Sunday, February 26, 2012

A fox in the henhouse...literally! And of course some wool!

A few years ago, while Deb and I were at a quilt show in PA, I saw this amazing wool penny rug pattern, so of course, I had to have it.  It had all of the wool, but I had to copy the patterns onto freezer paper, then iron it to the wool, cut the pieces out and then start appliqueing them on!  It took a while to get this all done.  I would work on it a little every fall and then put it away to get other projects started.  Finally, this year when Christmas was over, Kenny told me not to put it away again until it was all finished!  Great idea!  Anyway, I worked on it every night until it was done.  Now I am so excited to get to next year's Christmas and this will be in the box of decorations to put out and actually use!  
This Valentine's penny rug is another of the Grab-and-Go kits that I love so much.  No cutting, just sewing.  This was done in a few nights of sewing while watching television.
A funny story, with a not so happy ending (at least for one chicken).  One morning, Kenny called downstairs to me to tell me that one of my new banty hens was up on the garage roof looking at him while he was in the bathroom.  Since they never go that high, I thought he was kidding.  He wasn't!  I ran to get my camera and saw her sitting up as high as she could get.  Meanwhile, all of my chickens were running around sqwaking and carrying on.  I look over to the chicken coop and saw what looked like a dog...only it wasn't!  It was a red fox!  So that explained the running and hollering from all of my chickens.
 I ran out to shoo him(or her) away and tried to get all of my girls to come back to the henhouse so I could lock them back up.  A few hours later all but one had run back in.  The last one would not let me grab her.  Since I had to go back to school for our last performance of Oliver Twist (I'm the director), I left her out and hoped she would be waiting by the coop door when I got home (that's were they usually wait when it is time to go to bed), but she was nowhere to be found that afternoon.  Ken and I went out with flashlights that night and looked all over the woods, etc...no hen.  Nothing the next morning either.  Late that night we heard racoons fighting across the street (have you ever heard that?  OMG, it sounds like people being viciously attacked...scary) and wondered if they had her.  Either way, she was definitely a meal for some hawk, fox, or racoon that night.  Honestly, it was like Wild Kingdom around here that day and night.  So now, I have to get a new hen and a new rooster (he disappeared sometime in the fall when he was pretty young--more of a chicken mcnugget than a roaster actually).  I will be putting an order in next week.


Quilt retreat...plus!

This weekend was our annual Pieceful Quilting retreat in Southampton.  It was a great time and I had so much fun with my friends and the lovely ladies from the quilt shop.  Our teacher had just become a grandmother for the fourth time while we were there too!  How fun is that?  This is the quilt that we made over the weekend.  The theme of this retreat was "scrappy" which was right up my alley.

The fabrics that we were given to use in the quilt were pretty horrible by most people's standards!  Everyone was laughing when they saw their piles of fabric, but we knew that in the end we would produce something fun and nice.
I love mine!!  Eveyone used different settings and different colors for the borders.  I though I might as well stay on the bold side, so used this nice turquoise as my outer border.  Even Kenny likes it!
Over the winter (which is really not a winter at all here where I live...this year anyway!) I have been doing some hand sewing.  I made a few of these table toppers and penny rugs with precut kits of wool.  So much fun and easy.  Debbie picked a few more up for me while she was in Vermont.  Cannot wait to get started!