Thank goodness today has been Sunday. We’re tired from staying up too late last night. We’re feeling a bit drained from all the … well, small challenges that we’re presently facing: expensive car repairs, viruses, rush projects. Even Ian is working this weekend, which isn’t something he has to do too often.

It’s fine. Everything will be all right.

Housework. Sick boys. Freelance work. These are the things that have occupied our time this weekend instead of what we had planned: our annual trip to Mimi’s cabin in Strawberry in the Tahoe forest, to visit her and grandpa. Feverish children changed our plans.

We’re in a bit of a slump, you might say.

However, there were several sweet highlights. Like unexpected visits from friends, who fill up my heart with love and see deep inside me.

Low-key, take-it-easy play and movies to ease the disappointment, sickness, and crabbies. I think Lucas is well enough to return to school tomorrow, which is great because he’s feeling pretty blue and misses his friends.

The delicious mushroom, spinach, onion omelette Ian made me for breakfast.

A few feverish smiles and the wonderful opportunity to climb on Dad.

Some sewing for mama. I got to complete a small knot doll I started a month or more ago. She’s for Asher and I sewed all her clothing, hat, and hair today, using just leftover bits and bobs.

Ian said she looks a bit like a preschool teacher, and Asher immediately named her after his own teacher. So sweet.

I’m trying my hand at a new bread-making method. We’ll see how that turns out…. I also managed to finish a work project today, so that feels good, too.

And as for the rest of today, I’m thinking of snuggles and food and an early bedtime for all.

Ian and the kiddos spent the weekend getting ready for our vacation in the desert. Fortunately, we don’t have to buy any major items, especially considering Friday’s expensive emergency car repairs. Oy! Our desert equipment needs fixing up in some cases, but we have most of the things we need.

Ian has tons of electroluminescent wire leftover and/or recycled from old Burning Man art projects and he decided to decorate the boys’ nighttime jackets for 1) visibility and safety, and 2) fun!

This is what a creative guy with a thrift-store jacket, a stash of EL wire, and a glue gun can achieve in about an hour. Asher thinks his jacket is the coolest, and Daddy is the BEST! He’s right on both counts.

Ian and spent just about an hour in Placerville last weekend, on our way to South Lake Tahoe for a short getaway. Mom had said, “Why don’t you get out of town for a while?” Why not, indeed!

Since we didn’t have the boys in tow, I dragged Ian to Lofty Lou’s, where I pawed at the yarn and came home with these gems. He’s such a good sport!

This is a four-ounce ball of Firestar, a sparkly nylon fiber that can be carded with wool or silk or other fibers and either spun or needle-felted. Pretty!

And this is a lovely hank of hand-painted wool in an array of autumn browns, golds, and russet reds that I’m hoping will inspire some lovely autumnal artwork. Or I could spin it into luscious yarn, which I haven’t done since last February and I really should practice so I don’t forget how.

Or maybe both. That’s what I love about roving; it can become so many things! And I’ve just spent a bit of time on abstractfiber.com and I must say, YUM!

After a great deal of hot, exhausting, sweaty work—done mostly by my intrepid and valiant husband in 100-degree weather—we now have a working coop and chicken run and chickens to put in them! We spent today putting on some finishing touches, like installing the roost, filling in holes with dirt, etc. Ian built the person-size door to the chicken run today, even though we got the chickens last night and fenced them in. Putting all that chicken wire on was a big job and we worked right up until the deadline at 4 p.m., when had to go get the hens …

… which was a funny sort of adventure in that they had to be caught and put in a big cardboard box. They were hiding from the heat under a deck when we arrived and we had to coax them out. Fortunately their confident, courageous (former) owner caught them for us and then we put our box of hens into the back of the car. Chickens in a box. Weird. I’ve had chickens in grocery bags before, but never in a box!

The boys were and are pretty excited! Lucas wants to be very near them. He held one of them today for a few moments. The hens were a bit skittish yesterday evening, but they seem to be settling in.

We have four chicken breeds: clockwise from lower left, we have a Black Sussex, a Rhode Island Red, two Leghorns, and an Araucana at the bottom right. Good gracious, it’s hard to get good chicken pictures! They’re always moving!

We have some disagreement over their names, however. It seems we Wilsons are an opinionated bunch. Let me show you how:

Probably, we’ll end up using Lucas’s names most of the time. Although, I’m pretty sure the girls don’t care, so maybe we can each maintain our own pet names for them.

See how my Ian has suffered this week. He’s a prince among chicken-coup builders! Oh, and extremely tough, super macho, and manly.

Here’s Henrietta/Posh/Sunrise/Chicken 1.

Mid-morning today we got two eggs, laid in the same little hollow in the leaf litter. This afternoon, we got three more eggs, including a green-shelled one from Henrietta/Posh/Sunrise/Chicken 1, our Araucana.

I think we’re going to have a bit of trouble at first telling the two white birds apart. We’ve noticed that one has a little scar on top of her comb and they have different combs (in their shape and in the direction the fall). But I’m pretty sure Lucas has switched their names on me a couple of times already. One of them, Sporty, of course, was the hardest to catch and get into the box for transport yesterday.

The chicken run we (Ian) built (I helped with the wire!) is an area far bigger than our five hens need, but we think we want to get more birds. Also, I’m not sure how hard they are going to be on our garden and landscaping when we let them out to range, and if they start doing major damage, I may want to keep them confined in their big-enough run most of the time. Some friends let their chickens out every evening for “happy hour.”

The hens are fascinating so far, and I LOVE the sounds they make. We’ve been feeding them kitchen scraps today and they’ve devoured everything we’ve given them. We’ve also sacrificed some of our worms from our worm farm to feed our hens. We want our girls to be well nourished and also to associate their new home with yummy food.

What an adventure we’ve embarked upon! Crazy-weird and exciting. We’re chicken farmers!

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

You knew there was going to be at least one more chicken coop post, right? Good.

Ian has been working hard on this thing and we’re nearly there. He had to build two double laying boxes, one for each side of the coop. Without the top on, they look like this.

We are told that hens like to share laying boxes, so you don’t need one per hen. With four boxes, we will be able to expand our flock, should we find we LIKE having chickens.

Here’s the chicken coop with everything on it but the lock on the front doors and the decorations. We are thinking about putting in windows on the front doors for ventilation and light. Adding windows means adding decorative trim and that means I’ll have more surfaces I can paint. I’m thinking that no matter what, the chickens will be a feature of our backyard from now on, so their coop might as well be cute and creative, right? How many colors is too many colors to paint a chicken coop?

The laying boxes on either side have hinged tops for easy egg gathering. The coop is behind our garage building and up against the west fence, where the neighbors have really tall privet shrubs that shade my yard. The chickens will have shade during the hottest part of every day. At the moment, Ian and Lucas are outside installing the ramp the hens will use to enter the coop.

The hens we are adopting have to be out of their current abode on Saturday, 7/17. The finishing touches on the coop might not be done until after that.

I still can’t believe we’re going to be chicken owners. Wacky.

We’re getting chickens!

Grandma’s next-door neighbors are relocating to Rhode Island and they must find a new home for their five hens. Since we’ve been talking about getting chickens for about two years, we decided that now is the time. The hens are two years old, tame,  and laying. Perfect! The coop they are presently in cannot be moved as it’s more of an outbuilding than a coop, so we have to build our own chicken house. In our area, there are plenty of raccoons, opossums, and skunks who would love to feast on our girls, so we have to provide them with a safe home.

We visited the hens on Saturday just to make sure our children wouldn’t be terrified of them. I wanted to discover any phobias before we invested the time and effort into moving the chickens to our home. Then we set out for the local feed store, a place I haven’t been in many, many years. We met the chicken expert and pecked his brain a bit, then Ian started designing and figuring and calculating and masterminding.

On Sunday, we hit our home improvement store to buy building supplies. Then we came home and started work on our coop.

Lucas hammering

Asher hammering

Measuring and marking with his new carpenter’s pencil

My husband is so clever! And handy! And handsome!

Endless fascination

Asher did his natural work of mimicking and playing with the hardware. (He also did an amazing interpretive dance wearing mardi gras beads and a sword—LOVE.) Lucas was a big help to his dad and kept on task through most of the day, keeping a good attitude. Both boys are over the moon about getting chickens and promise to do their chores.

The coop is coming along well! After the first day of construction it already has a raised floor, back, and sides. Next is putting on the roof, building some nesting boxes, and putting on the front doors. The boys were so cute while helping Daddy yesterday. We made good progress over the weekend, but there’s still a long way to go, including sinking some fence poles and building the run. We are thinking about using a few vinyl flooring tiles on the floor of the coop so it scrubs clean really easily, like a kitchen floor. The whole front of the coop with be two big doors, so it will open completely when we want to clean it.

Me? So far, I’ve been in charge of photography, holding heavy lumber, beer buying, iced-tea and popsicle distribution, editing to keep up our bottom line, and dreaming of what colors to paint the coop.   😉

I’d been saving up this hammered botanicals project ever since I saw it on a blog I read, called Dim Sum, Bagels, and Crawfish, last March. (How could I not read it, with a marvelous name like that?) Oh, here it is! I was afraid I might not be able to find it. (The Internet is AWESOME!) Anyway, the Dim Sum author, Lucia, found it in a terrific book called Nature’s Art Box, which is on my wish list.

Anyway, I thought that these smashed flower prints would be a perfect project for my boisterous, bashing boys. I learned a lot during this project, not the lease of which was it’s best to follow directions. Alas, I’m the dive-in-and-figure-it-out sort of person.

We used:

• white cotton fabric
• scissors
• pinking shears
• hammer
• scotch tape
• flower cuttings from our garden
• phone book
• watercolor paper
• watercolor paints and paintbrush
• dollar store certificate frames, 8.5 x 11 size

Lucas enthusiastically helped with the hammering, but I couldn’t get Asher to join in. When dealing with a 3-year-old, timing is everything! And the time I had set aside to do this project was All Wrong. Asher wouldn’t even come outside to see what we were up to.

We found that the roses and pansies gave brilliant colors. The mallow flowers and Spanish lavender were subtler. Creating the watercolored mats fell to me. (Are they really mats if the fabric print goes on top of them?) I didn’t want to try to cut the mats precisely; laying the fabric on top of the watercolor paper seemed just fine.

Originally we made six of these. Then I read online that a mixture of alum and water would help keep the colors fresh. Fortunately, our friends had some alum that we could borrow. Unfortunately, three unexpected results happened when I lightly sprayed the fabric prints with the solution.

1. The color from the smashed roses bled like crazy, running down the hanging fabric (which you can see in the photo below in the center)
2. The color from the dark purple pansies bled outward (I learned not to spray as much solution, and still the capillary action of the water caused the dye to spread)
3. Unbeknownst to me, the fabric on two of the prints had actually taken up a tiny amount of newsprint from the phone book pages when we were hammering the cuttings. It was invisible before I sprayed the prints. Afterward, ack! Some of the newsprint words appeared in our lovely botanical prints. (You can see a big black W and other type on the right-hand print in the photo above)

None of those three surprises made me happy. And if I were to do this project again, I’m not sure if I’ll bother with spraying them with alum. Perhaps the colors from the flowers and stems will oxidize or fade over time. I don’t know. Also, I’ll make sure to put white paper between my fabric and anything with newsprint on it.

When all was said (cussed) and done, and after two pieces of glass from our frames were broken (more cussing after the children were asleep), we ended up with three pretty prints, ready to give out to grandmothers on Mother’s Day.

The grandmothers seemed pleased. 😉