{Spring} Hope Springs Eternal

Spring is teasing us.  We have had almost 2 weeks of lovely weather.  It is doing wonders for scaring away the winter blues.  The chickens are emerging from their dark cave and wandering around the yard.  We are taking advantage of the sun as long as it sticks around, but I'm not holding my breath.  I've been a Michigander for far too long to believe that Spring is here to stay.

 

We are getting ready for spring in other ways too.  We purchased 3 more baby chicks from the farm store at the end of February.  They are of unknown variety, but supposed to be good egg layers.  They are pretty hard to tell apart right now, but from smallest to largest we've named them Gold (Goldie), Frankincense (Frankie) and Myrrh (Murray).  They are currently in a pretty awkward stage, but here is a picture when they were still cute and fuzzy.

 

I've also started some garden seeds to add some green (and gardening excitement) to our house.  EG helped me plant them and is having fun watering them and watching them grow. 

 

We've done a few home projects this month.  I painted our hallway/stairs to the basement and the downstairs bathroom using leftover paints from our basement (mixed a few colors together to make a color I liked).  And a (very) long awaited home project was completed last weekend as part of my birthday present.  We removed the 90's blue carpet from our living room and hallway and revealed our beautiful oak floors.  They hardly have any marks or scratches, just a few paint splotches, staple holes and character dings.  We feel like we have a whole new house!

 

 



 We are all looking forward to Spring and all that it brings, but for now we will enjoy our pre-Spring warm weather as much as we can.

Winter Blues

Winter is not my favorite.  EG and I had a discussion today about how she does not like to be cold, neither do I darling daughter, neither do I.  And cold it has been.  Record breaking lows in this polar vortex called home.

This has made it hard to be motivated to write anything on here.  The chickens aren't very entertaining right now.  They are just trying to stay warm.  They rarely step outside, so we rarely see them.  Our little light bulb water warmer is still doing its job, although it is now equipped with a 60 watt light bulb.

Valentine's Day was a little bit of a bright spot in our winter white world.  We exchanged Valentines with some long distance friends so that EG would get some in the mail.  In addition to those, she received them from a few of my aunts and her grandparents, aunt and cousins.  Very exciting for a 3 year old!

I made a fun new wreath for our front door, with yarn and some felt.  I followed a tutorial that I found at this link.

 

Our chalkboard theme for Valentine's Day was 1 John 4:19.

 



EG and I made some delicious no-bake cake balls.  So, so, good and so, so much easier than real cake balls.  Find the recipe here.

 

We've kept ourselves busy with local indoor activities too.  We received a membership to the local children's museum for Christmas this year, so we have been there several times this winter.  We've also gone to 2 other children's museums for a family fun day and a friend's birthday party.  So much fun!

 

 

There has been some outdoor fun too.  Snowman building, sledding and plenty of snow shoveling (if you can call that fun), always followed by hot cocoa, with marshmallows (of course).

We may make it through this winter after all.  Keep warm!

Christmas Crafty

Well, the house has been stripped of sparkle and lights, and the furniture and artwork has been returned to its rightful locations.  It was a fun and busy Christmas season, but I'm glad to have my living room back to normal.  I'm also looking forward to the quiet winter weekends to come.

In anticipation of some obstacles during the holidays, I was prepared well in advance of Thanksgiving this year.  Gifts were purchased and wrapped before we left for our Colorado holiday to visit family and friends in the Boulder area.  After returning, we discovered that the anticipated obstacles were moved, leaving me free to enjoy the holidays without the worry of overwhelming details.  So much so, that I forgot about a family Christmas party until 2 days before it was to happen, at my house too!

I managed to squeeze in quite a few craft projects this season, partly to stretch our gift funds, but also to use up a large stockpile of fabric and other baubles.  Christmas with my husband's family has also taken on a crafty theme referred to as Johnson Christmas Camp.  A way to keep little children busy and build fun family memories in the process.

New Stockings:
I used the same curtains that I made EOP's Halloween costume out of to make new stockings for our little family.  I found the green fabric and trimmings at JoAnn Fabrics and Hobby Lobby.  I found a free pattern online and then used this tutorial to figure out how to sew them with a lining, although my cuff was done a little differently.

 

Homemade Vanilla:
There are so many tutorials on how to make your own vanilla, but I was still so surprised at how easy it was.  I went an extra step and made sure to purchase Fair Trade Vanilla beans, but everything else was the same.  The beans and the brown bottles were purchased on Amazon.  I used chalkboard vinyl and permanent chalk pens to create the labels.

Button Gift Tags:
Buttons can be used for so many fun projects.  These tags were a nice easy project to do with our preschooler.  She loves to choose the buttons we use and to put them down into a glue line.  A little embellishment with scrapbook pens and a ribbon tie, and voila, gift tags.  In the past, I've used embroidery floss and little brads to make them even cuter, but that is beyond a preschooler project.

  

 

 

 

Fabric Tissue Carriers:
My aunt made one of these for me one year for Christmas.  They seemed pretty simple, so I played around with my fabric scraps to make some of my own.  After I figured out how easy they were, I made 22 of them, in 2 days.  It was a great way to use up all of the scraps from the diaper bags that I've made, plus Christmas fabric from projects of old, and more buttons.

 

I didn't take pictures of the process, but this tutorial is pretty close to how I made them. 

Felt Flower Wreath:
I got into felt flowers a bit this year (thanks to my sister-in-law), so I redesigned an old grapevine wreath using less than $2 in felt in Christmas colors.  I really like how it turned out.  So much so that I don't want to take it off of the front door, so it stays until the Valentine wreath goes up.

Johnson Christmas Camp:
JCC had a snowman theme this year.  We ate snowman pancakes for breakfast, made snowman ornaments, sock snowmen and powder donut snowmen.  We created a family Christmas board and we can all pin ideas to it.  Then we pick the best/most doable projects for the time we have together.

 

 

 

 

Chalkboard Décor:

Of course, I had to change the chalkboard on the door to have a Christmas theme.  

 

 

Joy to the World is one of my favorite Christmas Carols.  The words carry so much meaning to me during the Christmas season (and year round).  We taught EG the first verse this year, partly so she knew more than just the chorus of Jingle Bells, but also to embed these important words into her heart (let every heart prepare him room).  It was so much fun to see EG's excitement every time the song came on the radio, or we sang it at church.  She would light up and immediately sing along.  She would, in so many words, repeat the sounding joys of Christmas.

 

 

The Early Prepper Gets the Egg

In anticipation of a hectic end of November/all of December, I started our winter chicken coop preparations early.  Many of you know that Michigan experienced an early "Polar Vortex" in mid-November.  It seems that my usually ridiculous planning ahead obsession ended up being the vital step in the survival of our chickens!

We consulted one of our urban farming friends about their chickens in winter.  They don't have electricity to their coop, so they just check on the water 2 times a day and break the ice off of it, and their full-sized chickens just huddle together for warmth.  Our little Bantams could probably survive this way too, but I'm hoping to keep up their egg production during the winter, and I'm too lazy to check their water twice a day in feet of snow.

I also found some blogs on Pinterest with tips for tending chickens during the winter months.  One idea was for a water warmer made from a cookie tin, a lamp kit and a 40 Watt light bulb.  It seemed worth a try.  So I purchased the necessary supplies and got to work.  The cookie tin cost 90 cents, about $10 for the lamp kit and a pack of 40 watt light bulbs.



Photo from blog link.  My photos are in limbo on a broken external hard drive.



Photo from blog link.  My photos are in limbo on a broken external hard drive.

We installed a heat lamp in the coop when we built it, with the intention of setting it on a timer over the winter to give the girls a little extra light and warmth.  However, our only electrical source has to run the heat lamp and the water warmer.  After our cold November, the water was not staying ice free on an intermittent warming schedule. We can switch to a higher wattage light bulb in the dead of winter if it seems the 40 is not keeping up, but for now, the timer is no more and the chickens are enjoying 24 hour heat lamp comfort, and ice free water.

So far, we have seen continued egg production, although not always salvageable.  A few eggs have cracked from freezing if we didn't get to them fast enough.

When we first started getting eggs, they were always in the laying boxes.  It seems that we can attribute this solely to the fake egg that I put in there.  We had to remove the plastic egg from the boxes to eliminate broody behavior in our non-laying hen.  Since then, we have found eggs everywhere.  On the ladder is one of the favorite spots.  Every once in a great while they end up in the laying boxes.  While we were gone for Thanksgiving, she laid all of her eggs in a spot directly behind the laying boxes... so close. 

Curtains to Costumes

EOP's office group usually has a theme for Halloween costumes every year, and this year's theme was The Princess Bride.  EOP was assigned his role, as the priest who performs the marriage ceremony of Prince Humperdink and Princess Buttercup.  You know, the "Mawaige" guy.

Mawaige is what bwings us togeva today.

Eric has had some challenging costumes before (he successfully created a joker costume out of a green fitted sheet one year), but this one seemed a little more daunting than his usual garb.  There is a lot of fabric in this costume and, unless you run across a cheap pope costume, it can get very expensive to create this look.  So. Much. Fabric.

Then I got an idea.  We had some curtains on our back window that did their job, but they weren't my favorite.  They are white, so they pick up every fingerprint and every visiting dog hair.  They were covering a sliding glass door, so they were always in the way.  And the first time I washed them, they shrunk, so they were too short.  For EG's birthday, I took them down so that they would be out of the way of traffic going out onto the back deck.  I washed them, and, well, I never put them back up.  I just couldn't do it.  So here I had 4 40x84-ish inch panels of heavy white fabric that was already hemmed.  That was a good start.

 



I started by taking one panel and folding it in half lengthwise and sewing up the side.  Then I figured out how long it needed to be to go from his neck to the floor, and I cut out a neck hole at the top of that section with pinking shears (oh how I love my new pinking shears).  This made the panel short in the back, but this was the base layer, so it wouldn't show.

While I was working on this, I was planning out the top layer of the costume (and watching the movie, of course, because - why not?).  I knew there was some sort of tapestry fabric in our house, but I couldn't for the life of me remember where it was.  Then it hit me!  We were given 3 bed skirts for a full size bed, when we purchased the bed from our friends.  All of them are nice quality, but we only use one of them.  This red tapestry bed skirt was just sitting in storage, waiting for a purpose.  This was a perfect start to the cape layer of the costume!

 

 

I left a short side intact and I seam ripped the other 3 sides to remove the tapestry fabric.  I then, added a 3 inch strip of the tapestry to each of these sides.  To make this into a cape, I sewed a square of fabric to the front, connecting the two sides of the section I left intact.

 

The hat was a bit of a challenge.  I kept putting it off, hoping it would magically make itself.  When that didn't happen, I started by cutting out a template out of poster board.

 

 

Once I knew this was the right size for hubby's head, I cut 2 out of the curtain fabric, making sure to use the already hemmed edge to my advantage, and sewed them around the curved sides.

 

 

The whole shape of this hat made me very uneasy.  Until I added the embellishments, it was too creepily similar to a Ku Klux Klan accessory for my liking. 



 

There were only 2 purchases made for this project.  One was gold trim.  Christmas at Halloween time was very helpful for finding a gold ribbon that would work for this. 

 

30 feet should be enough, right?

Then I just started adding ribbon accents to the costume.

 

On the hat to give it a more priestly look:

 

I used the curtain tie backs to make the tails on the back of the hat.

Around the neck hole of the base layer:

 

All over the cape layer:

 

Then I added the second purchase for this project, an iron-on gold cross, to the front of the hat.  I used the poster board template inside the hat to make it stand up correctly.

 

 

Here is the final look, in full make-up too.  EOP grew out his side burns and painted them silver and added some eyebrow pencil to his eyebrows to make them look a little bushier.

 

 

 

Not bad, eh?  All this for less than $4!  He got a lot of compliments at work too.  Everyone thought he was the pope, except when he was with the whole team.  We went in to see the rest of the team and they were all fabulous.

 

I had several people ask me what my costume was going to be.  Who had time???  I ended up dressing as a hockey fan, mostly because the hockey jersey was warm, and it was cold outside.  Also there just happened to be a game that night, so I just looked like I was in the know.  I guess I should have dressed up as Maria Von Trapp since I was making clothes out of curtains, all the while singing "these are a few of my favorite things!"

Costume Creations from Fabric Scraps

I usually try to make it an annual Halloween goal to spend as little as possible on costumes.  So far, I have had great success in this.  We were given an unused baby chicken costume when EG was born that fit her for her 2nd Halloween.  She wore that to one event, to the other she wore a totally retro, red and white plaid, polyester pant suit with a bonnet that was mine in 1977. 

 

Last year, she went as a garden gnome by wearing another old dress of mine (with a little Bavarian girl vibe), flower tights and a pointy hat that I made out of a $0.79 piece of stiff red felt and some felt scraps and ribbon from my basement stores.

 

This year I wanted to make an owl costume, so I found a few ideas on Pinterest.  I used this one for the feather template, but I wanted it to have wings, so I used this one for the shape of the costume.  I also knew that I would never finish the thing if I had to sew all of those feathers onto it.  So I used a gift card to buy pinking shears (to cut down on fraying of the feathers) and fabric adhesive tape (like double sided tape for fabric).  I found a selection of fabric from my basement stores that had the color scheme I was looking for and started tracing and cutting out feathers.  When I thought I had enough feathers, I cut out more and more and more.  Then I sat down and cut a small piece of tape about the width of the feather and stuck it on (leaving the other paper side on) - warning: this will ruin a pair of scissors, so use old ones that you can just throw away when you're done.

 

 

Then I found a larger scrap of fabric that was big enough to make the base of the wing "cape."  I used flannel simply because A. I had it on hand, B. it was big enough and C. it matched the color scheme.  I cut a semi-circle that was long enough to reach from finger tip to finger tip at the longest point and tall enough to reach from the base of the neck to the tailbone at the highest part of the arc (folding the fabric in half makes drawing this, and cutting this out, a little less painful).  I then sewed ribbons to the ends where the wrists would be so that the wings could be tied to her wrists and she could flap her wings.

 

Then it was time to start adding feathers to the cape.  I started at the bottom of the arc and laid out a row of feathers in a color pattern that I liked and then took the backing off and stuck them down.  I then laid out the second row, overlapping the first row and staggering the points of the feathers, and then stuck them down.  I repeated this until I was at the top, continuing to follow the shape of the arc a little bit with every row.  I then laid out a row of all orange ones to finish off the top (I'm not super happy with how that part looks, but it's not a huge deal).

 

I did the same thing with a small rectangle (about the size of her torso) and a small trapezoid (for a tail).  The orange feathers were used to make a neckline on the front torso section as well.  I attached the torso section to the top of the cape, in the center with 2 pieces of ribbon set far enough apart to fit her head through.  The tail section stayed separate and was just pinned to the base of her shirt.

 

Then there was the hat.  I found a $0.49 fleece hat at the thrift store, with the tags still on it, and in the right color.  I used 4 feathers (2 plaid for the outside and 2 yellow flannel for the inside) to make the ears (I just kind of made it up as I went until I got a shape that I liked).  I hand stitched them to the top.  The eyes and beak were made from yellow flannel (machine stitched on), white, black and orange felt (hand stitched on).

 



 
The costume was so cute!  It was nice because she could wear it over a t-shirt and pants (for the trick or treat event that was warmer than 70 degrees) or over several warm layers (for the snowy night of Halloween).

I'd say this was another successful, low-budget, super cute costume project.  I spent around $12 for the fabric adhesive tape and the hat.  Plus it cleaned out a ton of scrap fabric that I had piling up in the basement.

Fabulous Fall

October is a very busy month for us.  It's football season, and this girl loves her some football.  I am especially fond of my Chippewas of CMU, although they have surprised me this year (not always good surprises).  EG is becoming quite the little football fan herself, which I am delighted about.  She declared at the last game we went to that it was the "BEST DAY EVER!"  That's my girl.

We have also been participating in other normal fall activities, cider and donuts, pumpkin patch parties, making applesauce, preparing for Halloween (more on that later) and raking leaves.  So.  Many.  Leaves.

I have learned a few things while raking leaves this year.

1.  It doesn't matter how many lawn and leaf bags you think will be plenty, you will always have more leaves than bags.  You can always use just one (or two) more bag(s).  In the country, you just blow the leaves into the field, or the woods, but in the city, you always run out of bags.



(the leaves left after the first time raking the yard and after bagging 6 bags of leaves, it took 10 more bags)

2.  The trees will mock you while you are raking by dropping leaves on your head or dropping them where you just raked with a loud thud.

3.  The wind will mock you by destroying your neat piles of leaves before you can bag them.  See also: helpful small children.

4.  If you want to show off that you actually got outside and raked leaves during the day while your husband was at work, the only evidence of such raking left when he arrives home will be the leaf bags by the side of the road.  Another example of the trees and wind (but probably not helpful small children) mocking you.

5.  One good frosty morning, followed by a windy day can completely cover your freshly raked ground with enough leaves to fill 12 more bags, but you will only have 11.

(the second pile of leaves after the frosty/windy day)

6.  Chickens are very intrigued by leaf piles (and what's underneath them), but not people raking.  They will sneak up behind you but if you turn toward them, they will run away and hide.

 

7.  Even if I have to rake leaves, fall is still the best time of year.