A Chicken Named Sue

I’ve been trying to stick to a schedule of posting no more than three days in a row, but I have a lot to talk about this week.

The Christmas fabric I ordered from an Etsy seller arrived Tuesday, so I washed and pressed it and finished the Christmas stockings yesterday. My brain feels much better now that I no longer have two unmatched stocking fronts lying around. I can box up my Christmas supplies and put them away until later in the year. I do need to replenish my supply of fusible fleece, however, and it’s on sale at Joanns this week.

This popped up in my YouTube feed. I watched it while I was sewing, and then the husband and I sat and watched it last night:

I thought it was entertaining, and I am curious to see what else this group does. These are three brothers whose family owns the store Sew Yeah Quilting in Las Vegas. Their dad makes an appearance in the last segment and he’s quite the character. Men have such a unique approach to sewing, LOL.

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One of the chickens I hatched out last spring is lame. Its right leg sticks out at a weird angle. I have no idea how that happened or why I didn’t see it until it was almost grown.

I didn’t cull it last fall because it has a pleasant disposition and I felt sorry for it. I assumed it was a female. Despite the deformity, it appeared quite able to defend itself against the other chickens. Yesterday afternoon, I went out to the chicken coop. I scattered scratch grains in the chicken yard, and after all the chickens went out, I closed the door to the yard. I do this so I can give scratch grains to the lame chicken and it can eat in peace. (And also so I can collect eggs without a rooster following me around begging me to hand feed it scratch grains.) I went back out to retrieve the egg basket from the porch. As I was walking back to the coop, I heard a crowing noise coming from inside the coop. “How did one of the roosters get in?” I wondered. I went in and discovered the lame chicken standing in the middle of the coop, crowing its little heart out.

Is it a rooster? I’ll have to see if I can pick it up and examine it more closely. If it is a rooster, why did it wait so long to crow? If it’s a hen, why is it crowing? So many questions.

The husband says we should name it Sue.

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I set up a blog page on the husband’s website yesterday. I’m calling it Form and Pour—The Blog. Any future posts about his concrete jobs are going to get posted over there. I still have to set up the e-mail subscription form, but you can bookmark the page for future reference. He’s scheduled to pour some foundation walls today and I have just happen to have an errand near that jobsite, so I hope to get some pictures and write the first blog post soon after that. Stay tuned.

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I’ve been collecting pieces for a new quilt.

I haven’t had to dip into remnants yet, because everything I’ve needed so far has been in my collection of scraps. There are various scrap management systems out there. Mine is to cut leftovers into 5” charm squares or into 3-1/2” tumblers—the tumbler box is getting full—and then into either 2-1/2’ squares or strips, depending on the shape of the leftover. I stack them by color family which makes it easy to go into the box and pull just the squares I need.

That plastic bin came from Ikea. I saw it on a trip to Ikea in Portland last February and didn’t buy it, adhering to my usual Ikea shopping strategy of not buying something the first time I see it. I picked up two of them on a subsequent trip to the Ikea in Seattle, and now I wish I had bought a few more. They are fabulous for holding and carrying things around my sewing rooms.

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And finally, I have a new favorite wine, Apothic Inferno:

This combines two of my favorite things: red wine and whiskey. The wine is aged in whiskey barrels for 60 days, which layers the perfect amount of whiskey flavor—and it’s a good whiskey—on top. Apothic is one of the wines I buy regularly. I plan to stock up on this one as it’s a limited release.