Lost Treasures Found!
Well, so much has been happening around here. Going through some family issues, nothing major just needed to take care of it. Then all of a sudden it was the end of March, then Easter, and now in the middle of May.
Sadly, I have not been able to do any sewing, quilting, or organizing of house the last month or so. We keep thinking we are going to get the garden boxes ready for this season, but then we have a snow storm, then hard freeze several mornings, then another odd bought of snow, days later we had another few days of hard freeze.
All in all, I was sure our shade trees which had just started sprouting the spring leaves had died, but this week has seen lots of new green leaf sprouts. We lost all the early flowers, fruit from cherry and peach trees. Apples may have partially survived. They are still small trees so will not be able to make much fruit even under the best of conditions. The first year I had them, there was one little apple that fell off when we moved them. They are in large planters, trellis style. That first year we placed the two apple trees on the deck of the chicken coop. Hubby assured me that they would be fine up there. Three days later, the deer totally destroyed them. Ate every leaf and some stems. I made hubby move them to the deck on the house which the deer cannot go on and the trees started coming back. Last year, the second year to have them, I had a total of 6 small apples. Each apple tree/trellis, is specially grafted to grow five 5 varieties of apples on each tree. If they make it, I have counted approximately a dozen small apples.
At any rate, soon it will be time to plant some vegetables. At first, I didn't really want to put in the time and work to make a veggie garden this year. However, the way things are going in our area, with the increasing lack of product in the stores and cost of what is there going up almost daily, I may have to rethink that. I will, after running it around in my head a bit, be planting only what we eat the most of. I refuse to plant lettuce or spinach, in any shape or form. There does come a point, where the time and trouble is just not worth the work. I would like to try tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and peppers again. The tomatoes did pretty well last year and the peppers did some what okay. This year, I will take care of the insect problem because last year they feasted on our work and hubby didn't agree with me that we had a bug problem. It is actually still too cold at night to really do any planting at the moment so will have to kick that around in my head for a while.
My chickens are doing great, lots of fresh eggs. I have 10 hens and they lay well, about 8 a day. So I always have eggs. I give a lot away to friends, but I always have some on hand.
For my birthday, my daughter in law gave me a pair of Pekin ducks. She lays an egg regularly.
I recently raised up two little turken chicks. They are so ugly they are cute. At first I had them in the house with a heat lamp, then we moved them to a small pen in the coop, still with the heat lamp. Now they are in the main flock. Here's the thing...turkens are a weird bird. The official name of the breed is Transylvania Featherless Neck Chicken. They are reported to originate from Transylvania, Romania, Germany, well basically Europe. They tolerate cold weather but need to be protected from extreme cold because they do have less feathers over all. Their neck can get sunburned. They are good for meat, for eggs and the term "turken" comes from their appearance...which looks like some one crossed a turkey and a chicken. There is no turkey in their bird DNA what so ever. In fact they very much remind me of the little bird dinosaurs featured on Jurassic Park 2 and 3.
I have a yellow one and a black one. Before their combs came in, the black one looked like Moe from the three stooges. So, named it Moe and the yellow one my grand daughter name Milly. Supposedly they are both hens, but since I don't know how to sex them, not really sure I want to sex one, I'm okay with just waiting to see what it turns out being. Well, that is the little farm's news.
Now, for the really exciting news. I have recovered some lost treasures. I had a few quilts that went missing about 15 years ago. I was convinced that I had some how either mistakenly thrown them away or gave them away. My youngest daughter that is living in our former home (our house for 20 years until we moved 2 years ago) found a chest in the storage shed in the back yard. My lost quilts were in it.
Two are what I consider family heirlooms. I don't have a lot of those. My mom didn't have anything from her family, with the exception of a ceramic platter, colander and cheese grater and a crocheted bedspread her mom made. Her mother passed away when mom was not quite 2 years old. The rest of the things I have that passed down to me were her things, acquired by her, mostly early in her marriage. From my dad's side of the family, practically nothing...I was adopted so was not considered family. However, there were a few things that dad made sure I got. Two of those were quilts. One of the quilts, the fabric had been recovered several times through the years and after it ended up with my dad, the fabric was ripped and he wanted me to recover it. It never got done while my dad was living. However, in talking to my mom about it, I told her that I wanted to take all the layers off so I could see what the original quilt looked like. What a wonderful surprise. The original quilt, which was in outstanding shape considering its age, turned out to have a few blocks made from a civil war uniform trousers. Most of the other fabric was from old work shirts. From what little I have gathered about the quilt, and this info is not from the family but from a quilt expert, the original quilt was made in the late 1800's to early 1900's. My granny was born in 1888 and I am fairly sure that her mother made it. It is now going to be displayed proudly in my home.
The other quilt was probably made during the 1930's...based on the fabric. It has vibrant orange and soft blue fabrics, it is a star type block which I do not know the name of ... yet. The most lovely hand quilting and stitches I have ever seen. However, my aunt for some reason decided she needed to add a TON of machine stitched rows to it. I am told that this actually reduces the money value, but I don't care about that, for me it is special because I remember sleeping under that quilt with my granny. I am going to clean it gently and put it on my spare bed.
Another quilt that was in the chest was one of my first quilts. It was made for a challenge in the local quilt guild to create a quilt that incorporated a piece of plaid fabric. I had only been quilting a year or so. So...I sat on the floor of my bedroom and drew out all the blocks on notebook paper, taping pieces together so I had the size I wanted. At the time, I was helping with our church vacation bible school, the theme was frontier times. I determined I wanted a quilt to look like the shelf in an old time general store. I barely knew how to put blocks together, sure didn't know that certain fabrics were not mixed and that some techniques were not to be used on a traditional quilt. At least according to the quilt police group of ladies that had run the guild...forever. My friend and I were looking at all the quilts, we went to look at mine. There were some ladies standing there looking it over, I think it was three of them, and quite loudly one of them told the other two that if that was the best she could do she wouldn't show it to anyone. Yes, my feelings...which I admit I tend to wear fully on my sleeve...were hurt. I had rather obvious pieces of plaid fabric in my quilt while they put small little pieces on the label which they put on the back of the quilt. The whole back of my quilt is plaid that I had originally planned to make a dress out of. I will add that these ladies entries were the most popular magazine pattern at the time, or from a quilt class, used the same exact fabric as the sample photo or exactly what the pattern called for.
Understand, this is the same quilt guild and officers that had not only mine but a total of about 50 isolette covers for the the NICU sitting at a members house (where mice and dogs ran over them leaving deposits) for a year, while they were preaching to the members how badly we needed isolette covers because the guild was out or running low and not all babies at all the hospitals were being able to receive them. Of course, the requirements for a baby to have an isolette cover was that the baby needed to be in the NICU, but hey, the members in charge were handing them out to EVERY baby born. My good friend and I would challenge each other to make isolette covers each month, usually making about 5-6 each to turn in for donation. Then she moved away and it just wasn't the same so I quit going. The quilt guild didn't need me, I didn't need them. That was fall of 2005. Also, with the passing of my dad in 2003, I kind of lost my quilting mojo. The quilt group at our church started falling apart about this time too so I stopped participating in that as well.
In 2007, I became really stupid and took a job outside the home. I was gone from the house from 7:15 to 5:30 five days a week. I had Sat. and Sun. off. By the time I got home, cooked supper, I really didn't want to sew or craft. Apparently, my family could not do anything for them self during this time either. I did however figure out I would use my paycheck to purchase all the supplies, gadgets and gizmos I would need when I retired to start back scrapbooking and quilting. You see, the supplies kind of tend to overlap crafts.
I would machine embroidery blocks for a quilt. Then I would start doing embellished quilt blocks with the embroidery blocks. The embellishments led to buying embroidery floss, which led to counted cross stitching. Some of the embellishments led to buying seed and glass beads which led to jewelry making. Also some of the embellishments for the quilt blocks came from the supplies for scrapbooking and card making. I bought die cutters, embossing plates, punches and shaped scissors. All kinds of rubber stamps, inks, powders and potions. Took classes, went to crops. Loved making cards, hope to get back in to that soon. Turns out the alcohol inks are the same as used for my daughter's resin epoxy crafts...so I gave all of them to her. I found out, after buying all of that stuff...a small fortune...I hate scrapbooking. The photos that I would go through for the pages overwhelmed me. I also did not care for jewelry making. I do love the bead and embroidery embellishment for quilt squares. The embroidery floss has come in quite handy for smocking which I have picked back up a bit lately and now with two small grand daughters and two on the way will be doing more of it I am sure.
We moved my mom from Texas to here the later part of 2009 and in 2010 I developed some health issues and had to quit working. This is when I picked up my crafting again, quilting and machine embroidery. In 2011 my grand son was born premature, and I became the primary daycare for him. Which I loved and was a planned thing before he was actually even thought of. But it was hard to find the time to work on projects. Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. I packed up my sewing room and turned it back in to a bedroom so Hospice could care for my mom in our home so she would be around family. She passed away. I had just started getting my stuff unpacked back in to the sewing room again. At about the same time in 2013 my grand daughter was added so I was day care for two, and my youngest son graduated college and needed to move back in for a few months to get a job and money together for an apartment. Well, a few months turned in to 4 years. By that time, the grands were in school so I was ready to start making things again. I set up the bedroom in to a sewing room, bought a new sewing machine (a Pfaff Creative 2.0 and one of the biggest mistakes I ever made), bought a Brother 770 embroidery machine and I bought a mid arm quilter (Baby Lock Coronet). But, I really never got started good. While I had a room again, it was crowded. But I was making it work. Spending long hours sewing garments and making quilts. It was also about this time, 2015 actually, that we started doing Cowboy Action Shooting through SASS.
Then, youngest daughter graduated high school, struggled a bit to figure out her path, and then finally figured out what she wanted to do. Went to trade school, got a job, and was soon planning a wedding for April 2018. Yep...covid shut downs, restrictions that made no sense and the fear mongering hit. Practically shutting down our state, California, almost to a dead stop. Then, in 2020 we moved to a wonderful rural mountain community about an hour away from our home of 20 years and hubby retired. The house we bought up here has a mother in law suite, large enough to be an apartment, downstairs. Has it's own bathroom even. That is now the "Sewcial Den" or my sewing/quilting/crafting room. If you are interested in that story, you can look at some of the past post.
I guess that is pretty much it for now. Will try to keep up better in the future. Thanks for stopping by.
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