Catching Up!

I've been working on a variety of projects over the last week - but feel I haven't accomplished anything significant.  So here is a catch-up post of my 'smaller' projects....

Little butterflies made from a pattern in Lori Holt's 'Quilty Fun'.  I used charm squares of 'Marmalade' for this and have plans to make it into a larger projects using some of the other 'Quilty Fun' blocks.

A cigar box covered in Heather Ross's 'Nursery Versery'.  I used some batting to pad it out and stuck the fabric on with a mix of double sided tape and PVA glue.  K really needed a place to store her hair ties - so now we know where they should be!  The inside is covered in cream coloured paper.

I found a pile of cigar boxes at a garage sale recently and they have great possibilities as the wood is light, but solid and there is no residual smell.

A 'find it' bag made with plastic insects, made for a friend's birthday.  We also made one with dinosaurs, but the hardest part of both was finding the actual names to add to the list on the back of the bag!

Lots to do!

Lots of gardening... this is a shot of my herb garden and vegetable boxes.  Last week we took out a 2 metre tall camellia (bare spot at front right where K's rake is) and there are still some conifers to go before we square this part off.  The bricks are still being worked on... plenty to do there!

O+S class picnic blouse and hopscotch skirt

And this is a very proud K, with her trophy for leading her pet lamb at last year's local show.  We have only just received the trophy so lots of showing off is happening!

O+S Roller Skate dress with 'Tiny Tea Leaves' cardigan

This is what she looked like with her lamb last October - just to prove she wears Oliver + S most days!

I'm hoping you are all having more success at completing things than me!

Garden Growth

The weathers been anything between cool to hot so I've been working on some small projects inside and trying to tidy up my garden outside.  Although both places have a never ending list of jobs to do...

So for a quick garden update here are some pics of my paddock garden...

This is my tomato set-up.  I do grow a number of other tomato plants in my glasshouse as well as up stakes - but these are my determinate (or bush) varieties that I let spread out.  I have 'Roma', 'Scoresby Dwarf', 'Principe Borghese', 'Silvery Fir Tree', 'Oregon Spring' and 'Campbells' (most from Bristols).  The last two I haven't grown before - and I get a bit over-excited when ordering from seed companies.  I haven't had many tomatoes yet as summer has been very stop-start and I think I applied nitrogen rich fertiliser rather than a fruit-forming mix.  Oops!

The fibreglass stakes are held into the ground by small wooden posts and a wooden block with holes in it acts as a join at the top.  The net then goes over easily.

 This is my corn patch - we love corn.  I've grown plenty as we never seem to have enough and the chickens will guzzle extras.  The beet at the front is for the chickens as well, it is very holey!

 

I've grown a patch of sunflowers to bring back my memories of travelling in Provence - and because K loves them.  They are from a mixture of seeds, planted in two sessions, hence the smaller ones at the front.

My garlic has been a bit disappointing - this picture is of K's hand holding it close to the camera.  I looked after them so well so will go back to the drawing board for my next attempt.  Lucky I planted about 150 cloves!

A yummy pumpkin growing.  I always plant 'Crown Hybrid' and get great tasting fruit.  I've tried some 'Confection F1' this year (from Kings) but they don't look as good.  We'll see what they taste like.

And our chicken tally is growing!  Red Hampshire One hatched out her second brood last Friday and she improved on the one (Little Blue the Cochin) to produce eleven chicks.  They are a Red Hampshire/White Rock mix as the breeder had let his roosters out, but all look very cute.  She's a great mum and we spend lots of time just watching them all.  We've had a shuffle around with coops, brought in the lamb shed as a temporary one and have quite the young mums' group going on.

Chicken Update!

Progress is slowly being made in our chicken breeding programme.  We now have a total of 21, as hens, young roosters, a pullet and a number of chicks.

My mum had two young Orpington roosters that needed a new home - they're just over three months old but they're huge!

Our Orpington hen is in the middle

I have to concentrate when telling the difference between the black one and our black Orpington hen.  Next spring we're hoping that we can breed our own black Orpingtons and not have to traipse quite so far to get fertile eggs.  The beauty of Orpingtons is that they are friendly and even the roosters are unlikely to peek bottoms of little girls (or dads) like a previous leghorn rooster tried many times to!

I think these are New Hampshire Red chicks

Last Friday our Langshan brought out 5 chicks.  She had started with 15 eggs, but was not the most diligent mother so we are pleased to have these.  Two are Barred Plymouth Rock (mostly black with white spots, one being on the top of their head), two are golden (so probably Red Hampshire) and one is various shade of yellow (presuming white/buff Plymouth Rock).

A Barred Rock (bottom) and a Hampshire Red - excuse the thistle!  You can see the spot on the Barred Rock very clearly here.

The Buff/White Rock chick is to the extreme right - but can you see the Barred Rock chick hiding to the left?

There it is!

Two weeks before that our Buff Cochin had hatched one chick from her eggs - a Barred Plymouth Rock.  We are still scratching our heads as to why we only got one - but as we're still beginners there could be lots of reasons.

Our Buff Cochin got the new coop that my talented H had made in the last week of December.  It's got a lift up side so very easy to get into.

We'll have to sort something else out as our first Red Hampshire (to raise a chick) is ten days of sitting in to her next brood.  Fingers crossed that we get a better hatching rate out of these!  Her first chick - Little Blue the Blue Cochin is growing well, but misses her mum terribly.

Our little Orpington is just to the right of the hen.

Our second Red Hampshire is doing well with her seven chicks.  They are now over four weeks old. Of the three Partridge Plymouth Rock chicks two look like pullets, but I can't work it out for the bantam Partridge, the Barred Rock or the Orpingtons.  One of the Orpingtons is growing very slowly so we don't know what will become of it.

My garden has been somewhat neglected because of the fascination with poultry but I am having my best year ever growing onions!  I planted them as early as feasible and I've kept them well weeded.

And a cute picture to finish with one of our first sunflowers - taken just after K had finished eating dinner!

Garden Update

The garden has been keeping me very busy recently - and it is mainly the vegetable side - I have barely done anything to the flower garden apart from water it.  I did plant out some buxus and perennials, plus two pear trees, at the edge of my boxed vegetable garden.  See this post for earlier photos.

The obelisks have either runner beans or sweet peas growing up them.

I am really pleased with how it is looking - I love the 'english' style of gardening.  I need to add more bricks and when possible, continue the edges to meet up with other bricks.  Apart from the large pear tree ('Conference') I grew everything from cutting or seeds.  The smaller pear tree is a Williams' bon chretien and as they are used as rootstock for most pear varieties you can grow them from seed.  The rose in the distance is a cutting from my mother's 'Graham Thomas', but it looks very neglected as it has been in a pot for too long.

Everything is growing fast - including the weeds - and it is the season for planting out those frost sensitive vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes and pumpkin.

From back:  Potatoes ('Rocket'), Peppers (Capsicum - the rest are in my glasshouse), spring onions, and miserable looking carrots and radish.

From back:  Strawberries and lettuce - with the odd potatoes sprouting through.  I'm going to plant cucumbers where the lettuce are.  Young rhubarb are in the background.

From back: Celery, cabbage with lettuce, then broccoli with lettuce - I'm trying to maximise space.

My 'ordinary' garden has tomatoes, carrots, more potatoes, leeks, onions, more rhubarb, asparagus, and the berryfruit.  I now have the paddock garden fully planted with potatoes, peas, yams, heaps of onions, garlic and shallots, pumpkins, corn, some beet (for chickens) and sunflowers (for K).

We're eating heaps of asparagus and strawberries.  I almost filled a 2L container with strawberries yesterday, but that was a catch-up on the previous few days.  Time for jam!

An earlier pick!

Our wee chick is growing fast: but we now think it is a blue cochin rather than an orpington.

Photo taken a week earlier - the chick moves too fast for my camera!

Kids Clothing Week

Finally I have been organised enough (only just) to sew-along on a 'Kids Clothes Week' as the weather is less than perfect and K desperately needs some new clothes.

I need to make her some things in knit - but to make the most of my overlocker on its current settings I have been working with wovens.

First up Oliver + S 'After School Pants' (again) - number 62 in my O+S count.

I made them in a lovely navy fine wale corduroy.  The fabric is gorgeous to touch and should wear very well.  The top she is wearing with it is the O+S 'Hopscotch Top' I made in autumn.

K and I took some pictures yesterday under our large and beautiful cherry blossom tree.  She is having so much fun playing under this tree and the blossoms are being spread all around.  We've had family visiting and all the cousins have loved this tree just as much!

 

Couldn't resist making this picture bigger ....  :-)

It is lovely to look out my kitchen window at this beauty but I must keep going with my long list of sewing tasks - at least when the weather settles I can continue with my gardening...

Next up... a green skirt for K!

Garden Plans

After lots of dropped hints I got some tractor work done in my garden.  Not by my H, but by his fantastic mother and father who are sublime at rescuing me from garden frustration!

I had a shrub I wanted gone.  I'd attacked it with my hand-held clippers but it was far too big to disappear that way.  Our telehandler had it gone in less than 5 minutes, then the 'Little Suzue' Tractor came along and tidied up the leftover area in record time!

This...

Sorry - not a great photo!

It was all done in such a rush I had to use my cell phone camera

Became this...

Can you see which trees and shrubs I would like pulled out next time? - I'm happy to wait though!

Then yesterday my dear H remembered I was owed a birthday present (from six months ago) and he made me three raised garden beds from some macrocarpa timber.  They're all 2" x 8" pieces of wood.  The faraway bed is 4 foot x 6.5 foot and the other two are 4 foot by 8.5 foot.  We didn't need to make the beds very high as the soil underneath is quite good.

Today K and I have been busy layering newspaper, pea vine straw and chicken poo into the beds and hopefully H will bring in some telehandler bucket loads of soil from a worked up paddock to put on top.  I'm very lucky to have access to so many wonderful resources and a fantastic family!

 K helping me plant more rhubarb.

Finally... A Very Hungry Caterpillar!

I'm on a roll... this is the third quilt I've finished in the last three and a bit weeks!  I will be honest and say that the sandwiching, quilting and binding was all I had to do on the last two, but they still take time.  I'm relatively new to free motion quilting and as I'm using my home sewing machine it is a focused effort.

So here we go:

'A Very Hungry Caterpillar' Quilt.  Fabrics by Eric Carle from Andover Fabrics

K loves the Very Hungry Caterpillar book and can almost read it by herself.  She just gets caught up on the food names!  She will love sharing this quilt with others - I can see it visiting Playcentre and Preschool.

I started this quilt at least three years ago.  It is from a pattern in an 'Australian Patchwork and Stitching' (Volume 9, Number 4) that you might still find around (there is one on 'Trade Me' today but that is only good for New Zealanders).  The pattern was available singularly but I can't track one of those down as I borrowed the one I used from a friend.  The fabrics are still widely available.  I found them still sold at several online shops.  I did make this from a kit.

I used the same butterfly template (as my 'Papillon' quilt) to quilt single butterflies joined by long wandering wiggles.  I used a Mettler variegated thread on the top and white on the backing.  I marked the quilting lines on the backing and worked from that side.  My tension was really tricky to get right and I'm not completely happy with it - from the backing (white) side you can see lots of small dots from the variegated thread.  Otherwise I am very happy with my work, especially as once marked it only took a couple of hours to do.

I'm also getting much better at my bindings and am especially pleased with my corners on this quilt.

As I was out in the garden taking pictures of my quilt here is a gorgeous, huge, 'Mt Fuji' (we think) cherry tree in blossom.  It is right outside my sewing room (that is the square window in the centre).

K has a swing under this tree, but it is hung up higher to avoid the lawn mower - and you can also see my (or K's) quilt in the bottom pic.  We think the tree is at least 60 years old.

I'm linking up again to 'Finish it up Friday' on 'Crazy Mom Quilts' as well as 'FMQ Friday' on 'The Free Motion Quilting Project'.