Finishes and Farm Spam

In spite of a lack of sewing time (aside from my Crazy sewing!), I racked up two finishes during August. First of all, the afghan I started in May or June.  I had a pile of wool I needed to use, and had fallen for the Snowflake version of the 6-day Kid Blanket.

Perhaps the original version of this pattern took Betty McKnit 6 days to make, with thicker yarn and (possibly) a smaller size, but this one has taken me 3 months. A nice winter project. It's been nice to collapse into my chair at night and do some mindless crochet. Now that it's done, I'm struggling to get more energetic in the evenings but as calving eases, I'm sure some needleturn or stitchery projects will get started again.

This is the first time I have done an edging on an afghan, but I'm pleased I persevered with this. I nearly stopped here after this pretty wavy round - 

But this, not very clear, photo shows that it was worth doing the outer edge. The burgundy is done so that it looks like there are little pink bobbles.

The second recent finish was a quick impulse sew after discovering this new fabric in the shop. It's a kiwiana one which I thought would be ideal for a wee bag for Odie's dinosaurs.

Even though it doesn't actually have dinosaurs on it, it does feature Tuatara which were living at the time of the dinosaurs!

Odie was very pleased with it!

And onto the Farm Spam!

See the black calf on the right in the below photo? He is my 100th calf to rear! He was born yesterday and here he is coming in to the shed today.

(I tell a lie really, although we have 100 keeper calves, the grandies next door are rearing 3 of them for Calf Club. However I have three to-be-sold that I'm feeding, so we won't get too pedantic with all the figures!)

We've finished with all the colourful calves. The three below are all Friesian/Jersey cross (we actually mate with Kiwicross bulls) heifers (females) who will one day become milking cows for us. Identifiable by the yellow ear tags.

And all the calves being born now are by Angus bulls and are varying shades of black. Here are two we used last year in front of a mob of calves which contains some of their sons-

The beefy calves are really lovely to raise with all their fluffy chubbiness.

The red tag means it's a male Angus cross. All the female beefies get green tags. We have a lovely couple who buy all of the green girls when they're about 4-10 days old.

Some have really fluffy curly topknots!

As you can see I am forever moving my calves around the place. The calf shed is too small to keep them in for too long - 30-40 calves is its limit, so we have various other sheds we use. And at about 2-3 weeks old I start letting them out onto grass.

Sheltered paddocks at first but as they get older they move further out onto the farm and I shift them to a fresh paddock every two days.

The calves aren't the only ones who enjoy the milk.....the chooks always have their heads in my buckets trying to drink it. Tonight I had some leftover milk that had gone lumpy. The chooks loved it!

I looked over and spied a random egg which someone had deposited randomly on the ground -

Look at the size of it - a double yolker for sure.

That was 15 eggs for the day, not bad from 18 chooks.....

(Or was it 15 and a half eggs?!)

Whoops, nearly forgot to include this photo -

Ok, must away, 

'til next time,

Happy stitches,

Raewyn