All of a sudden I feel like spring is right around the corner! The weather for the last week has been sunny and upper 50s, which is fab for early February in West Virginia! I also got my seed orders, and will be seeding some lettuce tomorrow. The latest Tractor Supply ad was about Chick Days (in less than a month!), which means that I need to get going on a project I am very excited about - building a chicken coop! I have done a lot of research, and took elements from several plans/tutorials/tip lists, and designed one myself that takes into account our small number of chickens (I'm thinking 6 for this first venture), reclaimed materials available, the access points I want, and mobility. Yes, I am going for a chicken tractor. That way I don't have to dedicate an area of the yard to ruin, they can help keep the bugs down while having a more natural and lower cost diet, and they can help me dig up new garden plots if I want by just parking them in the same spot for a few days. I'm a little nervous, it is the biggest carpentry project by far that I've ever undertaken, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!
It's been pretty quiet, craft wise, around our house lately. I've been working on cleaning out the basement to make room for plants. I did clear the area I wanted to, but there is still an amazing amount of junk down there. I have been working on the block of the month at Craftsy, with reasonable results.
January was slashed blocks:
And February was half-square triangles:
I am enjoying it. I don't know if I have the patience to do an entire quilt of the same square, so this sampler quilt is right up my alley. My corners are definitely getting crisper with practice, but the jury is still out on whether I am truly quilter material (ba-dum ching!)
The kids and I had a great Fail yesterday - we tried to mimic the tutorial
here, but I obviously didn't read the directions thoroughly. We started out coloring pictures on some scrap fabric with permanent markers.
Aaaawwww... my sweet babies! Of course, K likes to do the opposite of what I tell her, so she left very little white space on her pictures. In retrospect, I should have known to tell her to color as much as possible. Anyway, we would up with these:
I taped them onto some shallow pie plates to catch to drips, and poured on some rubbing alcohol. This is where I stopped reading and started just looking the pictures on the tutorial. I was supposed to use and eye dropper and a few drops of alcohol. Ha! We used the bottle on these four 1'squares! I didn't get as much of the gist as I thought. Instead of the lovely patterns they got with a few drops, we got a big drippy mess! First this:
Not bad, right? I even liked the house in a horror-movie-about-possessed-children kind of way. But they just kept spreading and spreading, and lost all there charm.
So, in the bin! Oh well, at least we had a little science experiment, and a lesson in paying attention to all the instructions! I guess you're never too old for a Kindergarten refresher!
