We lost one of our geese sometime last night. When I went out this morning to feed them, only two came running up the driveway to meet me. They are always all together, so I knew something had to be wrong. I got the husband up and we looked all over, but couldn’t find the missing one, or any sign of a struggle. After a half hour or so, I looked by the fallen branch and saw its pretty little body cornered underneath. We still don’t know what happened, there were no marks on its body, no broken bones that we could see. I wonder if it was chased by something that literally scared it to death. Bear usually keeps watch over the yard, but we didn’t hear anything unusual last night. I feel so bad for the poor little thing, it must have been so frightened. The remaining two seem fine, although they were sticking pretty close to me while I was outside this morning. I think we’re going to have to find a way to lock them up at night. They like to float in their pool at night, but we may just have to put them in a pen instead. Silly birds, they’re so cute, but still so young and not too bright. When I go outside, if I sit quietly, they lay down at my feet and go to sleep. I have to take a picture, it’s just the sweetest thing.

I finished up the quilt top and bottom this weekend, ta-da! I can’t wait to get started on the quilting. I’ve got some wool batting, so I think it’s going to be nice and fluffy. I’ve never quilted with wool before. I think I’ll try to get it basted together tonight so I can start stitching away. Click on the picture to see it full-sized!

The pamphlet bookbinding tutorial is on it’s way, hopefully tomorrow. I had planned to take some pictures this morning, but didn’t have time after the goose quest. I made a few little pamphlet style books yesterday, they’re really cute and so easy to do! 

One block down, 3 more to go. This is so fun working with these bright colors. I want to stay home from work and play with them some more, but I better not. It will just have to wait until tonight. I think I’m going to like this little quilt, but I won’t know for sure until all the blocks are together. I plan on hand quilting with bright yellow floss, two or maybe 3 strands. I want it to really show up. This is good, stress relieving therapy as we’ve gotten a couple quotes for the tree. Apparently, when you have to use large cranes and other heavy equipment it costs thousands and thousands of dollars. Even more thousands than the original many thousands we thought. I better go check under the couch cushions for some spare change. And I know it’s not going to make me rich or anything, but if you could click one of those ads over to the left, it might just help a little bit. If you do that, I’ll keep the posts coming all week long! Woo-hoo!

Once upon a time this was a blog about making stuff. Let’s bring the creativity back, shall we?  Remember how I had big plans to install a clothesline? Well, I actually did it and have been using it the past few weeks. I just really love it. It’s just lovely to go out on a sunny Saturday morning and hang up my freshly washed clothes. I’m not sure how nice it will be in the Winter, but I still plan on trying. Here are not my clothes, but a selection of pretty fabrics, many of which are soon to be a quilt for a nephew who is on the way. I’m pretty excited to get started on this one, my craft room was overtaken by goslings for a few weeks, but they are happily living outside now and I have my very messy space back. For the quilt, I’m using Denyse Schmidt’s What a Bunch of Squares pattern (I think it’s slightly different than the one on her site), and lots of bright, graphic prints, like the numbers fabric on the left, and the green with black printing in the middle. The solid blue that you can just see towards the left will be used for the outside of each block. I hope it works. Her quilts are usually more solid, so I hope it’s not too busy. I plan on working on it all week, so I should have more pictures soon.

And here’s a little something I did a while ago. I bought this cute vintage table cloth on etsy. I love it, but the outlines around the daisy flowers were really faded, so I decided to fill them back in with a little backstitching. I added a cute red border and plain linen back, and viola! A pretty pillow! I like it on my rocking chair, but it will probably spend most of the time in the living room on one of the wing-back chairs, once I recover them with some linen I picked up a few weeks ago for $2 a yard. That’s no typo people, two dollars! I thought it was $4 when I took it to the cutting table, but it was on clearance, and another 50% off. Score!

In between scrubbing the toilet and bathtub, I made something yesterday. A chicken, of course! Although I confess it is not actually my pattern, it’s from the very talented Lyn of Molly Chicken. It was a fun little thing to make, and I made it pretty small, she’s about 6  inches, not including the comb and legs. I think she will make a good gift for a little chicken loving visitor arriving next week. I can’t wait to give it to her!

Later today I’ll be making a batch of oatmeal cranberry butterscotch cookies. I didn’t mention that I took the last batch to work, and they were polished off very quickly. I heard that someone tried to steal the entire jar, and someone else offered to pay my $5 for 5 cookies. He was dead serious too. So I guess the recipe is a keeper. I thought I’d share it here, so you can be popular with your friends and co-workers too.

Oatmeal Cranberry Butterscotch Chip Cookies   
1 1/2 c. unbleached flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 c. unsalted butter
1 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
3 c. oatmeal (not instant)
2 c. butterscotch chips
1 c. dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine flour, baking soda, salt and
cinnamon. Combine butter and sugars until smooth. Add the eggs and
vanilla. Stir in flour mixture. Stir in oatmeal, butterscotch chips and
cranberries. Drop by the spoonful onto an un-greased cookie sheet and
bake 13-15 minutes.

I worked on some monsters yesterday. It was a good activity for the cold, blustery, rainy weather.


This one is on it’s way to Pengiun Publishing in Australia, where her pattern is going to be included in a book about softies. How cool is that? I’m pretty excited. I also recently got an e-mail asking me to apply to be in a new book from Lark Publishing about beads and quilts. I better get working on that this week! You know what is the best part about participating in these sorts of projects? Free books, of course! I’m really looking forward to seeing the Softies book.

I also have a blue monster and a green monster nearly complete, and I’ll be putting them in the shop, hopefully by the weekend.

Here you can see that the chickens are hoping the fuzzy pink thing is some new kind of food for them:


Poor chucks spent the day under the porch yesterday, it was raining so hard. I think we have a second layer now, though. I got two eggs yesterday, one was sort of pointy and blotchy, which makes me think someone laid their first egg! I just ordered 100 egg cartons, so they better all get to work soon.

I have been on a self-imposed fabric diet for a very long time. I don’t think I’ve bought hardly any fabric in the past year, as a matter of fact. So when I got a little gift card to Joann’s for Valentine’s Day, I had to go spend it right away:

Actually, the fabric diet ended a couple weeks ago, when I went to the dentist, which happens to be next to a quilt shop. I was such a brave patient that I thought I deserved a little treat, so I got the tape measure fabric and the red floral underneath it in the top picture. It really helped with the pain in my jaw. Really, I recommend fabric buying for toothache pain. And then I also need to try out Superbuzzy, so see if they really were as great as everyone is saying. I ordered the green fabric with the words and the orange dot fabric, and I’ll have to agree that yes, Superbuzzy is all that. The rest is what a $40 gift card gets you at Joann’s when their quilting fabric goes on sale, 30% off. I had to get the chicken fabric after seeing it over at Alicia’s, and I love the apple and pear print, the colors are so pretty!

I love, love, love this quilt from the Tokyo Quilt Show, and I’d like to do something similar, so that’s what I was thinking while picking out a lot of the fabrics. I love how it’s a traditional pattern, but the colors and fabrics make it seem so modern and fresh.

I haven’t taken pictures of the chickens for a few weeks, so I attempted to get a few yesterday morning. They’re getting a little harder to photograph, because, like Pavlov’s dog, when they hear the screen door slam, they all come running, hoping that I’m bringing them a treat. So they get very very close to me, and it’s not so easy to get pictures that way. I managed a few decent shots, however:

They’re trying to get closer to me, hoping that the shiny silver thing in my hands is actually some food.

I don’t think there is much of anything cuter than a chicken butt:

A few more of the chickens have names now. The four Barred Rocks are named Ruby. I can’t tell them apart, other than the one is always the first to run to me when she sees me. When I don’t give her something to eat, she clucks indignantly and trys to stare me down.

This is Curly:

I can tell her from the other Buff Orpingtons, because her comb and wattle are much bigger and redder.

And of course, here is what Fuzzy Penelope Caramella looks like these days:

I have to try and get a shot of Bluebeard, so you’ll be able to tell where that name came from, and then there is the Free! Exotic chick, who is either Snow White or Snowball, I haven’t decided yet.

We’ve been getting one little egg just about every day. I found one of the Ruby’s in the nesting boxes twice, so I’m pretty sure one or two of them is the layer. They may be tiny eggs, but they are delicious! And, like Amy suggested in the comments, I blew out the first two eggs so the shells are still intact, and it turns out I had the perfect spot for them:

It’s hard to get a good picture in my dark living room, but you get the idea.