The Backyard Chickens Glow Up

 

It's been a long time since I made chick portraits with the kids.

How long has it been exactly?

THIS long!!!

It was so long ago that Syd, who now fears and loathes the backyard chickens in equal capacities, happily posed with a chick on her wrist. 

Syd won't go near even the bitty babies anymore, alas, but Will still has an infinite adoration for chickens both big and small. Early this spring she started to work on me and Matt about adding more chicks to our small flock. I kept a pretty hard line for a change, so obviously it was Matt's turn to be a sucker and spoil our child.

I mean, one of us HAS to, right?!? That's surely a rule somewhere...

So off Will and Matt went to buy four chicks, then a couple of days later they turned right around, for reasons that surely made sense to them, and they bought two more. And now we have six, on top of the four hens and two roosters we've already got. It's not exactly the farm that Will dreamed of having when she was four, but it's certainly closer to it!

This is Whistleblower:

And this is Whistleblower one month later!

This is Smol Bean:

And this is Smol Bean one month later!

Smol Bean is living proof of my kid's loving heart, as she lets me name one of the chicks each time she gets new ones, and she absolutely HATES this name. HATES. IT. And yet we still have a Smol Bean, because a Smol Bean was what I wanted:

This is Poppy:

And this is Poppy one month later:

This is Quetzalcoatlus: 

And this is Queztlcoatlus one month later, looking not entirely unlike her namesake!

This is Blitz:

And this is our baby Blitz one month later:

This is Hadrian:

And this is lanky Hadrian one month later:

The chicks just moved from their indoor palace into their outdoor nursery coop this week. I'm happy that their dust and smell and noise are out of the house, but I miss being able to pop into the playroom and visit with them, too. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, something about how fast young creatures grow and how wonderful and hard it is to have them when they're small, and how wonderful and hard it is when they leave the safety of your home. How their lives become so much more interesting in the wider world of the backyard, but you stop knowing them as well as you did when they were contained. How they become so different. How they stay so very much the same. 

Every day I think about how this incredible, funny, generous, bright, witty, thoughtful, and kind kid of mine is going to leave for the wide world so soon now, herself. Sometimes I feel excited about that--I'll find every brownie right where I left it! Sometimes I feel worried--How on EARTH can I monitor her from far away? What if there's an emergency, and nobody knows that my child must be evacuated before all the other children because she is the most special? Sometimes I make anxious to-do lists in my head of all the things I still have to teach her--physics, how to drive, the mandatory nature of daily showers, when to stop arguing one's point. 

Mostly, though, I think about how much I'm going to miss her every single second, and how much magic and newness and adventure and possibility she's brought into my life so far, and how I hope she keeps that and shares that as she makes her own way in the world. I hope she finds others who will participate with interest every single time she's reading a book and pops her head up wanting to discuss an important piece of information from it. I hope she finds others who love travel and adventure, who also want to go kayaking and skiing and hiking and climbing and target shooting and every other cool thing, but I hope she also isn't afraid to find new adventures and go on them all by herself, either. 

I hope she keeps this heart that loves animals of all kinds more than she loves most people, who treasures wolverines as much as she does puppies. I hope that her place in the world is filled with dogs of indeterminant breeding, ever-replenishing flocks of chickens, and fields of content horses. And I hope that every time she has a new batch of chicks, I'm close enough by that I can make their portraits for her.

Two Free Pairs of Bike Shorts Were Living in My Fabric Stash

Syd mentioned that she needed a new pair of comfy, stretchy exercise shorts for dance class, so into my fabric bin I dove!

I knew I had some spandex fabric leftover from our DIY leggings kick of three years ago, but just between us, I suspected that there wouldn't be enough spandex left to sew anything, because we hit that leggings kick pretty thoroughly!

I'd forgotten, though, that noses had been snubbed at the camouflage spandex that I'd bought, foolishly thinking that the kids would find it cute. They did NOT find it cute back in 2018, but it turns out that in 2021... well, it's still not their favorite print, but it's certainly good enough for a couple of pairs of bike shorts. I'm a little disappointed that there is just no way to match thread to the camouflage fabric, but it doesn't bother me so much that I'd put forth any effort to find a solution, either (edit: apparently, this is the solution. Now I know, at least!)

Syd's grown enough that now I can use my favorite Patterns for Pirates leggings pattern for her as well as Will. I love the fit of these leggings, the range of sizes in the pattern, and the customization options. Home-sewn leggings are still more expensive than store-bought, fast fashion leggings (and honestly, at the moment our local Goodwills are also absolutely stuffed with LulaRoe leggings, too, so you don't even have to go the fast fashion route to find cheap leggings), but the leggings that you sew yourself using a free pattern from the fabric that's just been sitting in the bottom of your fabric bin for the past three years?

Well, those are basically free leggings, and well-sewn, free bike shorts exactly when you need them, no trip to the store required, is way better than sweat shop clothes!

When You Don't Want to Spend Thirty Bucks: How to DIY a Dance Skirt

 This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

My kid's ballet program generally isn't too outrageous when it comes to recital costumes. I know of other programs in our town that require two or more elaborate, brand-new costumes per recital, generally along the lines of rainbow-colored flapper outfits, or leotards with butt ruffles, that you're never going to get your kid to wear again, because no kid *really* wants to be a flapper for Halloween. I will tell you another time about my thoughts on the privilege of wealth that lets someone assume that just because you're sending your kid to dance class, you can blow a bunch of money on an elaborate dance recital costume that your kid will wear once. 

 Anyway, my kid's program usually doesn't pull that kind of crap, but this year they required that for the recital, every child wear a white leotard and white dance skirt. Why the children can't simply wear the uniform leotards and dance skirts that they already own, I don't know, other than the assumption that none of us would mind shelling out another fifty bucks just so we can have an even harder time picking our kid out of the group on stage. 

 A white leotard that meets ballet program specifications is twenty-plus bucks. That's a fair price for the fabric and pattern and technique that goes into sewing such a leotard, especially if you pretend that the person who sewed it was paid a fair price for their work. 

A white dance skirt that meets the ballet program specifications is thirty-plus bucks. That's... ridiculous. The thing is a half-yard of chiffon, a yard of 1/4" bias tape, and a rolled hem.

 Fortunately, something that simple is also simple to make! 

 You will need: 

  half-yard of chiffon. That's enough to make a dance skirt for a long-legged ten-year-old. Size up to get more length. 

  1/4" double-fold bias tape. If you have cotton fabric that matches the color of your chiffon, you can also make your own bias tape to save even more money. 

 1. Make the pattern for your dance skirt. If you already own or can borrow a dance skirt, all you have to do is trace it, adding an extra inch to the bottom and sides for the rolled hem. If you don't have a skirt to copy, though, your job is barely harder--as you can see in the image above, the dance skirt is nothing more than a u-shaped half-circle of fabric, longer in the middle and gradually tapering to a little shorter at both sides, bilaterally symmetrical. The longest part of the skirt should be the length that you want, plus an inch for hemming; the width of the skirt should be 1.5 to 2 times your waist measurement. The bias tape should be long enough to wrap around you and tie comfortably in the back.  

  2. Copy your pattern onto the fabric and cut it out. 

 3. Sew the sides and bottom with a rolled hem. Here's how to sew a rolled hem without a rolled hem foot for your sewing machine. Considering the learning curve that a rolled hem foot requires, it's not any quicker to use one if you don't plan to use it often. 

  4. Center the bias tape with the center of the top raw edge of the skirt; encase the raw edge in bias tape. Here's how to sew double-fold bias tape--it's even easier than sewing the rolled hem! When you're finished, your kid's ballet skirt will look just like all the other kids' ballet skirts-- 

 --so be sure and sit close to the stage, so you can pick her out from all the other kids in white!

The Fire Department Burned My Neighbor's House Down

 

This is easily the most exciting thing to happen to me during the entire pandemic so far.

A couple of months ago, a form letter from the county showed up in my mailbox, telling me that the fire department was going to burn down a neighbor's vacant house. This house has sat unoccupied for SO long, long enough that I've periodically contemplated sneaking over to steal their perennials (I didn't, but I totally should have) or to climb in through the OPEN WINDOWS to see if they had any antique fixtures I could "salvage" (I didn't do that, either, and that one's probably just as well since that's probably a bigger crime than digging up daffodil bulbs). 

Anyway, that's how Operation: Structure Fire began. The letter didn't include any information about when this burn was supposed to occur, so I became obsessed with keeping a weather eye on the house, because god forbid I MISS A LITERAL HOUSE FIRE!!!! Fortunately, the window next to my desk (the one that also serves as Jones' kitty TV) looks in that direction, but as if I wasn't already afraid enough of venturing out into the real, germ-filled world, I became even more reluctant to go out and about, because what if the day I chose to drag my family out hiking was the day the fire department burned the house down!?!

I got even more excited when fire trucks from all over the county started showing up to the house, even though they'd just pull up, hang out for a few hours, then leave and be replaced by new ones. This continued for DAYS. Matt's best guess is that everyone was coming by for some kind of structure fire instructional seminar or something, but it threw me enough that I seriously considered not taking Syd to some random mandatory in-person standardized test the high school arbitrarily assigned her to (it doesn't even count for anything! They made her miss three actual classes to take it, and now that everything is online you don't even get a break on your homework if you've got an excused absence from class!). I did take Will to our regular Girl Scout volunteer gig with the Backpack Buddies program one county over, but I swear we have NEVER worked so fast to pack weekend meals for schoolchildren!

After all that, it turns out that one extremely rainy Saturday morning was The Big Day. The fire trucks came back, the drive-in next door filled up with firefighter overflow parking, and everyone milled about under their pop-up tents while my family sat on lawn chairs in our backyard and eyed them through binoculars while simultaneously eating Cheez-Its. 

It was a legit party, y'all!

For the first few hours, the fire looked mostly like this:

A firefighter who was cutting through our yard and had the misfortune to come upon us sitting in lawn chairs, eating Cheez-Its, and gossiping about his buddies while staring at them through binoculars kindly explained that they were starting small fires in the house, then sending all the rookie firefighters in so they could get some real-world experience. You know how big firefighters are on experiential education!

But when all the rookie firefighters had had their opportunity for experiential learning, the real fun began! We'd gone inside after becoming desensitized to baby fires, but when I saw black smoke begin to drift up, I bolted from my window look-out station. On my way outside I ran past Syd, who was in the middle of Zoom pointe class, and was all, "Tell them you have to go! THE FIRE IS HAPPENING!!!!!"

Obviously, I was really, really chill about this long-anticipated excitement:

Matt is always way more genuinely chill:

Matt and Syd traded the binoculars back and forth, while I used my telephoto lens to pick out all the lovely details of a house on fire:

But then sometimes you've got to zoom back out, so you can see the fire in all its glory!

It maybe got a *little* less exciting as enough of the house was burned to make the fire die down a little, but that just means that you could see the details better, vote on what part of the house was going to collapse next, and then cheer whenever it did:

Eventually, just a couple of the sturdiest corners were left actually standing:

Eventually even those corners collapsed, but by the next morning the foundation was still smoldering... which... okay, I guess that's fine because it was pretty much pouring this entire time, but, I mean, I live right over there? Next to that unsupervised but still smoldering literal house fire? Just alongside a woods full of trees and a multi-storey plywood movie screen?

Whatever, it was fine. 

You guys, I don't even know what I should look forward to next that has even half the excitement level that this has brought to my life. I mean, I'm excited about taking my Girl Scout troop camping, but that's also a lot of work. I'm excited about remodeling the kids' bathroom, but that consists of spending money and also work. I'm excited about an upcoming road trip to see Matt's relatives, but also insanely stressed out about it because, you know, that whole global pandemic that we're in. 

It just seems like it's going to be a lot of effort to find something else in my life as magical as sitting in a lawn chair in my backyard, eating Cheez-its, my cat weaving back and forth between my feet, and watching a house burn flat to the ground. That is a SERIOUSLY good way to spend a Saturday, you guys.

Unseasonable Craft Alert: I Sewed Next Year's Easter Presents Because Reasons

The reason being that I figured out exactly what I SUPER wanted to sew for my baby niece for Easter far too close to Easter to actually sew it, but I was so excited about it that I didn't want to set the idea aside for the ten months that it would take me to be bored of it when I remembered it again and not want to do it.

Because you might as well sew what you're excited to sew when you're excited to sew it!

Even if it will sit in your closet for the next ten months until you can mail it off to your niece at a seasonally appropriate time.

I'm especially excited about this fabric Easter basket, because I made it from the vintage quilt top that I have had in my stash for... a decade, perhaps? Shamefully, I don't even remember where I got it! Either someone once upon a time gave me their old quilt top, or I scored it from some upcycling center or freecycling meet-up, but ever since then, it has sat in the back of my fabric stash. I'd notice it when I was digging for something specific, and feel kind of guilty because surely there is SOME cool thing I could be making from someone's vintage charm quilt top!

Turns out that the cool thing? Is Easter baskets.

The Easter eggs took a lot of fiddling to get right, and I learned a lot about fabric grain and stretch as I did so. Say yay to the self-taught sewer figuring shit out on her own!

I finally decided that I prefer canvas to quilting cotton, both for the interesting texture and because I think the Easter eggs hold their shape better (I'm using pre-printed fabric, but you could also sew these in plain canvas and then decorate them with paint and markers!). When I make another set, though, I think I'm going to also experiment with interfacing to make the eggs even more absolutely perfect than they already are:

As usual, I had some buddies helping me out with these photographs. We are all loving the newly sunny and warm days!

If you want a set of your very own, I've now got a listing for these Easter egg softies and their vintage quilt basket up in my Pumpkin+Bear shop on etsy:

I'll make you your own set, though, because this particular set has one particular kid's name already on it, and it's going to spend the next ten months in my closet waiting for the perfect time for me to give it to her!

P.S. Want some other Easter crafts and projects that you can do, seasonably appropriate or not? Here's my massive list of all my favorite Easter craft tutorials.

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!