Chickens

As you can imagine, my little chicks are growing so fast!!!!  It won't be long until they have to go outside with their parents.  I'm assuming however that we have beginners luck with this batch. 7 out of 8 hatched. They are all healthy, all eating, drinking, pooping. They are active and growing, and they all made it through the first 24 hours of their tiny little lives.

As I was outside scooping poop out of the grown up chicken coops, and laying down bedding in their house, I couldn't help but think how much my chicken "hobby" has grown. We started out with a 10x10 dog pen, with a shade cover, 2 coops, and 8 chickens. I was dead set against a rooster, and was going to winterize the pen quite simply. Now they have a 12 ft long house, with electricity attached to their run and a rooster. We are planning on adding another 10 ft to their run this month if everything works out right.  Plus we have an egg incubator, and a chick nursery. We plan on setting up a second house and run to raise easter egg chickens to sell. Not to make a profit as much as to put the money into the chickens themselves for food, and even better shelter. I'm not sure that its a hobby, because we eat the eggs as well, and some if the chickens are being raised for meat.

In other news, I'm trying to find a list of local craft shows to join up with for my crochet work. That will be fun, and educational!!!

Just picture

Saturday Post (no pics sorry)

Hey everybody!!! Sorry I'm a bit late getting my regularly scheduled Saturday post up, its been one of those days. Not in a bad way, but a busy day.

First off, let me tell you the bad news. I killed the celery for sure. So, I'm going to have to start that over, but not do what I did....which was over watering it, and then I added coffee grounds thinking that it would be a good idea, but I don't think it was, since the celery wilted and died after that.

Ok, now lets start with Thursday. The eggs that were due...or at least we thought they were, hatched!!! All 7 of the ones that we had confirmed as being alive, and well hatched!! And they truly are alive and well, and chirping. I know who the parents are of 6 of them, Those would be from the Red Star, and the Black star. We have a little striped one that's just absolutely adorable, I don't know who the parents are of that little fellow...well I do know who the father is, just not the mother.  They started the process before we got up Thursday morning, So I'm estimating sometime after 3:30 AM, because I was up once and for some reason looked in on them while I was up. Frank woke me up around 6:30 am to tell me that there was action in the incubator...well I jumped out of that bed in a hurry. I don't think I've ever moved that fast in my entire life.  5 of the eggs had little spots where the chicks had managed to peck little holes in them. Then about an hour later the last 2 eggs got the little holes in them. I believe the first Chick hatched around 11:30 AM. The last 2 eggs hatched before midnight, so it was a long exciting day.


Last night I went to the Midnight Mystery Quilting Bee at the Quilters Cabin in Woodstock.  That was a lot of fun, somebody even brought a cooler full of wine. that part actually cracked me up. I did partake and have a glass, but only one, and early in the evening because I knew that I had to drive, and I was operating a machine with sharp pointy objects on it.  But the lady that designed the mystery quilt, didn't realize just how much she had put into it, and we didn't get them done. But we do have the instructions to finish. I worked on it some this evening but didn't get it done. That's ok though, I'm going to work on it over the next couple of days to get it finished.

Well, I'm going to end this for now. I plan on posting many pictures later on. The network that my phone runs off of isn't acting right so its not allowing me to post pictures on here. Hopefully it will be, behaving itself tomorrow.  I may have to just take pictures with a regular digital camera and do it that way vs my phone.

Beginning of the week

Good Morning everybody!!! I'm sitting here with a cup of coffee and working on my list of things to get done today. Its not much really, I need to go to the post office to mail off a couple of crochet orders, and get to the store and buy some coffee. I'm not sure which ranks as more important coffee or packages. 

I'm pretty excited about the mystery quilt along that happens on the 30th of this month. Its at the local quilt shop, and its called the Midnight Mystery Quilt. The name of the Quilt is Oh Momma I lost the Stars. I was looking at my list of fabrics that I need, and I've decided to do the smaller quilt, mostly because I'm a slow cutter for one, and for two I want to have my quilt top put together along with everybody else, so I'm doing version 1, which will be 64 x 64 inches.  This thing has 4 different focus fabrics, and then it has a Light, a Dark, a Light-medium and a Dark Medium, and for the squares there are a whole lotta 2 and 1/2 by 2 and 1/2 inch squares!!! I really need to either go out and buy some fabric, or I need to go through all of my fabric upstairs, either way, its only 10 days away!!! (oh my)

Tomorrow we turn off the egg turner in the incubator and go into lock down. From what we can tell, we're down to 7 eggs with living chicks in them. We have really been keeping a close eye on things. As of right now though, those poor chicks look like they are really crowded in those shells now. I can tell you that on hatching day I'll be listening hard for those little peeps!!! It will be really exciting to be able to finally say that we raised Chickens from eggs, and even more exciting to be able to say that we gathered those same eggs from our chickens. Even though we didn't raise our chickens from eggs or babies, I think we're doing pretty good with them, and can say we've been fairly successful. With them being our first batch of chickens, and not having any casualties to wildlife, dogs, or whatever, I'm proud.

I think I've over watered my celery plant. The poor thing is really wilted looking, and soft. I'm going to try and let it dry out a bit and then see what happens. I don't want to loose it now, not after all the excitement of watching it as hard as I have been!!!  Now since we've had limited sunlight here lately, thanks to all the overcast skies and rain, I've been giving my carrot seedlings some extra light by leaving the light on in my craft room in the early morning hours. I know its not the same as sunlight, but until the sun decides to grace us with his presence it will help out some.

Well blogger friends and family, time to get to work!!!!  Laundry, Dishes, dusting, chicken coops, and a few other things!!!!

Saturday with a surprise

Well, it's Saturday, which means it's time for the weekly celery update..as well as something else!!!

The celery as you can see by the pictures is still growing quite well, in fact, there are new sprouts coming up. We like this here at my house!!!

Now for the something else!!! I came upstairs to grab some yarn, and to take a glance to see if my carrot seeds needed any water...well when I looked in there, my seeds have sprouted!!! I'm thinking in about a week I'll have to go through and thin them out, but I'm excited beyond belief!!!

On to the chickens!!! Everybody appears to be doing great!!! Unfortunately though, due to shorter daylight hours, I'm only getting 2 eggs a day. Once we get the lights in there though it should get better.
I've been keeping an eye in the eggs in the incubator!!! In just a few days, we will stop the egg turner, and go into egg lockdown. It won't be long until we hear the chirps of baby chicks!!!

Wednesday night post

I hope that everybody had a great day today. Things here were poetry fantastic.

I revamped my facebook page for my crochet things. I changed the name to hats by brandi. I'm kind of excited to see where this takes me.
I love the creativity of turning yarn into actual items.
you can check out my fb page here
http://www.facebook.com/HatsbyBrandi.com

Ok, yes...I may have been advertising just a little...but can you blame a girl???

So just so you all know, new recipe coming this weekend!!!

Monday musing

It would seem I have a habit of blogging about whatever it is I'm currently doing. I don't know if it's the way my mind works, or if I think you all just might find it slightly less than boring.

I'm still cutting out those quilt squares. I'm either going to have some really wild looking quilts, or something fantastic.

I've decided to start working on a special quilt for my oldest nephew. He's been engaged to this lovely young lady for quite sometime. They plan on waiting until they are both completely done with school before they say I do. Well, I've decided that I'm going to make them a non scrappy quilt. I'm going to make them a double wedding ring quilt. I'm going to do it using blues, and whites mostly. That will create some lovely scrap fabric as well. I almost can't wait to get started on that.

I have quilting group on FB that I started. It's slowly growing. We've decided to start doing a block of the month kind of deal, then we can make our very own sampler quilts....which reminds me, I need to work on finishing that one from the quilting class I took a couple of years ago.
Anyways, once I get things rolling, I'll post the links to the blocks so that you can follow along, or rather quilt along.

In other non sewing/crafting related news the celery continues to grow swiftly by the hour.