Who Doesn't love Fat Chubby Cheeks?

There are more babies in the coop. Millie has hatched out at least three of the eggs she's been sitting on. Unfortunately Pearl tried to kidnap them and call them her own. We had two hens, the babies and the eggs all crammed into a tiny little bantam nest box. Of course trying to remove Pearl caused wide-spread panic and chaos. You have to be careful when when chaos ensues and bantam babies are involved. They're so tiny you could easily step on them. One even managed to leave the coop and enter the run. I on the other hand managed to get in a serious workout trying to catch the little bugger then trying to catch Pearl. I imagine it looked a lot like a Family Circus cartoon. The baby is now back safe in the nest and Pearl is in the slammer until she promises not to kidnap them again. She might be in there for awhile.

The babies are part of my ongoing experiment to get cheeky chicks like Jack's boy here. I really need to come up with a name for him and his sister. Nothing has come to me yet.

The fluffy cheeks are called muffs. Makes me think of the muff I had when I was a kid. It was a tube made of soft white fur and had a large string attached to it. You wore it around your neck and kept your hands inside of it to keep them worm. Man, I loved that thing. It was so soft.

Oh yeah, anyway, I'm attempting to narrow down my bantams to chickens with muffs. There are so many breeds out there one really must try to focus. So I've decided I'm only keeping the ones with fat, chubby cheeks.

That's bad news for old Lazarus or Liza or Tootsie or whatever his name is. Or maybe it's good news? Maybe some kind person will come and take him away to a coop of his own filled with beautiful bantam hens? That's what has happened to little Skippy here. Someone is picking him up tomorrow morning.

"Thank you, Lord. Thank you. I promise to be the best rooster ever. Thank you. You won't regret this. Oh, thank you."

Anybody Know a Good Therapist?

I think Dorothy needs to see somebody. She has stopped her bawling and wailing since Sophia has arrived, but now she seems depressed. It's almost as if Sophia told her "Hey kid, this is it. Get used to it. There ain't no going back home."


I think she misses her momma and her friends. She sighs a lot and does this dramatic flopping her head down thing. She's acting like a dejected teenager forced to move to a new city right before the prom. Who knows, maybe she left behind a boy she'd been making eyes at? Poor girl.

I Must Confess

It's easy to sit out here in blog land and pretend we're perfect. Perfect children, perfect house, perfect pets, perfect garden but I have a confession to make. I weeded my garden once in early spring and I haven't looked back since. (I'll pause here why you gasp.) There are weeds taller than me. Okay maybe that's not saying much since I'm barely over five foot tall but they are WAY taller than I am. So that is something.

I'm so thankful Mother Nature has my back on this one. Even though I have completely neglected my gardening duties, she's still putting on a heck of a show. She does it so much better than I do I think I'm going to relinquish control over to her more and more. The Coreopsis here for instance. It's lovely, but I hate deadheading it. It's out of here next year.

The heirloom phlox on the other hand can stay. If it didn't get mildew in this wet and dreary year than maybe it's a keeper.

The white variety, too.

The ditch lilies didn't put on a great show this year. I think they must like it dry. Oh, and maybe the 100 pound dog ripping them up by the roots didn't help either.

The Rose of Sharon just started. They're beautiful, but I sure wish they were somewhere else in the yard. They've been there for over 100 years though so I guess they're staying. Can you imagine the size of the root ball on these puppies?

Sweet peas run amok along my entrance garden. There is a fence there for them to climb but they don't. I give up trying to make them. Have at it sweet peas, do as you please.

One of my personal favorites, the hydrangeas. Always, always love them.

So what's blooming in your neck of the woods?

I Have a New BFF

Just don't tell the cat. She won't be happy to hear that news at all.

Sophia must be the sweetest ewe that ever lived. She's like a grass-eating dog in high heels. I had done a lot of research before deciding what breed of sheep I wanted. One of the reasons I decided on the Shetlands was because they were supposed to be good-natured but I had no idea they would actually demand attention as much as they do.


Sophia has some of last years wool left over and stuck to the tips of her fleece. The Shetland breed actually sheds their wool every year naturally so if you sheer them ahead of that natural break in the wool, you end up with these little scraps called skodda. You can see them in the photo below. I need to remove them so they won't mat. Should be great practice for me before I have to really shear them next spring.


Anyway, when I sit in one of those plastic lawn chairs in the pasture Sophia will come over and rest her head in my lap. How sweet is that? She'll stand there forever letting me pet her and pull those little scraps of wool off by hand! She's going to be a great candidate for rooing next spring. For the non-sheepy people reading, that's the process of shearing them by literally hand-plucking the wool after they start to shed it.

It's a slow process. It might take me all summer, but I'm definitely going to try it. She and I both seem to enjoy it.

Criminal Minds

Remember the little chicken door we added to the run to keep the sheep from crashing their party? It measured 12"x8".

It's now been modified to look like this. Measuring 6"x8".

Why you ask? Ooooh let me tell ya.

Because I was wrong about the sheep. They're not the riff-raff hanging outside a hip and trendy night club. They're not the paparazzi trying to get a glimpse of the rich and famous. Nope. They're nothing but a band of common criminals staking out the joint! Yes indeed, they actually managed to squeeze those woolly bodies of theirs in through that 12"x8" space and were trashing the place. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it myself.

You just can NOT leave young folks unsupervised now days. Rose and Blanche are just babies, but Dorothy is a yearling and really should have known better by now. She should have been setting a good example. Instead she's leading them to a life of crime. She's also not stopped whining and crying since she got here. We assume she is suffering from severe separation anxiety. Regardless, it was obvious we needed to bring in a baby sitter.

Meet Sophia.

She is four years old. Calm, cool and collected and instantly brought order to chaos yesterday afternoon when we brought her home. I love her already. But I won't trust her any farther than I could spit her either. You never know, she might be the ring leader of the crime syndicate.

And the Winner Is...

I really wanted a photo of one of the chickens picking the winner from my egg basket. Instead she looked at me like I'd gone mad. The kid's reaction was remarkably the same. Go figure.

Anyhoo, the winner of the fabulous Heritage Sampler pattern from Lori Smith is ...



Julie-Ann! Congratulations! She was the first to enter the drawing. I guess the early bird got the worm. :) Thanks everyone for playing along.

Remembering Adelia & a Give-Away

I took a short break from my woolly friends one afternoon this week and ventured out to a quilt shop I had been meaning to visit for awhile, The Back Door. I can now safely say it's one of my favorites.

They have a beautiful selection of fabric, but what impressed me the most was their kits. They had GADS of kits to choose from. Far more than what they had listed on their website. And everything was decorated and presented so well it was truly inspiring. I had a very hard time choosing only one kit. But in the end I walked out of there with the book Remembering Adelia and a kit to make the orange peel wall hanging on the cover. It should make a nice take-along applique project.


After returning home I was shuffling things around in Sheville and noticed I must really, really like this Heritage Sampler pattern by Lori Smith. Yep, I seem to have bought it twice. That means for one of you lucky ladies out there if you leave a comment you'll be entered into a drawing to win this little jem for yourself. Heaven knows I'll be lucky to do this one once let alone twice!


Quilt finishes 49 1/2" x 63"