wings for a bear
Apr. 8th, 2019 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I was commissioned by Farmkid to make wings to go on one of her stuffed bears. I did this, and found the correct fabric, and shaped them, and hand-sewed them with some fabric in the middle for interfacing, and got them finished today, and the very first thing she did was get a pair of scissors and try to cut them into a different shape, which would have structurally destroyed them. *hands* well, I had been about to spend a bunch more time refining the structure, and then said, "No, I am not going to exquisitely-finish these, she is five", so if she gets out the scissors again (she was not persuaded that it would destroy them) then it's only an hour or so wasted, and fabric I found, so.
I am averaging under 500 words a day on any writing projects, not for want of ideas but because of lack of time. This is normal, for the farm, but. A brutal reminder of how writing and the farm are pretty much incompatible.
This afternoon immediately after lunch, Farmkid was smitten with the idea of going and helping one of the part-timers who comes and works for food; she was seeding things in the greenhouse with Veg Manager and the new apprentice, and clearly, Farmkid had done seeding in the greenhouse before with her mother. (There are some zinnias and snapdragons sprouting in her bedroom on the windowsill, and some spinach and arugula in a tiny pot in the hallway window that just germinated.)
So I went out and we spent about two hours bothering the crap out of the greenhouse workers (who are used to this and don't mind), and planted a lot of things to bring back inside. Sigh. She uprooted some weeds from the greenhouse floor, and those are now in a pot. The worker was potting-up some germinated sweet pepper seedlings, and there was a Mystery Plant mixed in that clearly wasn't a pepper, so we took that and put it into a pot, and then went and compared it to every other seedling in the greenhouse to find out what it could possibly be. (Later, Veg Manager ID'd it as an artichoke; he'd reused the potting soil that had had ungerminated artichoke seeds in it, sort of unwarily.) (Farmkid insists it is NOT an artichoke because she doesn't want it to be.) (I had guessed it might be one, so I was rather pleased with myself. My phone is full of pics of random seedlings that Farmkid insisted I take for comparison.)
I've washed a million eggs today, and I accidentally dropped a tray about two inches, which cracked literally two dozen eggs at one go. Instead of bringing them inside to cook with, to join the six dozen cracked eggs already in the fridge for that purpose, I went up the hill to the barn with them and dumped them into the pigs' feed troughs. Merlot was the most alert of the sows and was delighted to devour them. (Eggs aren't efficient pig feed; to extract all the potential nutrients from the eggs they should first be hard-boiled, and last year at this time when the hens were over-producing in this bit before we cull last year's flock, we hard-boiled a huge pot of eggs every day and fed it to the pigs. But this year we're managing somehow not to be so overwhelmed-- but it was too many cracked eggs at once, and those don't keep.)
I've already made dinner-- boeuf borgingion in the instant pot-- and it's already done and just keeping warm. I hope it turns out well, I didn't have a recipe but I've made it a few times so.
I wish I could focus and write for a bit, but it's a dirty bit of the story, and I'm nominally watching Farmkid, who is playing with a younger kid whose mom is washing the rest of the million eggs in trade for food-- much of the labor on this farm is customers working part-time to offset the cost of food in trade, and it's lovely but hard to coordinate.
I did retune a guitar to have four strings tuned just like a banjo, so I can practice my movable chord shapes and plucking pattern, but my hands are so soft from washing eggs and then dishes that I don't think it's a good idea to play at the moment.
OH yesterday we made Chita a birthday cake, and the whole point was that we were going to video chat with Dude and the cat so we could sing to her, and I texted him about it all day, but when it came time for dinner, he was unresponsive. I tried calling, I texted four or five times over the course of more than an hour, and then finally it was past bedtime so we had to give up. I recorded the singing and blowing out of candles and put it on Instagram live.
Dude was not super contrite; he'd left his phone in the kitchen and then sat on the back porch all evening, and apparently all the times I'd said we were going to video chat with him hadn't... registered in his mind that he'd have to participate, for that to happen? IDK, I'm sort of resigned, but it was sad.
Anyway, here's the cake we made her:
100% Farmsister's art direction and execution there. (What we did: a cake based on a recipe beginning with creamed butter, since that was likely to be less crumbly baked in two 8" square cake pans, well-greased, turned out and left to cool overnight, then cut into shape with a sharp knife after we practiced on paper to get the shapes; a buttercream icing thinned with milk as a crumb coat and then another layer to cover. Not a lot of attention paid to the sides, which were the crumbiest of all-- the points of the paws were not structurally-sound so we just handled them as little as possible.)
I am averaging under 500 words a day on any writing projects, not for want of ideas but because of lack of time. This is normal, for the farm, but. A brutal reminder of how writing and the farm are pretty much incompatible.
This afternoon immediately after lunch, Farmkid was smitten with the idea of going and helping one of the part-timers who comes and works for food; she was seeding things in the greenhouse with Veg Manager and the new apprentice, and clearly, Farmkid had done seeding in the greenhouse before with her mother. (There are some zinnias and snapdragons sprouting in her bedroom on the windowsill, and some spinach and arugula in a tiny pot in the hallway window that just germinated.)
So I went out and we spent about two hours bothering the crap out of the greenhouse workers (who are used to this and don't mind), and planted a lot of things to bring back inside. Sigh. She uprooted some weeds from the greenhouse floor, and those are now in a pot. The worker was potting-up some germinated sweet pepper seedlings, and there was a Mystery Plant mixed in that clearly wasn't a pepper, so we took that and put it into a pot, and then went and compared it to every other seedling in the greenhouse to find out what it could possibly be. (Later, Veg Manager ID'd it as an artichoke; he'd reused the potting soil that had had ungerminated artichoke seeds in it, sort of unwarily.) (Farmkid insists it is NOT an artichoke because she doesn't want it to be.) (I had guessed it might be one, so I was rather pleased with myself. My phone is full of pics of random seedlings that Farmkid insisted I take for comparison.)
I've washed a million eggs today, and I accidentally dropped a tray about two inches, which cracked literally two dozen eggs at one go. Instead of bringing them inside to cook with, to join the six dozen cracked eggs already in the fridge for that purpose, I went up the hill to the barn with them and dumped them into the pigs' feed troughs. Merlot was the most alert of the sows and was delighted to devour them. (Eggs aren't efficient pig feed; to extract all the potential nutrients from the eggs they should first be hard-boiled, and last year at this time when the hens were over-producing in this bit before we cull last year's flock, we hard-boiled a huge pot of eggs every day and fed it to the pigs. But this year we're managing somehow not to be so overwhelmed-- but it was too many cracked eggs at once, and those don't keep.)
I've already made dinner-- boeuf borgingion in the instant pot-- and it's already done and just keeping warm. I hope it turns out well, I didn't have a recipe but I've made it a few times so.
I wish I could focus and write for a bit, but it's a dirty bit of the story, and I'm nominally watching Farmkid, who is playing with a younger kid whose mom is washing the rest of the million eggs in trade for food-- much of the labor on this farm is customers working part-time to offset the cost of food in trade, and it's lovely but hard to coordinate.
I did retune a guitar to have four strings tuned just like a banjo, so I can practice my movable chord shapes and plucking pattern, but my hands are so soft from washing eggs and then dishes that I don't think it's a good idea to play at the moment.
OH yesterday we made Chita a birthday cake, and the whole point was that we were going to video chat with Dude and the cat so we could sing to her, and I texted him about it all day, but when it came time for dinner, he was unresponsive. I tried calling, I texted four or five times over the course of more than an hour, and then finally it was past bedtime so we had to give up. I recorded the singing and blowing out of candles and put it on Instagram live.
Dude was not super contrite; he'd left his phone in the kitchen and then sat on the back porch all evening, and apparently all the times I'd said we were going to video chat with him hadn't... registered in his mind that he'd have to participate, for that to happen? IDK, I'm sort of resigned, but it was sad.
Anyway, here's the cake we made her:
100% Farmsister's art direction and execution there. (What we did: a cake based on a recipe beginning with creamed butter, since that was likely to be less crumbly baked in two 8" square cake pans, well-greased, turned out and left to cool overnight, then cut into shape with a sharp knife after we practiced on paper to get the shapes; a buttercream icing thinned with milk as a crumb coat and then another layer to cover. Not a lot of attention paid to the sides, which were the crumbiest of all-- the points of the paws were not structurally-sound so we just handled them as little as possible.)
