blooms on it a couple days ago (the blooms only last one day)!

In farm news, on the way home from the locker we stopped to eat dinner. I took a picture because this is a classic farmer park job. Five spots for the win!

And here the kids are "helping" daddy with the morning chores.

And Daddy and Z are surveying the landscape:

Until next time, enjoy the summer!

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: