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!

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.

I’ve been wanting to make some art for our walls for a long time. I was thinking that it would be fun to make some yo-yo’s the other day, and then I thought that they would be cute as little flowers in a tiny wall quilt. So I decided to take a break from the great decluttering project and make a new mess and do some sewing:

I also took a trip to the Japanese market, which has a pretty good sized bookstore and found a few fun craft books, the one on the lower right is called "Flower accessory" and has some really great, imaginative fabric flowers-perfect for gifts, I think. I also got one on teddy bears and another about felting. They are really well illustrated, so I don’t think it will be hard to follow the instructions.