Flighty Leghorns

The husband brought the group of Leghorns home Wednesday evening. That night, several of them refused to come inside the coop. They slept outside. Yesterday, the entire group of Leghorns refused to come out of the coop, even for scratch grains.

The husband reminds me—frequently—that chickens have brains the size of peas.

These are some of the new chickens. It is hard to tell in the photo, but the ones in the middle are the ones I am calling “lavender” colored. They are actually a purple-tinged gray (use your imagination).

The one to the far left has more brownish coloring. Up close, the color differences are fairly dramatic. Leghorns are so flighty, though, that it was hard to get a good shot. That yellow rope in the middle of the picture is there to hold a metal cover over the waterer and feeder so the birds don’t roost on them.

The chicks now have their big chicken feathers. They are, however, the smallest creatures in the coop and tend to cower in abject terror when someone comes in.

The morels are up—this one was a mere 1” tall, so it will be a few more days yet to harvesting.

My new tractor is supposed to arrive today, complete with bagging attachment. I am eager to put it to work. Garden cleanup is mostly done save for moving a few pieces of black plastic around. I might plant some rows of lettuce, too. I had to kill off our perpetual lettuce patch last year because of weeds and I’d like to re-establish a new one somewhere else. The tray of lettuce in the greenhouse is coming along nicely, though.

Lavender Chickens?

The husband is doing a concrete job down in the valley. The owners put in a big hops farm and processing center last year and now they are building a sales office. The wife also breeds show chickens. She had 10 hens, each a year old, that she didn’t want to breed, so they came to live here. I am hoping that having a few more hens will be a distraction for the roosters. She told the husband that they were all Leghorn varieties, including some lavender ones. Lavender is a recognized color in some chicken breeds—like Orpingtons—but I am not sure how stable the genetics are. These almost look like Ameracaunas to me, so they may been crossed with lavender Ameracaunas at some point to get the coloring. I’ll take some pictures today.

I live in a zoo. No bear sightings, fortunately. And the hummingbirds came back. They seem to be late this year,—I expect them at the beginning of April—but at least they are here.

The weather was nice yesterday afternoon, so I went out and worked on the second half of the garden. I replaced the cardboard around the berry bushes and pruned the currants, then raked up all the debris into a couple of piles. (I also displaced a family of voles, which did not bother me in the least.) When the husband got home, he burned the piles for me while I cooked dinner. He also fixed the grape trellis as it was starting to come down under the weight of the vines. I’ll work on what’s left today and tomorrow, and we’ll be all ready to set plants out the last weekend in May.

The greenhouse is such a beautiful place right now with all our seedlings. I’ve got about two dozen Dirty Girl tomato plants:

These all came from the one seed I got from Susan last year. It grew into a plant and I saved all the seeds. I will plant some of these, but I will also make them available to other people. I love the potato leaves on this variety. Many heirloom and open-pollinated tomato varieties have these kinds of leaves.

I saved seed from my biggest Oregon Star paste tomatoes. I’ve only got a dozen of those, though, so they will all be planted here.

Fortunately, I also have Amish Paste and Purple Russian paste tomatoes started, so I should have plenty for sauce.

Things are looking good and we are right on schedule. Yay! I need to call the John Deere dealer today, though—they have my tractor but were waiting on the bagging attachment to arrive so they could install it. I’m going to ask them if they can deliver the tractor anyway and install the bagging attachment later, because who knows where it is being held up or how long it will take to get here. We’re going to need to cut the grass in another week or so. The mower comes with a mulch setting, so the bagging attachment isn’t critical.

Sewing is on the back burner for the moment, although another weather system is supposed to come through this weekend.

Tumblers and Testing

I’ve got several bins with die-cut scraps—one with 5” charm squares, one with 2-1/2” squares (although that one is a bit thin at the moment), and one with tumblers. I pulled out a bunch of tumblers a few weeks ago intending to get them sewn up into something. Totally scrappy tumbler quilts look like a jumbled mess to me, so I imposed a few rules: I limited myself to three colors of dark blue, bright yellow, and aqua, and I alternated the dark blues and the aquas as well as the dark blues and the yellows. I’m hoping that the placement of the dark blues will keep the rioting in check. So far, it seems to be working. I sewed the tumblers into pairs, then the pairs into quads:

Then ironed them open:

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I think this will be at least enough for a wallhanging, or perhaps a lap quilt with the addition of some borders. (I see that it is probably time to wash the ironing board cover, too.)

I found a block in BlockBase+ to play with. This one is called “Providence” and is attributed to Nancy Cabot. It’s on a 5 x 5 grid of 25 squares. This website has instructions for making it in 5”, 7-1/2”, and 10” sizes. I chose to do the 10” size (I am having trouble wrapping my head around making quarter-square triangles that finish at 1” square, although I might try it sometime.) The block has several variations depending on how you choose to color each square. Mine looked like this:

I did it in Christmas colors just because the fabric was handy. This block has some potential. Despite the number of units, it went together easily. With a solid sashing to tie everything together, I think it could also be made scrappy.

We’ll see. where it ends up. BlockBase+ has a huge number of blocks that don’t seem to have made it into many quilt designs. I love playing with the more obscure ones.

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Dave, the younger rooster, has decided that he wants to be King of the Coop, so he and Baby (his dad) have been duking it out. When I went into the coop yesterday, Baby was a bit bloodied up and wandering around dazed and confused. (The husband said the same thing happened last spring, when Baby and the black rooster got into it.) I don’t care who is in charge. And I don’t think Dave will get aggressive toward me. He is a year and a half old and he knows the coop routine. He won’t eat out of my hand, but he will come and stand next to me until I get the scoop of scratch grains, at which point he hustles the hens out to the chicken yard. In terms of rooster behavior, he does exactly what he is supposed to.

Hopefully they won’t kill each other, but I am not going to stand out there and referee.

Our neighbor, Mike, had a bear in his yard the other night. The bear left a calling card:

Clearly, it has been raiding trash cans somewhere. The husband said that the homeowner he’s been working for a couple of miles south of here saw a grizzly sow with two cubs. The bears are awake and looking for food.

Putter Putter Putter

I did not do a good job of managing projects in the pipeline after all, because now I have nothing in the pipeline. And while it feels good to have finished so many projects, I was at loose ends yesterday, which does not feel good. I hesitate to start another big project, because I am sure that as soon as I do, the weather will improve and I will need to be spending my time outside.

I played around with BlockBase+ and EQ8 for a while and came up with a few more quilt designs. I boxed up the Guidepost sweaters to mail this week. I went out to the greenhouse mid-morning because Ali and her little guy were over there re-potting some of their seedlings, so I organized my tomatoes and planted a few more trays of seeds (flowers, mostly) and visited with them. We are all a bit concerned about the upcoming fire season. Our fire department was called to an out-of-control grass fire on Wednesday because the homeowner—someone who moved here from out of state—had been advised NOT to burn but went ahead and did it anyway. I saw the aftermath when I took some supplies to the crew. The fire had burned an area the size of two football fields in just an hour or so, and threatened not only this homeowner’s land, but neighboring properties as well.

A large part of Ali’s job is homeowner education on fires and fire behavior, but we worry that some people just aren’t educable. This particular homeowner may think twice, however, about burning again in the future. And while snowpack is near or above normal in the mountains, we need more rain than we’re getting at the moment.

I wanted to sew, so I got out the bin of 5” squares and started putting together some comforter tops for us to tie at our monthly sewing meetings at church. Finished comforters will get donated to Mennonite Central Committee. Our sewing group is meeting again May 6 after more than a year.

I’m still poking around the Newspapers.com website. I ran across a “quilt designer” whose name was unfamiliar to me—Hetty Winthrop. Interestingly, I found her name on a clipping from the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

A Google search led me to Barbara Brackman’s site for her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. In the entry for May 25, 2020, she notes that Hetty Winthrop seems to have “lifted liberally” from other pattern designers of the time (ironic, given the copyright notice in the newspaper ad). She goes on to say:

So who was this pattern pirate? Of course Hetty Winthrop is a pen name, evoking Colonial ladies and old New England families for the Bell Syndicate, a large newspaper company in business from 1916 to 1973. They distributed many comic strips and fiction other than needlework. But quilt patterns were hot in 1932 and '33. I would imagine Hetty was an artist working for Bell recruited for this needlework task at which s(he) was not too talented.

Wilene Smith has posted a page on Hetty, noting four US papers that bought the column in the first go-round beginning in December, 1932. It was revived in 1938 & '39 for Canadian papers through Dominion News Bureau, which also printed it in the early 30s.

Wilene Smith’s page can be found here. This stuff is fascinating.

A few months ago, I set up an online library card in the Montana library system and have been borrowing and reading books on my iPad. I just finished one by an incredibly well-known romance author—so well known that when I said her name to the husband, he responded, “The woman who writes all those romance novels?” As he is not in the habit of reading romance novels (or monitoring my reading preferences, for that matter), that should tell you how well known this person is.

I can’t believe this person got published, let alone written more than several dozen books. The writing was awful. I don’t do much creative writing, but one rule I do know is “Show, don’t tell,” which means to set up the scene so that the reader can imagine it in his or her head. This novel consisted of several hundred pages of “And then this happened,” followed by “And then this happened,” etc. The storyline was interesting, which was why I finished the book, but it was like going to a fancy restaurant expecting a delicious meal and being served a McDonald’s hamburger instead.

My gold standard for excellent storytelling is a woman who writes historical fiction under the pen name of Sara Donati. She has spoiled me for anything less.

Quilt Research

I have been working on patterns, but in the process, I fell down a rabbit hole at Newspapers.com. And I found some fun stuff.

First up, the Kansas City Star listing for Noon and Night, dated January 29, 1934. This was the earliest newspaper date I could find for this pattern. Others were dated February and March of that same year.

This one, from the Madison, WI Capital Times, indicates that it is a “Laura Wheeler” design and also includes a coupon for ordering.

I am still baffled as to why Noon and Night—and several dozen other patterns—were left out of compilations of Kansas City Star quilt blocks. Was the first compilation incomplete, and then the ones that followed simply propagated the mistake? That block was ridiculously hard to hunt down.

Here is Alice Brooks’ Three-Patch, the block that inspired Under the Big Top, from the Billings Gazette, May 27, 1937:

“Start soon, and have it all ready to show at the fall fair.” LOL.

And finally, the one I went looking for: Beginner’s Choice, another Laura Wheeler design, from the Palm Beach Post, November 9, 1940.

This is a good, clear, graphic and satisfies me that the block is composed of four chisel-shaped pieces and two trapezoid pieces. I need to stop thinking of old quilt block piecing in terms of 21st century techniques. That’s a failing on my part. A “beginner” in 2021 might find those shapes and the accompanying Y-seams difficult, but a “beginner” in 1940 would not. Changing the piecing to squares and half-square triangles does simplify the construction, though, and that’s how I am writing the pattern.

I am almost afraid to keep looking through the listings at Newspapers.com. “Laura Wheeler” also designed a bunch of knitting patterns, too. If I fell down that rabbit hole, I might be gone for weeks.

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I finished sewing the last two rows of the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt together; I didn’t mean to leave that one languishing so long. I’ll piece the backing and think about how I want to quilt it.

We moved the chicks last night. I spent an hour yesterday morning mucking out that area of the chicken coop because we let the big chickens roost in there when we don’t have chicks. I did that first thing so I could then come in and take a shower. When the husband got home, he spread out a bale of pine shavings and then we moved the chicks in two batches—putting them in a deep Rubbermaid bin for transport—from the garage to the coop. The chick’s area is closed off from the rest of the coop, so even though they can see the big chickens and the big chickens can see them, the chicks are safe.

Notes From the Neighborhood

We have a whiteboard in the greenhouse where we can make lists or write notes. I noticed one day that Ali had written something on the board. The next day, the husband had written another note underneath:

I love going out to the greenhouse—it smells wonderful in there with all the little plants coming up. Ali, Mike, Elysian, and I all have plants started and sometimes we have short confabs when we’re out there at the same time. It’s a great gathering place.

And just for the record, I have zero qualms about disposing of pests that are competing for my food. If it comes down to me eating or the rodents eating, I am going to win that battle every time.

I think the peeps may get moved in with the big chickens this weekend. We have a separate area within the coop where we put the babies when they are too big for the brooder box. They have just about doubled in size and it’s getting crowded in the box. One also tried to escape yesterday. I have to scoot the wire lid over to replace their food and water and one chick got a bit too curious about what I was doing.

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I parked myself in my office chair yesterday morning and worked on patterns for most of the day. Once I get into a groove, I hate to stop. The layouts are started for Big Top, the wallhanging, and the green and purple quilt, and most of the verbiage for Big Top is written. Next up will be making the illustrations and doing the math for different sizes.

One of the issues I struggle with in these quilt patterns is whether or not I should try to write them for precuts. The Big Top quilt could be done with charm square packs and jelly rolls, but the instructions for doing it that way are completely different for the instructions for cutting it from yardage—so much so that I would be writing two separate patterns. I don’t use a lot of precuts, so I am inclined not to write patterns for them even though I know how popular they are.

We’ll see. Patterns tend to evolve along the way, just like quilts.

I also figured out exactly how that not-White Kona got into the purple and green quilt. I was writing through the process of making the Big Top blocks and remembered that after I cut those, I had some of that background fabric left. (It was Kona Natural.) It was lying on the cutting table and I grabbed it thinking it was Kona White. Note to self: Do not cut fabric for two quilts with similar background fabrics simultaneously. Or just don’t make quilts with white backgrounds.

My new cutting table is scheduled to arrive next month. I ordered it from Tracey’s Tables on February 5 and knew that it would take some time as each one is custom built, but I hadn’t heard anything from them since. No updates, nothing. As the order involved a fair chunk of money, I decided to e-mail them and see what was going on. I got a very nice, very prompt reply from customer service with the anticipated delivery date.

I’ve noticed that tiny quilt blocks are starting to become a thing now. Fat Quarter Shop has been running their Sewcialites sewalong for several months, with the option to make 3”, 6”, 9”, and 12” blocks. Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life has been making the 3” blocks. And yesterday’s Accuquilt launch party on Facebook Live was for their new 4” Qube system. I thought making those 6” blocks was tough—I can’t imagine making 3” or 4” blocks. I’d have to buy a 55-gallon drum of Best Press.

Laugh With Me

“Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused,'" Gabriel quoted. "One of the unrecorded Beatitudes.” ―Terri Garey, Devil Without a Cause

I provide myself plenty of entertainment. Yesterday, for example, I finished binding the wallhanging and decided I would take it and the purple and green quilt out to photograph. I finally got a new battery for my Sony Alpha-100 DSLR camera. That wasn’t a cheap camera when I bought it 15 or so years ago, and I really ought to be using it instead of the iPhone. I have several nice lenses for it, too.

I did the wallhanging first:

Adding that black binding helped finish it off. The border doesn’t look like it’s floating in space now. And that swag quilting along the edges absolutely was the right choice.

Then I hung up the purple and green quilt. And I looked at it. Do you see it?

These blocks were all supposed to have Kona White as the background, but somewhere along the line, I must have pulled a chunk of Kona not-White (Kona Bone or Kona Snow are the most likely suspects) out of my stash and used it instead. I have been working on this quilt for the last two months—including two days of quilting it under the bright LED lights on my Q20—and never noticed the difference in the shades. If the creamier white were evenly distributed among the blocks, I would have called it a design element, LOL.

All I could do when I saw this was laugh. I’m not upset. I had planned all along to remake this quilt in a different colorway at some point. And I do like the addition of the creamier white, so that may get factored into the remake of the quilt, although I will be sure to place it in a more controlled manner.

Some days I am a good example and some days I am a horrible warning. Learn from me. I really ought to get into the habit of cutting all my fabrics at once instead of piecemeal. I also need to figure out some better lighting for my cutting area.

I also had an epiphany about quilt names while I was standing outside laughing at myself. Quilt names need to reflect the design of the quilt and not necessarily the colors, so calling this design something like “Lilac Chain” isn’t going to work. What if a quilter decided to make it in Christmas colors? (Yes, quilters can use their imaginations and not get stuck on a particular colorway, but I can tell you from my experience as a knitting designer that it doesn’t work that way.) “Thistle Chain” is a bit better, but not much. “Pokey Stars” is nice and descriptive, but perhaps not in the best way. Needless to say, I’m still thinking about a name for this one.

So. The wallhanging can get written up as a pattern, although I still want to play around with that block and perhaps do a larger version. The purple and green quilt will be re-made, too, but with more careful attention paid to fabric shades and placement. I also have the design to make that I am calling Duck Duck Goose. I may set aside a day or two later this week for some marathon cutting sessions. I’ve got some new dies for the Studio cutter that will help with the prep work.

Binding in a Windstorm

I don’t have a hero shot of the purple and green quilt yet. I finished sewing down the binding yesterday as a windstorm was blowing outside, so there was no chance for a picture. The windstorm was intense, although not on the order of the one in March 2020. We didn’t lose any trees. The lights flickered a few times but the power stayed on.

I had a heck of a time finding a good binding for this quilt. I wanted something a shade darker than the outer purple border to pick up the dark purple in the chain blocks. My stash of Kona purples didn’t suit, nor did any of the stores in town have the right color. I looked at Moda Grunge. I looked at Moda Marbles. I held up my swatch of border fabric against every purple fabric in the quilt store and finally one popped out. It was a geometric print (Kimberbell), which didn’t fit with the floral design at all, but when I folded it on the bias, it looked enough like a flower to me that I went with it.

I like the way it looks on the quilt. It’s dark enough to pick up the purple in the chain, but it’s also got a lighter purple in it that is the same as the border color.

And it looks nice with this giant floral-y watercolor print on the back:

Done and done. This design needs a pattern. If the weather forecast holds for the week, we may be getting cold temps and snow again by next weekend, so I’ll be looking for some indoor work. And it’s probably a good thing I never got the peas planted. On Saturday—which was gorgeous—we pulled the black plastic off a section of the garden and I raked up all the dead vegetation and burned it.

Before the storm hit yesterday, the husband and I went out and pulled the plastic back and secured it with bricks and rocks. That half of the garden is now ready for planting. I’ve still got a few weeks, yet, to tackle the other half.

While I was in the garden, the husband was doing more yard cleanup with the backhoe. That was a frustrating process, though, because our fire department kept getting paged out for out-of-control grass fires. We had something like three calls in the space of two hours. He’s got one or two days a week to get things done here, and when our volunteer firefighters—no one gets paid, not even the chief—spend big chunks of their days off putting out other people’s fires, nothing gets done at their own homes. We had slash piles burning, too. I also felt bad for the dispatcher. She was paging out rural fire departments left and right and you could hear it in her voice that she had had enough. The husband finished out the day on a mutual aid barn fire call down the road with the neighboring fire department. He also went to an out-of-control grass fire that got into the timber just as the windstorm was ramping up yesterday.

Grass fires happen, I get it. The wind shifts or increases and things get away. (Yesterday’s windstorm had been in the forecast for several days, however.) People assume that when there is an emergency, “someone” is going to show up in a timely manner. This is especially true of people who move here from larger metropolitan areas. With so many people moving into our valley, our resources are getting stretched thin.

I started the binding on the wallhanging last night. I’ll have it done this evening. I have one more quilt basted and ready to quilt—a charity quilt, not my own design—and it might be a good one for practicing more ruler work designs.

Hero Shots

The weather finally has cooperated enough for me to take some outside photos of my quilts. When I was a guest on the DIY Channel show “Knitty Gritty” way back in 2004, the knitted object that was the topic of the show—in my case, an Aran-themed afghan—was referred to as “the hero,” so you may think of these as the hero shots of my quilts.

The lighting inside our house is abysmal. I much prefer outside shots in diffuse light, either an overcast day or in the late afternoon, but in Montana, those conditions are only available from about March to October. The rest of the time, the snow is reflective, it’s too hard to get to certain spots to hang things, or the light is too weak. One of my favorite places for photos is the side of the woodshed. The north side has just enough of the right kind of light in the afternoon. (I did not edit any of these photos and the colors are fairly true.) I also like the rustic backdrop. I started with the Bear Paw baby quilt:

As much as I love the spiral square quilting, I think it did cause the linen/cotton fabric to stretch a bit around the edges. Oh, well, it’s a baby blanket, and it feels amazing. Again, it’s a great pattern and one I’ve added to the “go-to patterns” pile.

This is the Under the Big Top quilt:

I still have a soft spot for this quilt. It may never be my most popular design, but it’s one of my favorites. I need to finish this pattern.

And I finally got a good outside shot of Cobbles and Pebbles:

I plan to take as many outside and close-up shots as I can this summer so I can add the photos to my patterns.

The Beginner’s Choice wallhanging is trimmed and waiting for binding. I took it with me to the quilt store yesterday to do a “show and tell” with the ruler class instructor. I was the only customer in the store, so the staff and I stood there and looked it over and did a post-mortem on my quilting. (They had lots of positive comments.) The instructor asked me to bring it to the class in May. I also chatted with the owner of the store about possibly teaching some classes, but I won’t say more than that until and unless it happens.

[We were having drinks on the veranda last night and after I told the husband about my conversation with the quilt store owner, he said, “You just want to teach, don’t you?” I guess I can’t get away from it.]

I’ve got about half the binding sewn down on the purple and green quilt. I need to write that pattern, too. And the one for Beginner’s Choice. Writing patterns involves a completely different part of my brain and I have to be in the mood to do it. I got a good laugh from a Facebook post yesterday by a fellow knitting designer. She was writing a pattern and decided it was a good time to take a break after she had written “Figure it out your own self” on the pattern. LOL. We’ve all been there.

Ruler Work Synthesis

This is a long post, so pull up a cup of tea and settle in.

The other day, I felt compelled to get the basted Beginner’s Choice wallhanging out to be quilted. If you will recall, this is a Laura Wheeler block that I believe was intended to be simple—a nine-patch composed of squares and half-square triangles, which would indeed make it suitable for a beginner—but somehow morphed into a much more complicated block consisting of trapezoids and chisels. I have not been able to find the simpler block anywhere, but the more complicated ( = not beginner) version appears in both Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns and in the BlockBase program.

I made a wallhanging featuring this block using Christmas fabrics. I was mostly playing around, although this is on the “to be re-done and published” list for a future date. I can’t tell you exactly what motivated me to get it out and work on it, but clearly my brain had some itch that needed to be scratched. I know that wanting more practice with my longarm rulers factored into the decision.

One of the first things Angela Walters said in the class I took from her was that no one gets better at machine quilting without practice. (That holds true for most things.) I have worked hard at adopting a mindset that will allow me to play around with my quilted stuff without assigning super-high expectations of perfection. Angela Walters is in my head a lot:

• Practice, practice, practice!

• Done is better than perfect!

• Every master was once a disaster!

I very much appreciated the video in which Angela shared some of her very first longarmed quilts and pointed out just how awful they were.

The last couple of months have been a journey of getting to know the Q20 and forcing myself to quilt things other than loops. But I find myself getting caught up in quilting design decisions—as if designing the actual quilt top itself wasn’t fraught with a myriad of choices—and having to fight my way through the various pieces of conflicting advice I am hearing. I said to the husband yesterday that I know why some people buy longarm machines on frames and hook them up to computers. Letting the computer quilt an edge-to-edge design is infinitely easier than custom quilting.

But I am determined to master this.

I’m going to take a short detour here. A phenomenon I saw in knitting also appears to have infected the quilting universe. I started knitting in the 1980s. Somewhere around the early 2000s, a group of younger people found the craft, but they wanted everyone to know that what they were doing was “not your grandmother’s knitting.” I found that phrase annoying and ungrateful on so many levels. It is possible to be modern and edgy without denigrating what came before you as primitive and unsophisticated (which it most certainly was not). That attitude has made itself known in quilting, too, and it has caused me no end of whiplash:

“Don’t use polyester batting—it makes your quilts look like 1980s comforters,” only to discover that most quilt designers use either two batts, one of which is polyester or wool, or a 50/50 blend of cotton and polyester. (The explanation is that they travel and hang better on display without wrinkling because of the polyester.)

“Don’t stitch in the ditch—that’s for grandmothers” only to discover that a lot of custom quilting relies heavily on stitching in the ditch.

I am juggling a whole lot of conflicting information in my head and trying to gel it into something that makes sense for me. Read that last part again. FOR ME.

I spread out the basted wallhanging and looked at it. Amanda Murphy advises to “quilt the bones” of the design first. Quilt the structural elements and the parts you want to emphasize and then go back and add embellishments. I knew I wanted the black ribbon-y pieces to stand out, so I started there.

You have to remember that I was trained by a group of Mennonite quilters, and my personal aesthetic has always been more traditional than modern. I very much like the look of quilting 1/4” from the seamline better than stitching in the ditch. I quilted inside the “star” that was formed by the black fabric ribbons:

My first thought was to do some kind of filler within the star I had just outlined. I don’t like dense quilting, though. Quilts with so much thread in them that they could stand up by themselves don’t appeal to me. That was too large an expanse to leave unquilted, however. I spent a solid couple of hours looking through Amanda Murphy’s books and watching YouTube videos and looking at my collection of longarm rulers, hoping that inspiration would strike.

A few weeks ago, I was looking at the wall of longarm rulers at the quilt store when I saw the Handi-Quilter “swag” collection. These are four rulers that can be used alone or in combination to make swag patterns. I had no idea why at the time, but I sensed that I needed those rulers, so I bought them. Lo and behold, the two largest swag rulers have cutouts in the middle that can be used for making other designs, too. (I love tools with more than one use.)

The largest swag template had this teardop cutout. I got out a sheet of paper and a pencil and started playing around. (Did anyone else have a Spirograph growing up?) If the pointed end is placed in the center of a circle, a flower forms. If the rounded end is placed in the center of a circle, a different kind of flower forms, one that reminded me of a poinsettia.

I placed these in the center of each star, which added enough quilting to satisfy me. I quilted partial flowers in the partial stars along each edge. That left just the border to be quilted. Once again, the swag templates came to the rescue:

The border wasn’t deep enough for me to use all four, but the three smallest swag templates worked perfectly. I finished off the quilting with rays of straight lines in each corner. I’ll get it bound this weekend and take a picture.

This simple wallhanging—which was made as a way to test a block—feels like a milestone to me. Ruler work and custom quilting are becoming good friends of mine. That’s a bit unexpected but certainly welcome.

I should have several finishes to show off next week, so stay tuned.

Ruler Club and the Swish Template

I had a nice chat with our pig supplier yesterday morning. I am planning a trip to Alaska to see DD#1 and DSIL and wanted to make sure that the dates of my trip don’t coincide with more livestock arriving on the farm. We confirmed the order and the dates and I went ahead and made my travel plans. I will have to get a covid test before I go, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

It was sunny yesterday, but still cold. I got a bunch of paperwork sorted and organized in the morning, then went to town and ran errands. The farm store is awash in chicks now—oh, the irony—and the cashier tried to get me to take 10 more at 30% off. I hope they don’t decide to stop carrying chicks because it has been such a hassle for them the past two seasons. Apparently, after two months of not being able to get chicks delivered on a regular schedule, they got a chick shipment every day last week.

[I would have taken more chicks, but our brooder box is full.]

I ran into my friend Debbie at one of the nurseries. (She did the flowers for DD#1’s wedding.) She was buying some shrubs and I was there just to see what they had. I was surprised to see that their stock is much thinner that it used to be and I wonder what is going on. I think the owners want to sell and retire, so that may be the reason. I wandered around the greenhouses and enjoyed seeing and smelling the flowers and herbs.

The traffic, though—I know people in big cities laugh when they hear me complain, but as I explained to the husband over dinner, I have an idea in my head of how long errands should take based on having lived here for 28 years. That schedule has gone all to pieces in the last year or so. It took me 15 minutes to drive a one-mile stretch of road yesterday. Part of the problem is (special) people who insist on trying to drive and park in places where they don’t belong, which gums up the traffic flow for everyone else.

I made it to the quilt store in time for my ruler class, though. This month, we got the “Swish” template, which joins the On-Point template from last month.

Handi-Quilter runs these ruler classes in six-month blocks, from September to February and then again from March to August. I probably will keep taking them as long as the store keeps offering them. Each series has a theme. The theme for this series is “Borders,” which is great because I can never figure out how to quilt designs in a border. Our instructor showed us some very cool ideas for this curved-line template, though, so I might try it out soon. (I really need to learn to quilt feathers.) I picked up a “center-zero” tape measure at this same store, which will help me lay out and mark my designs.

I think I like ruler work because unlike free-motion quilting—which is done without a net—ruler work provides some underlying structure to the design. “Quilting,” as it pertains to putting designs into fabric with thread, will never be my strong suit, however. For me, it’s a means to an end, not a way to express my creativity. That happens with the fabric and piecing.

The husband watches a YouTube channel put out by some guy in southern Oregon who owns a heavy equipment/big rig repair business. He drives up and down I-5 in Oregon and California fixing stuff. I can tell just from the few episodes I’ve watched that the guy is brilliant, although I wish there were subtitles because half the time it’s like watching a film in a foreign language. I ask the husband a lot of questions. Last night, I learned how to chase down a broken solder joint in the electronic control module of a logging truck. Who knew. The husband reminded me that every trade has its own terminology.

Potatoes and Paws

While I was at church on Sunday, the husband planted potatoes.

We try not to till much in the garden anymore, but this section needed some compost dug into it. Between the chickens, the pigs, and our compost bins, we have no shortage of soil amendments. And when we can get rotted straw, that’s a great addition, too.

It was windy and raw again here yesterday. We are supposed to be up in the 60s by the weekend. Let’s hope. I spent the day moving some quilt projects further along the pipeline. I quilted the Bear Paw baby quilt, after spending an hour determining proper settings on the Janome. (This is straight-line walking foot quilting, which is why I was using the Janome and not the Q20.) I started with the settings I usually use when quilting on the Janome: blue dot bobbin case, Aurifil 50wt in the bobbin, Signature 40wt on top, a Microtex 90/14 needle, and tension set at 4. I could not get a suitable stitch. In the end, I went back to the regular red dot bobbin case and switched to a universal needle and that did the trick. I did the square spiral quilting with the lines about 1/2” apart.

The batting is Luna Kyoto, a 50/50 bamboo/cotton blend. I don’t think I’ve ever tried this brand before, but the quilt store had crib size batts, so I bought one. That batting and the Essex linen fabric are a nice combination. I went with a quilting cotton for the back and had just enough navy blue Kona binding already made up to go around it, with 4” to spare. I’ll sew that down some evening this week. This was a quick, fun project and the tutorial has been added to my list of favorite go-to quilt patterns.

I also made and attached the binding to the purple and green quilt. I decided to make bias binding, not because I have to navigate curves, but because the print I chose looked better as binding cut on the bias. I used my Accuquilt cutter to cut the binding strips and that worked really well. That binding has been attached to the quilt and I’ll get that sewn down this week, too.

Ruler Club is this afternoon—we get a new Handi-Quilter ruler and a quick lesson in how to use it. I am curious to see which ruler we get today. Last month was the on-point diamond. I’m finding that I really like the Handi-Quilter rulers. I have the Bernina set of rulers, too, but they aren’t quite as user friendly. The class schedule from the big quilt store in Spokane arrived in my mailbox this week, and I’ve already circled half a dozen classes I’d like to take between now and July. They are offering a class on using the Bernina rulers and I am tempted to sign up for it.

I have to replant all my zucchini seeds. A little rodent got in and dug them all up and ate them, as well as some of the melon seeds. The cucumbers appear to have escaped unscathed. I was hoping it wasn’t destructive chipmunks because they wrought total devastation three years ago. The husband set up traps and we nabbed a mouse yesterday morning. (I took a picture to text to the husband, but I’ll spare all of you.) Hopefully it was the culprit. I might rig up some kind of wire screen over the replacement tray of zucchinis, just in case.

Everything else looks great. The tomatoes have come up, the cukes have come up, and the tray of lettuce sprouted. Ali, Mike, and Elysian also have seedlings coming up. If it’s going to be nice this weekend, I’ll try to get the peas planted. The peeps are doing fine. I had to have a talk with Dave—one of the roosters—yesterday, because he wasn’t following the afternoon scratch grain routine. It’s kind of a complicated routine, so I won’t try to describe it, but he was not where he was supposed to be when I went into the coop. We had a short discussion in which he looked at me with one eye and then the other, and then he scooted back outside. My roosters are so goofy. They do know their names, though, and they will come when I call them.

Ambition, Foiled

The husband had an ambitious to-do list yesterday. I usually don’t decide what I am doing on the weekend until I find out what he has planned, in case it’s a project where I can help. The first item on the list was planting fruit trees. We had the two apples from Costco, and while he dug holes, I ran up to Susan’s and picked up the Westfield Seek-No-Further and Northern Lights apple trees that she grafted for me. She also gave me one called Hidden Rose (AKA Airlie Redflesh). She gets the most interesting varieties. Her DSIL’s dad also loves to graft and grow apple trees, so the other Westfield Seek-No-Further start is going to their place in Kellogg, Idaho.

All the holes were dug by the time I got back. We are putting these new trees in the front yard with the rest of the apple trees:

The new trees are hard to see because they are just skinny whips at this point. (That black blob is Lila, our project supervisor.) This is looking north on our property, toward the back of the old garage that was here when we bought the property in 1994.

This picture is deceptive. The day was sunny—sort of—but with a stiff, raw wind. We got two of the trees planted and then the pager went off for an out-of-control grass fire. (We didn’t burn because it was too windy, but apparently, other people didn’t check the weather forecast.) The husband left to get the engine and I finished planting the trees. Just as I got back to the house, the wind picked up even more and it started snowing. By the time the husband came home from the fire, snow was covering the ground, but then the sun came out and it melted. Those squalls kept coming, on and off, for the entire day.

Welcome to Montana.

He had wanted to plant potatoes, but it was just too raw out there to be digging in the garden. Instead, he put compost around all the trees and made sure the new ones were protected with wire cages. My friend Anna had gifted me two large bags of Brussels sprouts, so I trimmed and roasted those and finished the last of my MIL’s Guidepost sweaters. Those will get boxed up and mailed this week. Neither of us had the most productive day, but oh, well.

FedEx delivered this:

I am trying a Ruggable system. These are the ones that are supposed to be washable. We have always had area rugs in the living room, but Lila hauls in a huge amount of dirt. She has quite a few “mud wallows” around the yard that she loves to lie in, and all that topsoil ends up in my living room. She’s also had some accidents on the rugs—those have been happening ever since we got her as a puppy, and it’s usually because she drank a whole bunch of water and needs to pee in the middle of the night. (Of course, she doesn’t pee on the vast expanse of wood floor, which is easier to clean up; she pees on the carpet.) I threw out the last stained and dirty rug and went a few weeks with nothing on the floor, but that room is too big not to have some kind of carpet. The walls are painted brick red. I picked this pattern in hopes that the dirt would be less noticeable. The system consists of a grippy pad—I bought the extra-cushy one—with a thin, flexible, obviously petroleum-based carpet on top. The top layer can be peeled off and thrown in the washer.

We’ll see how it works. I want my house to look nice, but it’s a constant battle out here on the farm.

Runs Like a Deere

This is the emoji you text your mother when you find out she is buying a tractor:

It speaks volumes, LOL. (That was DD#2.)

I said last year that when I turned 55, I was going to go shopping for a riding lawnmower, because—as much as I appreciate the exercise—it is getting to be too much for me to mow our acreage with a push mower once a week during the summer. I hadn’t planned to go shopping quite this soon, but we were having a discussion about mowers in the homesteading chat group yesterday morning, and as I needed to go get chicken feed anyway, I thought I’d look at what was available in town.

The Kubota dealer had no riding mowers in stock and couldn’t tell me when they thought they would get more inventory. The young man I spoke to tried very hard, though, to convince me that I needed the $7000 zero-turn radius commercial machine with the 54” mower deck. I have no plans to start a lawn care business.

The sales guy at the John Deere dealer had a much more relaxed approach. He asked me what I needed, listened to my answers, then gave me the pros and cons of riding mowers versus zero-turn radius mowers and showed me models in a range of prices. I took the information home with me, intending to discuss it with the husband over dinner. As luck would have it, he was home—passing through between jobs—so we had our discussion, decided on a model and accessories, and I headed back into town to make my purchase.

[Somewhere on this planet is a picture of me, about age 15, sitting on my grandfather’s John Deere riding mower. I was the grandchild willing to drive that behemoth around the yard, so the job of cutting the grass fell to me. I remember that that mower had a manual clutch. It might have had power steering, but I rather doubt it. The rational part of my brain thinks that nostalgia is a lousy reason to buy something (says the woman who drives a BMW because her boyfriend-now-husband had one in college), but I looked at that John Deere tractor and was transported back in time 40 years. When the husband blesses an equipment purchase, though, I feel okay about it even if it involves less-than-rational decision-making on my part.]

The dealer has to bring the model I want up from Missoula—everyone is short on stock—but I was able to test drive the same one, an X384:

Tractors have improved considerably in 40 years. This one has a hydrostatic clutch with forward and reverse pedals. We chose a model with four-wheel steering, which I tested by doing figure-eights in the parking lot. It will not be hard to maneuver this machine around our trees.

There are lots of optional accessories. I can get a snowblower, a snowplow, a rear blade, a bagging attachment, a sun canopy or even a full enclosure, and a trailer. I added just the bagging attachment and the trailer for now, but I can see where having a snow removal attachment would be helpful in the winter.

Our chat group discussion reminded me, once again, that men and women have vastly different approaches when it comes to homesteading tools. The whole discussion came about because one of the women, who is younger than me and a single mom, mentioned that she was picking up her new tractor. (Hers is similar in size to mine, but a different brand.) I asked what machine she chose, and as soon as the guys found out I was looking for one, they bombarded me with all kinds of advice, which boiled down to two things: 1) Bigger is better and 2) Sexier is better.

[I’m not going in the direction you might think I’m going, but that sums it up nicely.]

The husband is a bit like this, too, but practicality is foremost in his decision-making. He also has had to listen to me complain for 30+ years about machinery designed by men for men. We have equipment here—the brush hog mower comes to mind—that I don’t use because I can’t operate it safely. That mower requires upper body strength I simply don’t possess. Sometimes smaller and more basic is the right choice. Having this tractor will allow me to do stuff around here in ways that are manageable for me without waiting for him to break out the heavy equipment. And this machine will go places, like the garden, where the access is too tight for anything larger.

Because I spent all day shopping, I did not get anything else done. I still need to put the borders on the baby quilt, make the binding for the purple and green quilt, and sew the last couple of rows of the Flower Garden quilt together. I think we might finish up burning today, though.

Hold On, Spring

I was sewing upstairs yesterday afternoon when I heard what sounded like thunder. The problem is that lots of things sound like thunder around here:

• Snow sliding off the metal roof

• Trees falling down in the yard

• Kids running across the porch

• Car accidents in front of the house (we had someone wrap his truck around a tree in our yard about 10 years ago)

• Actual thunder

It took me a few minutes of investigating to realize that it was, indeed, thunder. And it was accompanied by snow! And wind! Yay. I love Montana.

I was good and tied myself to my office chair yesterday morning so I could finish the tax prep. The construction company tax returns are done and filed, but all of that information is kept in QuickBooks and is easy to give to the accountant. The other two businesses and our personal stuff take longer. Because the IRS extended the deadline for filing, I’ve let that slide longer than I should have.

My reward to myself for completing that task was to make a baby quilt. I need to have a supply of them on hand. Specifically, I’ve been wanting to try the Scrappy Bear Paw Baby Quilt tutorial on Jeni Baker’s website. If I am going to gift a baby quilt, it should have a Montana theme, and what could be more Montana than the Bear Paw block? I loved the chambray version that Anna Graham of Noodlehead made. Anna suggests the Robert Kaufman Essex Yarn Dyed (55% linen/45% cotton) fabric as a substitute for the chambray she used. I pulled all of the Essex Yarn Dyed out of my stash and played with some color combinations.

[I understand that stores can’t always carry entire lines of fabric, but it frustrates me when ALL THE STORES in the same geographical area carry the exact same colors. Our quilt stores carry the grays, beiges, and denims of this fabric. Hobby Lobby has also started carrying it, but only in black, denim, beige, and seafoam green. And that’s the same lineup in every one of their stores, because I checked at all the stores in Washington on our recent road trip. I think it’s a shame, because this line has some really spectacular saturated colors in it.]

I have a lot of denims and grays. I also have beige and seafoam green. I am pretty sure I also have a chunk of a chocolate brown somewhere, but I can’t find it. That’s odd. Not only is my stash well organized, but I keep a running inventory in my brain and can almost always put my hands on a fabric within a few minutes.

One nice feature of this pattern is that it doesn’t use up a lot of fabric, and even smaller scraps work for the Bear Paw half-square triangles. Speaking of half-square triangles, I took this opportunity to try out the Diagonal Seam Tape that I bought on the road trip:

My overall impression is that the seam tape is a step up from painter’s tape with drawn lines. I don’t want to dissuade anyone from buying it. My issue, I think, is more that I don’t like piecing on my Janome. I use my beloved Vittorio, the Necchi BF, for piecing. I had to fiddle with the Janome’s settings quite a bit as the Essex is just a bit thicker than quilting cotton. In the end, what worked was to use my even-feed open toe foot on the machine instead of the standard foot. I suspect that when I make HSTs, I will have to do all of them on the Janome with the seam tape and then move to the Necchi for the rest of the piecing. (I don’t want to put the seam tape on the Necchi because the finish is a bit fragile.) The seam tape does result in accurately-pieced HSTs, although I make mine slightly oversized to trim down.

This pattern goes together quickly. This is the center with the four Bear Paw blocks. I still have to add the 6” borders on each side. Those will be in the same dark blue denim Essex.

The Essex is wonderfully soft and a great choice for a baby quilt. Because that fabric is a bit heavier that quilting cotton, I plan to use a lighter batting (bamboo?) or maybe even just a piece of flannel in between. I am curious to see how this quilts up. I think I will do what Anna did with hers and quilt a square spiral.

The weather forecast doesn’t appear to include more snow (I hope), but it is supposed to be cool through next week. Except for checking on seedlings and chicks, I think my outdoor activities will be postponed for a few more days.

The Joy of Dirt

The greenhouse has been a busy place lately. I’ve got most of my veggie seeds planted.

I even have my first tomato seedling. This is one of the Dirty Girl seeds I saved from last year’s plant.

Ali came over on Monday and Tuesday to plant seeds, and our neighbor Mike joined her yesterday so he could get his started. We have plenty of space, plenty of pots and trays, and the sunshine is free. I am delighted to share. We will all have lovely gardens this season. I plant my seeds in a 50/50 mix of potting soil and compost and that combo seems to work well.

I did a Costco run Monday morning and was thrilled to see apple trees for sale!

Costco used to have fruit trees for sale in early March. My State Fair, Honeycrisps, Red Wealthy, and Lodi apple trees all came from Costco about 10 years ago. (I also had a Sweet Sixteen but it died.) The Costco trees did much better than the bare root ones we planted at the same time and have produced steadily for the past five or six seasons. Costco either stopped carrying trees or had them for such a short time that I missed the window. When I saw these, I grabbed one each of Cortland and Winesap. They also had Northern Spy, but Susan has one and says it’s a late apple and hers hasn’t flowered yet. We’ll get these planted along with the Northern Lights and Seek-No-Further that Susan has for me, and I should have a very respectable selection of apples in my orchard.

I am curious to see if we get peaches again this year as it was a fairly mild winter.

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I finished quilting the purple and green quilt. I had done loopy flowers in the middle section, intending to do something else in the borders, but I wasn’t happy with the small bit of border quilting I tried. I took it out and ended up doing more loopy flowers. I think that was a good choice. I don’t need to be fancy on every single quilt, and finished is better than perfect. The quilt needs a binding and then I can write the pattern for that one, too. (I am waiting for a cold and rainy day.) I’d like to remake that quilt in different fabrics. It’s a fun and quick design.

I hope that allergy season slows down soon. I am really struggling this year. The problem isn’t so much respiratory as it is itchy, watery eyes and itchy skin. I forgot to take some allergy medication Monday morning and by dinner time, I was miserable. I may look into doing a low histamine diet for a couple of weeks to see if that helps. All the foods I like to eat—spinach, yogurt, cheese, etc.—are on the high histamine food list, and I have been eating a lot of cooked spinach lately. (Go figure.)

Out of Hibernation

We’ll see if I can get through today without taking out any windmills.

I worked outside on Saturday. We have a very tiny window for burning slash piles—tiny because of the weather and tiny because of the husband’s schedule—and we would like to get as much done as possible before open burning season ends. This is continued cleanup from that windstorm in March 2020 when we lost dozens of trees.

Our neighbor, Ali, who works for the state department of natural resources in their forest management/fire division, came over for a few hours Saturday morning to help us. She set up her camera to take time-lapse photos. (When she finishes the montage and releases it, I’ll post a link to it.) These piles of brush have been drying out for a year. They burned hot and fast. The problem with spring (and fall) burning is that sometimes the wind comes up and fires get away from people. Just after lunch, the pager went off for an out-of-control grass fire south of us. The husband left me in charge of the burn piles and went and got the wildland engine from the station. Just as he was returning from that fire, though, the pager went off again and he headed off to another grass fire down in the valley.

Cleaning up this mess gives us a lot more usable area on our property. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it yet, but it’s not nearly as hospitable to ground squirrels as it used to be and that’s a bonus. We do plan to put a new driveway along the south edge of our property at some point, and our neighbors just to the south are planning to put up a fence line there. All of this should look much nicer in a year or two. We should be able to finish up the rest of the burning next weekend.

[I think I need to start shopping for a nice riding lawnmower.]

Inside the house, I took down all the insulated shades and swapped out our heavy down comforter for the lighter summer one. I like being able to see out the windows again.

We do need some rain. A weak front came through last night with a bit of wind and rain, but we could use more moisture.

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I am going to finish up the sewing projects I have in the pipeline: quilting the green/purple quilt, getting the Flower Garden quilt basted, finishing the Pepper and Flax top, and completing a few small miscellaneous projects. After that, I’ll reassess where I am before I start anything else. You can expect more garden and animal pictures for the next couple of weeks. Tera and her husband just got a small flock of sheep and I plan to stop over there soon to check them out. I am sure Cathy has got calves on the way. Our peeps are doing well. Piglets won’t arrive here until the end of May/beginning of June, although Elysian thinks her sow is pregnant and may have babies this month. It’s a busy time of year, for sure.

Raising the Bar

The libertarian part of me that doesn’t concern itself with things that don’t affect me directly sometimes comes into conflict with the part of me that likes to go tilting at windmills. (The husband has been known to leave for work in the mornings by giving me a kiss and expressing sympathy for said windmills on his way out the door.) I couldn’t help myself yesterday morning. I ran across such a badly-written article on a Spokane news station website that I felt compelled to e-mail the news director. The author of the article would not have passed my eighth-grade English class back in Avon, Ohio. The entire piece read as though it had been written by a child. The most egregious error was the use of the word “breached” to describe a buttocks-presentation birth. (Hello? Merriam-Webster? Google?) I did not receive a response to my e-mail but I saw, later in the day, that the errors had been corrected.

And now we reach the “get off my lawn” portion of today’s blog post. What is with people nowadays? Is it laziness? Is it ignorance? Is it sheer incompetence? Has the bar really fallen so low that some middle-aged woman in Kalispell, Montana, has to take a virtual red pen to an article on a regional news stations’s website?

This makes quite a statement (I would like to credit it but I can’t remember where I found it):

How many 18-year-old boys match this description today? My very attractive and accomplished younger daughter has a lot to say about the lack of maturity in the young men of her generation. I know that mediocrity is rampant among people of all ages, not just certain generations. I’m tired of it. And I am becoming far less willing to ignore it when I see it. Show up and make an effort.

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I planted more seeds yesterday and will finish up this morning. The husband and I also did a recon tour of the garden to formulate a plan of attack. The potatoes need to go in soon. If it’s too windy to burn today, we might plant. I have to decide if I want to leave the billboard tarp on the spot where I want to put an herb garden, out by the strawberries. That area is terribly overgrown with quackgrass and Oregon grape. It would be better to leave the tarp on one more season to make sure that nothing survives under there, but I’m itching to plant that section.

Our neighbor, Mike, came over and I gave him some bacon as a thank-you—he feeds scraps to the pigs because the pig pasture backs up onto his property. He’s on the fire department with the husband and also works as a flight medic on the ALERT helicopter. His garden was lovely last year. He grew enough kale for the whole neighborhood, LOL.

Cobbles and Pebbles and Peeps

The Cobbles and Pebbles pattern is live in the store and on sale for the first week.

Some time between now and next fall, I need to figure out how to handle the social media end of pattern production. I am terrible about posting on Instagram and I only check Facebook when I get a notification of activity on my page. The time I do spend online is usually in a homesteading chat group, which is full of people who actually do things rather than wasting their time on social media yelling about stuff they can’t change.

As a result, there is no coordinated social media campaign to launch this pattern. I will try to fix that before I release any more patterns, but farming is the big focus for me right now. With the nice weather, we’ve also had some visits from friends and neighbors, and sitting on the porch enjoying the sunshine with people we haven’t seen all winter is important.

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This is not my first rodeo. I am convinced that the farm store really has no clue when they are getting chicks. An employee might tell you the chicks are expected on Friday, but when you get there on Friday, you discover that the shipment came in on Thursday and all the chicks have been sold. I had a hunch the store might get a shipment yesterday, so I drove in to town midmorning. I heard the telltale peeping noises as soon as I walked in. The stock also bears no resemblance to what the chick schedule said was supposed to come in. I get a different breed of chickens every season so we know how old each cohort is. I needed black or white ones this year. There weren’t enough of one breed of either color, so I ended up with 10 black Jersey Giants and 10 White Plymouth Rocks. That works.

[I think that next year, a group of us is going to have to get together and order directly from the hatchery. I’m not interested in playing chick roulette with the farm store again next year.]

I also bought six chicks (a variety of breeds) for Susan, although when I dropped them off and she opened the box, she discovered that one was missing. We still don’t know where it went. She drove back in to town with the receipt and got a replacement.

Our peeps went into the brooder box where they settled right in:

This is a very active group of peeps. The chicks I hatched out last year slept a lot.

We made a change this year and put the brooder box in the old garage instead of the coop. The old garage stays at a consistent 55 degrees, which—along with the heat lamps—provides a better environment than the temperature swings in the coop. This also means that big chickens are not standing on top of the wire cover looking down into the brooder box. And I can pop out to the garage several times a day to check on peeps without the big chickens mobbing me for scratch grains.

I spent a few hours in the greenhouse yesterday potting up seeds. We are having a plant sale later this spring to help raise funds for our local community group, the Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation, so I am planting extra of everything. Last year, Susan gave me two Dirty Girl tomato seeds that she got from a farmer in California. (This is an open pollinated tomato similar to Early Girl.) Only one of them germinated, but I saved all the seed from that plant’s tomatoes. If they germinate, I’ll have several dozen—plenty for us and some to share. I also saved the seed from the largest Cherokee Purple and Indian Stripe tomatoes. Plant genetics are kind of fun to play with. I keep thinking that as promiscuous as my lavender plants are, the chances of a new variety popping up are pretty high, but I don’t have time to spend trying to isolate and propagate it.

I’ll plant the cukes, melons, and zucchinis today. This morning, though, I am going to assemble Bertha’s Flower Garden blocks, which I finished appliquéing last night.

The Kiss of the Sun

After a quick trip to the farm store yesterday morning (still no chicks), I went out to the garden to see what needed to be done. I know there is advice circulating around social media not to clean up dead branches, etc., until the temperatures are consistently in the 50s so as to allow pollinators to emerge from their winter homes. The problem here is that we don’t have those conditions until later in the season, and there will be other pressing tasks then. I’m going to continue to work as I always have. Yesterday was a bright, sunny day and it got up into the 50s. I worked in a T-shirt and jeans.

I got out the clippers and went after the dead canes in the raspberry patch. Our raspberry patch got very overgrown, and cleaning it up has been a multi-year project. I’m also beating back the suckers that want to take over and slowly taking out the thorny variety in favor of the thornless one. The two varieties were interplanted when we put the patch in. Thankfully, the thornless variety is more vigorous and productive.

The patch looks much better now, with better air circulation between the canes and less cover for the ground squirrels.

It felt so good to be outside moving around! I wandered around the garden to see how things were doing. The rhubarb is just starting to put up shoots. And in last year’s row of lettuce, I found this:

A few plants overwintered! We may have greens sooner than expected.

I moved some landscape fabric around and put cardboard down to get ahead of the weeds. The husband will help me move the black plastic around this weekend. The potatoes need to go in soon, too.

I still have to finish pruning fruit trees and decide where the new ones will go. Susan grafted some apple varieties for me last year. One is from her Northern Lights tree—she says that is her favorite pie apple. I am not sure it will de-throne Duchess of Oldenburg, which is my favorite pie apple, but I’m willing to try it. She tried to graft a Duchess for me last year but it didn’t take. She’s also got a Westfield Seek-No-Further for me. That is an apple I wanted simply because it’s mentioned in one of my favorite books (the Wilderness Series by Sara Donati).

I’m going to give the farm store another week, and if I still can’t get chicks, I’ll set up the incubator. A couple of hens are taking turns sitting on a pile of eggs—of course, being birds with brains the size of peas, the pile of eggs is on the floor under the nesting boxes instead of inside them. I asked the husband to leave the eggs there—we have plenty—just in case they manage to hatch out a chick or two. I usually collect eggs in the afternoon when I feed the chickens, but he’ll bring in any he finds at night when he closes up the coop, so I have to let him know if I want to let hens go broody.

Gardening season is officially underway. I will still work on sewing projects here and there as I have time, but I’ll be outside as much as I can.

I quilted the inside section of the green and purple quilt the other day. I did loopy flowers in light lavender thread:

I still have to do the outer border. I’d like to do some kind of leafy vine in that area, but I need to practice, first, on some scrap quilt sandwiches.

The GFG blocks are almost done—I have six left to appliqué and then I can put the top together. That one may have to wait until next fall to be quilted, but at least the top will be done. This is my favorite block:

I love how Bertha fussy cut the little chick for one of the hexies. I plan to put this block in the center of the top.