Wednesday, May 8, 2013

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Handmade Looms and a Rock Star Dress (and Four New Babies, Too)



I messed up the distance between the upper black and white ruffle and the pink skulls ruffle--I'm not going to  try to fix it, but it did cause me to see that the dress with only two ruffles would be a pretty cool top. Mod to come:




In other news, I took a deep breath, gathered some supplies, put Matt to work with a box knife and plenty of duct tape, and accepted the generosity of a good friend in her gift of four of her recently-hatched chicks:

We can keep up to five hens in our yard, but really I only want two or three, so hopefully one or two, but not all four, of these babies will be boys, because I don't know how we'll stand to choose which ones to give back to my friend, otherwise.

Because we LOVE these chicks. LOVE. THEM. Especially Fluffball:

Fluffball is some kind of chicken genius, I swear. Willow is all the time catching potato bugs (I pay her a penny for each bug she picks out of my garden, payable upon the dollar) and dropping them into the chicks' brooder, and so far only Fluffball has figured out the utter awesomeness of these bugs. She'll run up right away and start grabbing them up, and then the other chicks will get excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth and try to get it from her, but in the rare instances that they actually do, they just stare at the bug and they're all, "What's the hell is THIS thing?!?", but in that time Fluffball has managed to grab another bug, which gets the chicks all excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth.

Fluffball can also roost on the rock that we've got in there for some chick enrichment, and she can jump off of your hand if you put it super low to the ground, and once Sydney had her outside of her brooder on the floor with her, and she saw an ant crawling by, and she ate it!

Of course, we love Arrow, Crow, and Cluck, too. But it's nice to know that they've got a chicken genius like Fluffball to show them what's what.

2 comments:

Tina said...

AWESOME!!!! Chickens are surprisingly smart. I worked for a women once who raised heritage birds, and it was so fun to watch all the different birds (geese, turkeys, ducks, and chickens). The best part is watching the mama hens and ducks with their babies. Watch out though, cause they are about as mean as mama bears if their babies are threatened!
I so want chickens! And goats, and sheep, and horses, and cows, and a big garden... being patient is so hard.

julie said...

I want goats and sheep and horses and a big garden, too! Maybe not cows...

I was telling my friend all about our amazing Fluffball, and she says that he's probably a boy, because apparently whatever chick HER kids always fall most in love with every year turns out to be a rooster.