Wednesday, July 22, 2015

First Eggs & Some Quilt Blocks

It was exciting day here at the farm!

The past few days we've heard one of the chickens, aka 'the girls', make the egg laying squawk (which is quite different than their normal squawking and 'talking'.  It's more like an announcement that she's getting ready to lay an egg).  I would check the nest boxes but never found any eggs.  I also thought they were still a bit too young to start laying so I didn't think much about it.

This morning one of the girls was making the egg laying squawk again.  Again, I thought they were too young and just practicing.

Meanwhile, I was getting ready to hang the laundry on the line and walked over to where we keep the firewood and the riding mower to get my clothespins off the drying rack that was leaning against the shed and, lo and behold, there were two eggs laying on the ground in a makeshift nest.  Wait, what?  I couldn't believe it!

So, when she started squawking again I decided to put her in the nest box in hopes that she would relate the feeling of needing to lay an egg with getting in the nest box rather than laying them outside.

She wanted no part of it.  Although, she did check it out and hunker down for a bit but then she wanted out.  I let her go but then she started the egg laying squawk again and was meandering around the yard.

So, I put her in the nest box again and closed the coop door.  She jumped down and wanted out of the coop.  I left her in there for a few minutes but let her back out when she did not get back in the nest box.  I didn't want her feeling imprisoned just because she needed to lay an egg.

She immediately went over to the makeshift nest and hunkered down.

A few minutes later she left her nest leaving me a delicious egg!


How exciting!

And I just bought eggs while we were in town yesterday, haha!  Oh well, I will boil those up and save these for breakfast.


We are going to try and leave them in the chicken run for a few days in hopes that they will get the gist of laying their eggs in the nest boxes.  Then we will let them back out to free range again.

This is our first experience with being able to let the chickens free range and we were wondering where they would end up laying their eggs.  Now we know (wink!). 

As many of you on Facebook know, I've been working on my sewing room.  It's a work in progress but, at least I'm able to sew in there in the meantime.

Here's what I've been working on...


This is one block for the guest room quilt.

Here are a few more blocks laid out on our bed in no particular order.  I did alternate the light and dark blocks in all rows except the top row so you can get an idea of how it will look in the end. 



I have four more dark blocks to make then it will be time to decide what to do with the border.  I'm not sure I want to do the border in the pattern.  I think it might be too busy and am leaning towards a simpler, more neutral border so as not to compete with the blocks.  I'll lay out some test strips then decide.

It's been fun being able to sew again after five months of working hard on the house and farm and having a cute room to do it in (wink!).

GoneCountry


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