Friday Night

I haven't been able to join in with Friday sewing events for a while so I was pleased when the stars lined up last night, and I could take part in Wendy's Friday Night Sew In this month.

Friday's a busy day for me, it's the day I work at the quiltshop then I race home for farm chores - at the moment there are lots of hungry calves needing feeding. But I was relatively organised with dinner and by the time it was dark, I was happily ensconced in my stitching chair ♥

First of all, I finished sewing the last of my hexie-flowers onto background fabric —

Here is the little team of hexies I have made for my 2022 quilt —

Next I started a stitchery I have had my eye on for the last few weeks but hadn't got to.

It's a sweet stitchery gifted in the Tilda Lovers Group (FB). I have a rough idea what I would like to do with it, but I am hoping that a firmer plan will form as I stitch! As you can see, I didn't get very far but I'm pleased I made a start.

(To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. Such a sweet sentiment.)

On Saturday morning I was able to sew a few last seams on my latest churndashes. August has been a slow month in the land of Chrundashes but I'm hoping to dedicate a bit of time to them in the coming week to get my tally up. I need 39 of this size (6") for the quilt I am doing and I am up to 31 so that's not bad!

Thank you very much Wendy, for hosting Friday Night Sew In. To see who else took part, you can visit her Sugarlane Designs blog *here*.

'til next time,

happy stitches,

Time for a catch up!

After my spectacular blogpost a day (nearly) in July, I realise it's now ten thirteen fourteen days with no post!

Generally, the farm has been keeping us all busy, but I have made progress on several things.

I've added just 4 more churn dashes to my collection (these are 6" blocks) —

I took apart my disastrous 'stitched by candlelight' hexie rosette and remodelled it, forming two more. Out with the old —

In with the new —

(Different lighting, but that 'red' is the same fabric!)

Six is enough for what I want to do; they'll be appliqued onto larger squares for my 2022 quilt.

I had needed a little more fabric to complete my Raining Cats and Dogs block/row...so here it is in all its glory!

This is actually 12" x 60 so is a decent size (!). It will also be part of my 2022 quilt. Its width will dictate the size of that quilt.

And Memory Lane has seen some progress too. I made 5 more blocks, joined them together and sewed them on as the bottom border of this quilt. 

(Yes, if you notice it, I did change the order of the above blocks...I had muddled them when joining.)

And I've attached the top border too - here is how that is looking now.

I have a bit of thinking to get the two side borders done. They will look similar to these, but with different sized and shaped stitchery blocks to work with.

On the home front —

Miss Lily (and family) had a brief visit one day. She insisted 'we' do some more sewing while here. She wanted another dolls' quilt.

Her attention span was long enough to quickly sandwich two squares of fabric with an offcut of batting, two diagonal lines as quilting and a zigzag around the outside. I wasn't even allowed to trim it to tidy the rough edges! Here it is in her (birthday) dolls' house —

Just perfect I'd say!

Last weekend one of the local gardens opened their gates as a fundraiser, while their beautiful magnolias were in flower. ED, YD and I (and a couple of children) went along.

We were amazed at the size of the blooms on this tree!

The same weekend, the older twins had their first ever 'dance recital'. This was quite well done, and each little group spent only 5-10 minutes on stage - with one or two routines. Our two loved it. (They do mini-acro; a bit of gymnastics/acrobatics in it which seems quite fun!)

The other day when YD and Odie were out, we went out the back. He remembered exploring from another time and took us off for a bit of a bush walk. 

These three were entertained, watching Gandad in the paddock with the cows another day —

I am bursting at the seams with calves. I have approx 60 that I'm rearing right now. And we've sold a couple of dozen which I reared through to about a week old. 

They're starting to fill up the sheds 

Three mobs (of ten) in this shed now. The older ones now have access to the outdoors so they can start to learn how to eat grass.

It's always a good workout, carrying buckets of milk to the calves! 

We're still having to help the first-timers calve, as the bull we were sold is throwing big calves. They're all doing well. It is always amazing to see how resilient calves are. This guy was rejected by his mum, unlicked even. We got him to the shed, I managed to make him stand and got his first feed of colostrum into him. I left him for the night with an old horse-neck cover draped over him —

Next morning (10 hours later) he was unrecognisable from the other calves —

A nice scene one morning this week —

OK, must away, and (finally) get this posted!

'til next time,

happy stitches,

Block-a-day-July Day 31

It's fanfare time!! I got through the month of making at least one block a day EVERY DAY.

I mostly blogged every day too - with the exception of a few days at the start and then some days where the blogpost was next morning instead of late night.

But in my mind I did it, and all it was, was a silly challenge to myself to spur me on with my sewing and blogging.

Thanks for following along, your visits and comments - they meant a lot to me. I have big plans to catch up on my replies, answer some of your questions and reciprocate visits too!!!

As my grand finale, I was going to make a cow block. There's a rather sweet one in Lori Holts' Farm Girl Vintage 2.

Very fitting with what's been going on around here lately!

I did make a start —

Today we moved the older 10 calves down to another shed, where there's more room. The main calf shed is starting to fill up now so the move is necessary in the interests of good hygiene. Over crowded calves pick up and spread bugs too easily —

YD and her family popped out. They made us lunch, they helped with some farm work. They helped with the calves. 

It was a glorious afternoon to have those roller doors up!

Tonight I have sewn another hexie rosette —

'til next time,

happy stitches,

Block-a-day-July Day 25

It was definitely a day for hunkering down inside and keeping dry today. That sounds like a perfect recipe for lots of sewing but I'd forgotten I had two (now) 4 year olds for the day...so no sewing but plenty of fun regardless.

We managed outside for a bit, of course the puddles were a huge attraction. (haha I've just realised you can't really see any puddle here, but water was pouring down off the shed roof and the kids were having a blast in it!) —

And the calves too —

You may be wondering how my friend (#201)(red tag) from last night is doing. That was him with George in the above photo this morning and here he is tonight having a good feed with his mates —

......This was how far I got with my post when the power went out.......

We had dinner by candle light - luckily it was almost all done when it went out. The mince was cooked, then the power flickered on again for 5 minutes so I quickly threw some bread in the toaster and eggs in the pan before we lost it again! 

I groped around in the dark and found some fabric for a hexie rosette - and prepped that by candlelight, thinking while I was doing so that I'm fairly certain this is not the only hexie that has been prepped by candlelight. I'm guessing they didn't have glue pens back in those days!

....Then the power came on and stayed on...

Not 100% sure that I like this one but it's done and might look ok at some stage (this is what happens when you choose your fabrics in the dark!!)

'til next time,

happy stitches,

Block-a-day-July Day 24

Today I sewed the two raindrop blocks to go with yesterday's umbrellas. These start off as HST and get their corners 'stitched and flipped' so are pretty straight forward to make.

Then three Churndashes, one for yesterday, one for today and one for luck —

The pattern (*here*) tells us to make some of the churndashes with two different fabrics (as well as the background fabric) so I had a play with the black/grey one; doesn't look too bad, I guess.

Today the younger twins turned FOUR so there was a bit of a do down at our local playcentre. It's a great venue as there is plenty of room for play and everyone seemed to have a fun time (in spite of the rain!).

We've long made it a policy not to 'sleep with' our cows - we don't get up several times during the night to check on the close-to-calving ones, as some farmers do. (It's just too hard when you don't get a chance to switch off.) However when we did the rounds later on this afternoon, this first-time lass looked like she was starting to calve so we thought we'd better keep an eye on her. We brought her back, close to the shed so that we could monitor her progress.

(Look how tight her udder is, too - ouch!)
So about 8pm we went out to see if anything was happening and she hadn't progressed very far. We decided to get her into the shed to check what was going on and ended up giving her a helping hand. Ideally calves are born front feet first - this one had a leg tucked back so the poor cow wouldn't have been able to do it on her own. 

It's a wet and wild night so we thought the calf would do better going straight into the calfshed rather that out onto the grass with mum, who may or may not be interested in it. 

I gave him about an hour and then went out to check on and feed him.

He was doing well, nice and strong but was struggling to get onto his front feet. 

I managed to get him up (I propped him up on an over turned milk feeder!) so that I could feed him. 

(Very hard to take a photo when you are feeding a calf!!) We had some fresh colostrum from a cow we brought in this afternoon and he drank 2litres of that all up really well.

So I've left him for the night. I'm sure he'll be up and bellowing for some more milk first thing tomorrow morning!

While trying to get a calf photo I ended up selfie-ing! The calfshed lighting was fairly kind so here I am in midwifery and nursing mode!!

'til next time,

happy stitches,