What’s Going on at the Farm

 Yesterday, I found myself in my sewing room for the first time in months.  I’ve had this vintage 1940s apron pattern turned PDF from Etsy printed and cut out months ago, and this vintage-y fabric washed and ready to use, sitting on my chest freezer/cutting table.  Since I finished the Tsu pattern writing and grading, I sent it off to my tech editor, and as a reward, I let myself do some sewing.  Knut was at our church’s softball game.  Silje is still at camp, and the 4 younger ones all happened to fall asleep when they were supposed to.  It was like everything aligned for me to go in there.

When Knut got home from the game, I was working on the last 2 seams, and he said “Is that the sewing machine?  I almost forgot what that sounded like!”  It took me awhile to declutter my workspace and find the machine.  I have more, coordinating fabric to make the girls matching ones.  I need to finish cutting out their sizes.  (Since the pattern is on a PDF, I’m simply scaling down the printing so that the pieces will be child-sized.)

I modified this old pattern quite a bit as I was working on it.  I didn’t add the tulip pocket because I thought it looked cheesy, and I knew I wouldn’t use a pocket, and I thought that flour would collect in it.  But in the end I think it looks too plain and wished I would have added something.  I may still.  The front curved much higher, so I just took my circular cutter, and shaved off some of the edge.  I have really narrow shoulders, so before I put on all the piping, I tried it on, and decided to narrow the shoulders quite a bit.  So that got sliced too.  In hindsight, I wish I would have sliced off some of the bottom as well, as I feel like it’s long on my 5’2″ frame.  I did use size XS, but it still wasn’t small enough.  I did like the basic pattern, though, because it doesn’t hang around my neck, and I hate aprons that hang around my neck.  I will definitely be making this one again, although I’ll be taking some length off next time.

I didn’t get to the girls’ aprons, but getting this one done from cutting to finished made me really, really happy.

Yesterday I took the kids to town to drop Elias of at preschool VBS.  Unfortunately, we missed the big show of a bin being moved.  Knut was bummed about that.  A huge crane came to our backyard to move one of the larger bins to the side, to make room for a new bin coming.  The purpose, I’m told, of the extra storage is to allow for the dryer to work more continuously during harvest time.  Grain gets quite hot when going through the dryer, and needs to cool before storage so that it doesn’t mold.

I’m probably oversimplifying, or completely wrong.  I’m not the expert on this, but I do know a bin was being moved, an the kids probably would have liked to see it.  So Knut took a bunch of pictures for them with my camera.

 Knut found a dead meat chicken in the pen yesterday.  It had been beaten to death by his fellow birds.  Our mailman came by the other day when I was in the garden and chatted with me.  He commended us for getting the Red Rangers over the cornish-cross broilers as they are a much healthier bird.  I said, yes, we wanted a breed with stronger legs for forging better.  He said one thing to look out for with the Red Rangers is that they do get very strong, and therefore they can hurt each other very easily.  He said of friend of his had Red Rangers, and he had a tough time keeping them all alive to butchering time because they kept killing each other.

So we were going to keep our eyes out for any violence, and low and behold, yesterday we found or first victim.  It seems early for them to be getting like this.  Butchering isn’t for at least another month.  We were planning on 1 1/2 months more at least.  So Knut has put me on research duty to see what we can do about it.  I plan on calling the hatchery this afternoon and see what they say.

And that’s what’s going on at the farm this week.