Cooking and Canning and Copying

I added nine quarts of really nice chicken stock to the pantry yesterday:

Next up is another batch of ham stock. I’ve got quite a few bags of scraps and bones in the freezer.

We are butchering chickens on Saturday. Our church’s former pastor, Jeryl, is coming to help as he always does. (He lives up the road.) He usually brings chickens of his own, although I give him some of ours, too, as a thank-you for helping. He and the husband and I have an efficient system and can do several dozen birds in a morning. I think Elysian is coming over, and Tera’s husband wants to bring some of their chickens and learn the process, too. We should have a good group. I see showers in the forecast, but I can put up our pop-up tent. And the forecast probably will change between now and then.

After this, we should be back on our usual rotation of chicken breeds. Things got messed up during the pandemic when I couldn’t get chicks. I hatched out my own chicks that year, but they were Heinz 57 chickens. The next year, I had to get half of one variety and half of another. We also had some that the husband brought home from one of his customers. By next week, we should be back down to Barred Rocks, White Leghorns, and Dave. Dave is getting up there—roosters typically don’t last more than 4 or 5 years and he’s 3—so I might incubate half a dozen eggs in the spring and hope he fathers a replacement. He such a great rooster, though. I’ll be sad when he’s gone.

The mice are lining up to get caught in our traps. They are coming in on the south side of the house and the traps in the laundry room and in my office have been busy. Ugh. Hopefully this will be over in another couple of weeks. The two feral cats have been parked outside the chicken coop, but they aren’t catching everything.

Such is life in the woods.

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I’d love to get out of pattern alteration land. I’ve got Burda 6329—a pleated-front raglan tee shirt—on my cutting table so I can frankenpattern it with the Nancy Raglan. I like that Burda tee shirt except for the fact that the sleeves have darts. I don’t understand why, as that pattern is designed for knit tops. I usually only see darts in raglan sleeves for wovens. I think they distort the sleeve, so I want to take them out. I compared the two patterns and I should be able to make the sleeve for the Burda pattern look more like the Nancy Raglan.

Pattern alterations involve a lot of tracing, taping, and labelling. Sometimes I have the patience for that and sometimes I just want to sew.

I’ve also got to get started on some kind of Christmas outfit. I don’t want to leave that for the last minute.