Well, it ain’t art…

…but it’s almost craft! I’m getting closer!

Today was a good day. I did clay stuff that entirely failed to fall apart on me and actually has a shape other than “round lump”. I’ve been practicing all week, and I’ve managed both those things before, but not at the same time! This is a definite sign of improvement. (Yeah, yeah, it’s still kind of ugly, but at least it’s there!)

Then, today was also the day to open the magic chicken-making box!

thirty two cute little balls of chirping fluff.

It is also the three-week birthday of the first six baby chickens. I got two babies - one from each clutch - to pose together:

Is that amazing, or what?

Also, I sheared Chloe. It went pretty well, she even lay down for me so I could do her very wooly belly. The only real slowdown was that it turns out Chloe is very ticklish, especially on her sides. So by the time we were done we were feeling kind of frivolous, and I left her a stylish puff on her tail.

Now I’m going to go check on baby chickens again, and stand in the yard enjoying this really spectacular sunset we seem to be having, while a goose chirps at me.   I hope your days all go as well for you as today did for me!

 

Grrrr.

You know, it isn’t actually much use having a pretty darned good camera that you spent a bunch of money on if your batteries are old and crappy and won’t hold a charge.

Pictures that are thus not included with this post:

• Me, shearing a bunch of very patient sheep.
• The really big ram I’m going to have to try to shear soon.
• Combed Rambouillet top. (drool)
• Ditto silk alpaca blend (drool droool drool)
• The great blue heron that was just now standing calmly in my backyard
• Any of my recent clay disasters (I’m getting better!)
• The hen who, with impeccable timing, decided to go broody the same day as the most recent bunch of eggs started hatching.
• knitting (yes, there has actually been some knitting)

Pictures that I did manage to take while the batteries would let me:

Unrepeatable experiment wool:

That was dyed with a gallon of home made wine that had gone to vinegar, which I’d been keeping around in case it was good for something, even though I knew it wasn’t. Except apparently it was, because the yarn is really quite pretty.  I couldn’t get the colour quite right in the picture, this looks a little gold to me, probably because of the wood, and it’s actually more of a purple-grey.  I’ll try again when it’s off the wheel.

And of course, baby chickens.  The really cute close-up from a couple of posts ago of the little yellow chick?  Same chick:

This is the first one hatched, definitely a male.  Raven calls him “Tiger” for obvious reasons.  I call him “ThunderFoot” because he’s huge.

So far, the black ones are staying mostly black, which makes me so happy I can’t tell you - until . this lot, nearly all the black chicks have grown up stripey.  I love my pretty stripey hens, but the black hens are gorgeous and I want more!

This one, I think, is going to look like his daddy

So yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve got this week.  Have to move these chicks into their new less-heated and closer to the Big Chickens house (they will be thrilled, they love watching the Big Chickens.) and clean out the warm space for the new babies.  The box is chirping loudly even as I write this.

 

Mud Pies

I promised you dirt, so here we go.

Prologue: The things I have (except for the Weeble Treehouse, long story) generally always tended to want most have been tools. Even before I was really able to make stuff, I always liked the idea of doing so. When I was very small, I used to turn my tricycle upside down in the driveway and pretend it was a spinning wheel. CK claims not to remember this, and probably doesn’t, because I was always kind of a secretive kid, and deep down perhaps I knew that it was maybe a little weird to have more fun with your trike upside down than rightside up, so I usually made sure nobody was paying attention when I played that stuff.

I had a little holly hobby sewing machine, and a fisher price loom. But I never had a pottery wheel. I never even had the chance to use a pottery wheel until briefly in high school (it was a disaster, but I still had the feeling I could get better if I had a chance to practice). I loved playing with clay, and I remember being ridiculously excited when I climbed a hill at a campsite one time and discovered that the soil in that spot was yellow. I couldn’t seem to convey why this was so thrilling to the rest of my family, although I think my brother was at least interested. (Probably he knew already about chrome and stuff in soils, precocious little brat.)

Anyway, I tell you all this Trivial Stuff About Me as a prelude to admitting that I now actually have a pottery wheel, have had for almost a year now, and have not yet used it. This must change. Most of the reason I haven’t played with it is that I haven’t got a place for a wheel here. The ‘messy corner’ of my studio is really not equipped to deal with more mess than some glue, paint and maybe sun printing, and I’ve already spilled over into the guest room with stash and random assorted “things that might be useful someday”, plus I dye in the kitchen. Raven hasn’t got a workshop at all yet, so it might be kind of taken the wrong way if I tried to sneak a clay studio into the kitchen as well. So the wheel lives over at The Ed’s house. It has it’s own little room (CK and I converted The Strange Little Room You Go To If You’re Bad in the basement into a messy craft workshop) and I can go and play with it whenever I want - but you know, it’s over there, and I’m over here, and sheep, and life, and… I just haven’t yet.

As I said, this must change. Step one is: Acquire Clay. There are a couple of ways to do this - the relatively simple ‘go somewhere and buy clay’ method, and the slightly more labour intensive ’stuff I found around the house’ method. Guess which one I picked?

The soil here IS clay. In most of the area it is well tilled, well mulched yummy fertile clay-y soil. But on our property, it is uncultivated, unmolested, and trampled by 100 years of schoolchildren solid packed clay, with a light coating (very light) of topsoil. The first year we were here, we dug a pond. By which I mean I made a lot of coffee, and Raven and our friend Aaron stood around in the cold drinking coffee and watching The Ed play with a backhoe. The Ed also drank coffee, and I am told he had a pretty big grin on his face most of the time. This was probably because he had a chance to dig a really big hole, I don’t think the coffee was that exciting. It was Maxwell House.

Four years later, the reeds have moved in, the frogs have moved in and would have taken over the yard if the chickens didn’t provide a level of population control — you’ve got to see five hens fighting over a frog- or then again maybe you don’t — there are fish breeding, and now handily enough it’s a place for Phil to play and hide. It is also a really good way to dig up a bucket of sticky murky mud.

Once I had my bucket o’goo, I topped it up with water and started to mix it. This is totally mud pie territory. The goal is to dissolve as much of the mud as will dissolve into the water, so you have a thick sloppy sludge with a lot of crud in it. Once the sludge has reached the point where it’s really super oogy and you’re finding yourself tempted to declare that this is what you’re serving for dinner tonight just to make people turn green, it’s time to strain it. I poured it through a window screen (yup, found one on the porch) into a second bucket. The clay particles are really small, so even though the sludge feels thick, it will go through the screen - but all the yucky stuff that you probably don’t even want to know what some of it is, will not.

I actually poured it back several times - strain it, dump it back into the bucket and mix again, strain again - each time getting more sludge in the water, and more crud out. (Doncha love my technical terms? “Sludge”, “crud”?)

At the end, I had a big pile of clay covered vegetable matter and assorted Other Stuff on the ground, and a lovely smooth gooey slip in the bucket.  I was also covered in clay.

I also had, you should note, about a 1/3 volume reduction from the original bucket. This will go down a bit further as the water evaporates.

The bucket has been sitting outside settling for a couple of days now. Every morning I go out and dump off about 3/4 to one inch of clean clear water, and the remaining sludge is that much denser. Tomorrow I am going to spread my sludge on cafeteria trays (of which we have an inexplicably large number in our attic, we use them for all sorts of silly things) which will speed up the evaporation process. Once the clay is in the trays, keeping it wet enough will quickly become the issue. I will cover it with wet rags, and damp them down occasionally until the clay is a nice workable texture. I will then cut it, bag it, and in the case of the chunk I want to try and turn, beat the living snot out of it in order to make sure there aren’t any air bubbles or dry bits or anything at all that will, when firing, shatter my second pottery disaster finished piece.

So there’s my dirt.  All the critters are doing well, baby chickens are fledging nicely and growing fast (batteries on the charger today, no new pictures) Phil has actually been spotted flying a distance of a few yards, but hasn’t got any height yet, and Blackie has decided that actually, having to wear the halter isn’t so bad at all if it means she gets to come out of the yard and eat grass in front of the house.  (Why mow the lawn when I can knit or read and chat with a sheep?  We have a new lawn chaise and I needed to make sure it was comfortable, you know.  It is.)  Raven is in the city again because his grandmother is having an operation to remove skin cancer later today - poor lady is having a rough year, and if you felt like sending happy “please don’t have a stroke during the operation” vibes her way, that would be awesome.  Thanks.

 

Happy birthday baby chickens

The chicks are now a week old, and I’ve finally got my act in gear to post the pictures of them coming out of the incubator.

One of them was thoughtful enough to hatch right in front of the little window. This is a picture of the egg cracking. You may have to use your imagination, Raven says this looks like a grainy horror film image:

We were a little concerned about who exactly they might be going to imprint on. Velcro was very involved in the hatch. I don’t know if you can make it out or not, but she’s nose to beak with a baby here:

Finally it was time to take them out. Out of 27 eggs, nine were fertile and six of those managed to hatch. Those are fine odds on the hatch, not so good on the fertility, but we’ve got both Patches and Crowley jumping on hens, and Patches is just now coming into maturity, so it isn’t surprising that the fertility was low. I believe Patches may be the daddy of some of the eggs currently in the big magic box (I put a new lot in right away) - there are a lot of fertile eggs this time around, but of course they won’t all hatch either. If the germ is weak, or the shell is too porous, or the hen was having a bad day, or the temperature mucks up again… there are lots of reasons for failed germ or failed hatch. But we’ll get some!

There are four black and two yellow chicks. (One of the blacks was hiding underneath the tray, and so is not pictured here!

We brought them out to the brooder - we’ve got a nursery set up in our smaller coop, which unlike the big coop has no openable windows and gets very very warm in summer.

They’ve got that huge tray of food so they can’t help but eat it - for a while (like about six years) they’ll try to eat everything, so some of what they try had better be edible! I also dipped their little beaks in the water to show them where that was and what you do with it. They caught on to the water drinking right away, especially the smallest yellow one. Water drinking is her Best Thing.

Here they are at day three, looking considerably fluffier and more traditionally chick-like:

Now they’re old enough to handle slightly lower temperatures, and so when it gets super hot we bring them outside to learn about the world. If you look close, they’re getting lots of little feathers already. The wing feathers come in first, and it’s my favorite stage because they’ll be all cute and fluffy everywhere else, but they’ll have perfect tiny feathered wings. I love that.

Ok, are you saturated with “cute” yet?  Next time I’ll post something dirty.

Meantime, here’s Blackie, dressed as The Queen of the May… you’ve got something on your head there, darling…

 

Just to say

I really need to make this hat.

That is all.

 

Cute babies to brighten your day

The yellow one is about four hours old. The black one had just managed to clamber out of its egg and over a little ledge, so it’s very sleepy.

Raven took this picture last night - this morning there are I think two more little black ones.

 

WIPs I can’t explain

Well ok, there’s only one that I can’t explain. I am making jam - yes, I am making jam right now - and that’s easy to explain because a friend gave us a LOT of plums. Although it turns out that not only do I usually wind up doing things the ‘hard’ way, but I am in fact incompetent when it comes to doing things the ‘easy’ way. Raise your hand if you can’t make jam using pectin and the recipe that comes in the box? But, you can make it just fine without a recipe and using just sugar? Oooh, pick me, pick me! So there’s a lot of simmering going on, hence the time to blog at y’all.

I’m doing mosaic on the porch in front of the doors - we left a space for tile, because it gets so muddy around here in the spring and in winter snow and dirt get tracked in, so we figured we’d just put a tile patch by the doors where the mats go - easy to clean and not going to damage the wood and all that. Very practical. Also boring. So I’m doing mosaics there. Don’t have a picture yet, sorry - it really doesn’t look like much yet anyway, you’ve all seen broken plates, right? I’ll post pictures when I get them actually looking LIKE pictures. I should warn you though, I’ve never actually done this before, so don’t expect to be impressed. I’ve been looking for an excuse to stick tile to something for quite a while now, so as a starter project something that’s going to be hidden under a doormat most of the time is probably just about perfect!

Now here’s the one I can’t really explain:

Still (a) Life, K Ridley

It’s not quite done yet, but almost. This is the first thing I’ve made in a really long time that has no purpose other than being what it is, if you know what I mean. Feels kind of weird.

More in character, I finished that dog hair/suffolk yarn:

Tell me that’s not pretty. I’ve been working with so many subtle colours lately, it was great to play with these nice strong hues. Still kool-aid and food dye, BTW.

In animal news, the light bulb burned out on the incubator, and when I replaced it all I had was a 60 watt, which wasn’t hot enough. CK and The Ed came to the rescue with a couple of 100 watt bulbs, but I’m not sure whether the eggs (at least a couple of which do seem to have been developing) will have made it or not. There’s only a few days to go, so I’m just going to keep going and see what happens, I’m going to put some more eggs in right away whether we get a hatch or not, because that way any chicks we get will be old enough to be left for a while when we go to a wedding we have to go to up in Barrie in the fall.

Phil is the flyin’est goose on the farm. Which is to say, he runs really fast and flaps his wings a lot, and if the wind happens to be blowing in the right direction he sometimes gets about an inch or two in the air for a few feet. But we cheer and clap and congratulate him anyway. He likes the praise, because now whenever he feels like he’s not getting enough attention he ‘flies” around the yard. (And yes, sometimes I run around flapping my arms, and yes, he does follow me when I’m doing it, and NO there will not be any pictures of that if I can help it!)

Phil has also decided that he definitely is not a chicken. Chickens have stupid little wings that aren’t good for anything, and they don’t play in the water, and they make all these crazy noises and sleep in strange little buildings and crawl in boxes for some reason, and also even though they are very small they are sometimes kind of scary. (Bianca can kick Phil’s feathered butt, and everybody is scared of Luna.) So, looking for a new role model, and having already rejected dogs and cats, Phil is thinking about being a sheep.

True, sheep don’t seem to have wings at all, and their feathers are just plain weird. These are definite negatives. On the plus side, they’re big and strong and nobody messes with them. They can jump pretty high, and they can run fast when they want to. They eat way more grass than the chickens do, they also like corn and like Phil they like to stick their heads into the pond and make outrageous slurping noises. They don’t seem to swim much (Monster did once, but it was an accident) but they sleep in that neat stable with all the straw, which Phil’s been fascinated with lately. So, he’s been following them around.

I have a new friend out by the pond. I call him FrankenFrog.

He’s green and gold like one kind of frog on his top half, and then there’s a neat line just below his shoulders and his bottom half is brown and yellow. He’s the biggest frog in the pond as far as I’ve seen and although I don’t try to pick up the frogs (I like the fact that our frogs and fish are all pretty friendly and fearless, and I don’t want to freak them out) he will let me pet him. As you see.

The bunnies continue well - they’ve definitely settled in the treeline by the pond, and they’ve picked up a third bunny-friend as well. The three of them play in the yard every evening. They’re fairly brave, relative to wild bunnies in general, so I guess Velcro brought ‘em up ok - they won’t let us actually approach them, but as long as we play “ignore the rabbit” they’ll let us get within a very few feet before they decide to move on.

Blackie’s been super-affectionate lately, probably because Monster is increasingly independent. He’s taken over the job of fence-breaking and escape-plotting, his new partner in crime being Chloe. She’s not actually a bad sheep, she’s a very good sheep, but she has a sort of a crush on Monster still, and she’ll do what he tells her. Chloe is obviously putting most of her energy into wool production - her wool is twice as long as the boys’, although I observed yesterday that if I were to shear her tomorrow, and take off her thick layer of wooly puff - she’d still be a fat little sheep. Linton, on the other hand, might disappear if shorn. He’s a tiny wee thing.

Guess that’s it for now - I’ve probably been doing lots of other stuff, but if so I can’t remember what it is right now, and I should probably go tend the jam anyway.

 

Down on the floor

I’m not even going to apologize. I’m totally beating myself up though, because the longer I go without writing here, the harder it is to actually get up (or down) and do it, and then by the time I do I’ve forgotten all the things I wanted to tell you.  Or I remember them, and then I make a post so long that nobody wants to read it!

I’m still blogging in my head every day.  If I had a brain machine that would type into the computer the things that I think to this blog while I’m doing other things, you could read a post every day.  Fewer pictures though.  And it would be really creepy.  I’m glad I don’t have a brain machine.

Don’t have a lot of time for fibre just lately either, alas.  I have been spinning a little - a border collie/blackface blend that I made out of these bags and bags of dog hair I got a while ago.

It’s very very soft, and felts like a dream (if you dream of felting, which I personally don’t).  I think it is going to be some lace, because although I am also massively behind on blog reading, I can’t help but notice that Jen has been cranking out quite the stack of jealous-making lace things lately, and I want to knit the Luna moth shawl. Which by the way is totally impractical for me, and I’m crazy to want to do it because it will be snagged and ruined within moments I’m sure.  But I want to anyway. So since it’s taking me so silly long to spin the stuff in the little snatches of time I’ve had lately, I’m going to spin it and the just look at it for a while and see if there’s anything else it would rather be.

What’s mostly been keeping me busy is this ‘farm’ thing.  I am by the way still using the word ‘farm’; even though I philosophically agree with the ‘homestead’ linguistic, the word itself doesn’t have any resonance for me.  I don’t know if that’s a Canadian thing, or just personal.  But I’m used to calling the [evil] big industrial farms ‘factory farming’ and/or in the case of the massive soy fields around here ‘cash cropping’ and we don’t have any of that, we’ve just got some chickens and sheep and a garden.  And a goose.  Around here we’d probably be called a ‘hobby farm’, and I hate that description - this is definitely, whatever else it may be not a hobby.  Whatever you prefer to call it, the advent of the sheep last fall definitely marked a major change in the seriousness with which I have to approach the whole livestock rearing thing.  We’ve also started selling eggs, because only friends were willing to take them for free - even when ‘free’ really meant ‘in exchange for the random bags of wheat you leave by the mailbox’ or ‘as a thank you for plowing my driveway’.  So I put up a sign, and by some weird small-town speed-of-light gossip thing, people who never even drive down my road instantly knew that we had eggs.  Now the chickens are self-supporting, and I don’t have a fridge full of too many eggs.  Good deal.

Also as a result of my egg sign, someone dropped off two incubators that they’d been looking to get rid of, as they have no chickens and these things were taking up space they would prefer to use for lawnmowers and things that they do have.  This is so many shades of cool.  First, I have very much been wanting to try hatching eggs myself, but y’know, sitting on them for a month seemed impractical, and I have no warm feathers.  My first choice is of course to let the hens do it themselves, but nobody has shown an inclination so far this year, and anyway I need to increase the flock at a somewhat higher rate than the one-and-two chicks per hen that we’ve had so far.  (Really I should let Patches live and run two cocks.  He’s nice enough, he’s just kind of a wuss.)  So I’ve got some eggs in an incubator and we’ll see if anything hatches.

But just having an incubator turn up on my doorstep is not the coolest bit (although it is very nifty) - the coolest bit is this:

Two of ‘em!  Aren’t they gorgeous?  They’re Buckeye “standards”, which I found listed in a trade manual from 1913 - by the 20s they were making them in cast iron, so they’re definitely from around that time.  They belonged to the grandmother of the ex-husband of the woman who dropped them off.  Her dad says his mother had one just like them also.  One of them is converted to run off a light bulb, or either one of them could be run off of the original lamps.  They even came with the manual, which is some great reading, let me tell you!

Another thing that has been keeping me out of trouble and away from the knitting is - pretty floors.  You may or may not remember when I did the bedroom last year, and the only thing I couldn’t do anything about was the plywood floor?  Well, we’ve had a pile of scavanged wood sitting in our front room since sometime after Christmas, and we finally laid a floor in the bedroom.

Ain’t that just a mighty big improvement over paint-speckled plywood?  But that’s not all, folks!  There was, as it turned out, a LOT of wood piled in my front room.  (People who have been here and had to sort of climb over it will verify this.)  So we managed to put a floor on the front porch as well!

As you may have noticed, I spend a lot of time on my front porch.  We both do.  It’s warm on sunny days in winter, because Raven enclosed it with glass doors.  The animals like to sit in the doorways and get sun and breeze.  It’s a nice place to work on things.  It’s also an easy place to let a pile of crap build up, and since we had this old chunk of carpeting on the floor to block drafts, it got pretty gross, between us tracking in mud, and Phil sleeping there lately… ew.  And of course it’s the first thing people see when they come in, and it looks so junky - actually I think “junky” is almost complimentary sometimes.  It was pretty bad.  I have a ‘before’ picture somewhere, but I don’t even want to show you.  Ick.

But here it is now!

Only about a million times nicer, and easier to clean too.

Ok, you’ve stayed with me this long, (or you haven’t, and you’re just skimming down for goose pictures.)  Either way, here’s Phil at eight weeks:

You will notice that he’s wearing a sling.  When his feathers started coming in, one of his wings was very wonky.  Looked almost as if he’d broken it, except of course he hadn’t - ‘cos you know, being as he was with us all the time, we would have noticed.  Also, he wasn’t in any pain, he just had this crazy floppy wing.

See?  (Also, you can see some of the gross carpet.)  Anyway, we were worried that he wasn’t going to  be able to fly, and also that it was going to hurt his social life when he got older and interested in dating - because you know what teenagers can be like, they make fun of you if you’re ‘different’.  Well, after a morning spent on the telephone trying to find an actual person involved in animal rescue/natural resources, which division of government around here is apparently run by ansa-phones, I found a nice lady who explained that this is a growth thing caused by a high protein diet (so much for ‘he needs lots of protein’, which by the way came from the same source as ‘he’s a duck’) and it happens in the wild too, so we didn’t have to feel bad - but we should tie up his wing into the correct position and keep it there while he finishes growing.  So Phil has a sling.  He can still flap his wings, he just can’t extend the “wrist” bit on one side, but he can reach to preen his feathers, which he couldn’t before.

Here’s another cute picture from about three weeks, just to show how fast the little fella has been growing:  (And to make sure you are well sated with cute birdie pics before I sign off!)

 

flickr games

I’ve been in Virginia for almost a week and a thousand years, and I have lots of fun pictures from Reston, but I forgot to bring my camera cable so I can’t show you yet.  So to while away the time, here are some pictures via the fun Flickr mosaic meme from Emily:

1. Kelly Time!, 2. In the Company of Eels, 3. The Seventh Seal, 4. Flying purple, 5. Pelican, 6. llibreria - bookstore - Amsterdam, 7. The Mill, 8. “I, Piórko, like Cheese!”, 9. Immature GBH - Arriving, 10. Perspective Matters, 11. graffiti tears, 12. ridley 1861

Want to play too?
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

 

I laughed really hard but it wasn’t hysterics, honest

Well, spring was nice, but it appears to be summer now. We’ve had sunny days with temperatures that soar to the boiling point, suddenly explode into thunderstorms and cool everything down for the evening, and then the same thing all over again the next day. Yesterday’s storm was simply brilliant - there’s another one brewing right now, but it doesn’t look nearly so exciting. Yesterday we had wild smashing wind, and rushing clouds, and this really cool boiling hole in the sky with lightening and rain coming out of it. It wasn’t a funnel, but it looked like it could have gone that way if it’d wanted. Thankfully, it didn’t. I love storms. I was out at the back behind the barn watching this one come roaring across the fields, while Raven was out front taking pictures of the sky. (See, it’s not just me!)

Now, among those pictures I couldn’t show you the other day because my computer ate them was a shot of this very broken tree branch - actually about half a tree that had rotted out at the trunk and was only attached by the fact that it was hooked into the other branch. It should have fallen that day. We waited for it to fall. We’ve been wanting it to bloody well get it over with and fall so that it would be on the ground instead of hanging over us and the sheep like some kind of tree of Damocles threatening us with its crushing weight.

So yesterday, with sheep safely in the barn and chickens safely cowering under the deck, it decided to fall.

Remember how I said we’d finally finished the fence?