Runaway October

Lit­tle chicken by hddod

Awhile back I may have men­tioned that I was think­ing of get­ting some chick­ens to keep in the back­yard. Then we got Fable, the Great Dane pup,  and I let it slide. Who really needs to worry about a giant puppy and chicks at the same time?

Now that we’ve moved, Fable’s trained and we have more room, I’ve been think­ing about it again. Espe­cially when I fry up some over-easy eggs and the yolks are light yel­low. At Best. Sadly, we got a newslet­ter from our HOA with a friendly lit­tle reminder that all live­stock — cows, horses, sheep, pigs, chick­ens, goats, etc — are against county zon­ing and the HOA CC&Rs. With a lit­tle bit of research I learned that the county does not ban any pets. They only ban live­stock in cer­tain areas, which is any ani­mal that you use for a profit, such as sell­ing meat, milk, eggs, and other prod­ucts. So now it’s all on the HOA. I’ve heard one other lit­tle lonely voice in the HOA forums say­ing they’d like chick­ens, so it’s us against them. Ha!

Danc­ing Chicken by joyrex

There are so many rea­sons to keep your own chickens:

• Insect con­trol — What do chick­ens do all day? They hunt, peck and scratch for bugs. I’ve seen a pack of hens dec­i­mate a scor­pion in sec­onds flat, as well.
• Snake con­trol — Same as with a scor­pion. While they may not eat a snake, they sure make him sorry for com­ing around.
• Fer­til­izer — Chicken manure fer­til­izer is one of the high­est in nutri­ents of all the ani­mal fertilizers.
• Eggs, of course — Accord­ing to Robin Rip­ley, “In con­trast to fac­tory farm eggs, eggs from back­yard chick­ens have 25 per­cent more vit­a­min E, a third more vit­a­min A and 75 per­cent more beta carotene [hence why home­grown egg yolks are bright orange and so tasty]. They also have sig­nif­i­cantly more omega-3 fatty acids than fac­tory farmed eggs.”
• Local Food — What bet­ter way to know where your food comes from? You know what your chick­ens are eat­ing, so you know what’s in your eggs and meat as well.
• Respon­si­bil­ity and Life Cycles — Teach­ing chil­dren where food comes from and how to care for pets is vital. Car­ing for chick­ens is eas­ier than a dog or cat.

Red Hen by jamesmorton

A few con­cerns I’ve heard are that chick­ens are noisy, attract bugs and preda­tors, and spread avian flu. Roost­ers can cer­tainly be annoy­ing, but many urban chicken keep­ers choose not to keep roost­ers. Roost­ers are not required for hens to pro­duce eggs and many peo­ple wont keep them out of respect for their neigh­bors. An unkempt chicken coop can cer­tainly attract flies, but like any pet main­te­nance is impor­tant to the well­be­ing of  your flock. Back­yard chick­ens are unlikely to con­tract avian flu in the first place. They do not “social­ize” with sick fowl and are kept in bet­ter con­di­tions so the like­li­hood of catch­ing any dis­ease is low.

Hens & Chicks at Sprout­ing Horn by ehoyer

Use­ful links for Urban Chickens:

• Urban Chick­ens
• The City Chicken
• Back­yard Chickens
• All About Chickens
• How to Keep Chick­ens in the City
• Rais­ing Chick­ens on an Urban Homestead

Hens by Amanda Rudkin

News arti­cles on Urban Chickens:

• Chick­ens Given Roost in Urban Backyards
• City Well Suited for Urban Chickens
• US City Dwellers Flock to Rais­ing Chickens
• Urban Chick­ens Rul­ing the Roost
• Eat­ing Locally: Back­yard Chickens
• Eight Ben­e­fits of Rais­ing Back­yard Chickens
• Bel­guim Offers Chick­ens to Waste-Cutting Households

King of the coop by ninjaclutz

Books on Chicken Keeping:

• Keep Chick­ens! Tend­ing Small Flocks in Cities, Sub­urbs, and Other Small Spaces, by Bar­bara Kilarski
• Liv­ing with Chick­ens: Every­thing You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Back­yard Flock, by Jay Rossier
• The Joy of Keep­ing Chick­ens: The Ulti­mate Guide to Rais­ing Poul­try for Fun or Profit, by Jen­nifer Megyesi
• Chick­ens In Your Back­yard: A Beginner’s Guide, by Rick Luttmann
• Barn­yard in Your Back­yard: A Beginner’s Guide to Rais­ing Chick­ens, Ducks, Geese, Rab­bits, Goats, Sheep, and Cows, by Gail Damerow
• City Chicks: Keep­ing Micro-flocks of Chick­ens as Gar­den Helpers, Com­post Mak­ers, Bio-reyclers, and Local Food Pro­duc­ers, by Patri­cia Foreman
• The Urban Hen: A Prac­ti­cal Guide to Keep­ing Poul­try in a Town or City, by Paul Peacock

Chicks in a Box by samdogs

So there’s some infor­ma­tion for you. I’ll keep you updated on how things go with the HOA.

Would you keep Urban Chick­ens? Why or Why not?

Not too long ago we bought two sets of the Svala table and chairs from IKEA for our “play­room”. I was kinda bummed they came unfin­ished but then got excited that I could do what­ever I wanted with them. I mean, who doesn’t dream of this per­fectly coör­di­nated play­room that looks like it came straight out of a Pot­tery Barn or Montes­sori guidebook?

Svala from Ikea

The kids had dif­fer­ent ideas, as usual. Within a few days they had scrib­bled all over the top with crayons and who-knows-what. Even the table legs had been col­ored on. I’m totally psy­ched with the cre­ativ­ity com­ing from these two lit­tle boys. Psy­ched. Too bad they didn’t con­sult me first because their art­work totally didn’t go with my Pot­tery Barn color schemes.

Daisy Dreams lam­i­nated cotton

I recently came across a tuto­r­ial for an oil­cloth table cover from Twig & This­tle, that I thought was a great idea for the boys’ work­space. I had some oil­cloth that I picked up from my favoritest fab­ric coop but it was very girly.

Then it occured to me that I had a yard of chalk­cloth in my stash. That would be per­fect! It’s fairly water resis­tant for spills and such, and I could whip out the chalks when the kids were bored. Score!

Kathleen’s tuto­r­ial included adorable lit­tle scal­lops around the edge, which I thought would be okay if done in a nice manly color, like black

chalk­cloth. But man, chalk­cloth is hard to work with. I didn’t have quite enough to cover both tables sep­a­rately so I did one cover for both tables pushed together.

I ended up just hav­ing straight edges with a lit­tle bit of dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing.  I think it turned out pretty good and the kids have throughly tested it. Heck I even ended up eat­ing on it last night because we had a HUGE crowd to feed last night.

Chalk­cloth Table Topper

Pretty Col­ors

This is seri­ous business…

(Declan was still napping)

So if you’re in need of some­thing sim­i­lar head on over to Twig & This­tle for the exact instruc­tions. Or you can check out Oil­cloth Addict for a no sew cus­tom chalk­cloth table top­per, also.

Recently I’ve come across a cou­ple arti­cles and tuto­ri­als on how to recy­cle yarn. At first I thought some­one was tak­ing it too far. I mean, wouldn’t that be a HUGE amount of work for a lit­tle bit of yarn? No. Think about how many skeins of yarn it takes to make a nor­mal sweater — 4, 8, 12? Depends on the sweater and the yarn but that’s a lot of money if you buy some­thing that isn’t ugly clearance-pile acrylic. Just a decent small wool skein is $5!

So I experimented.

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I bought two small hooded Good­will sweaters, cute as but­tons, but only big enough to fit one of my boobs in. Okay, more than that but just know­ing that some­one that petite existed made me want to destroy the sweaters. Kid­ding! They were 100% cot­ton and appeared to be Super Bulky. I did the seam check… Awe­some! The pan­els were shaped, not knit­ted in large blocks, cut and then serged together. That would mean that the yarn would be in lots of lit­tle pieces instead of one con­tin­u­ous strand. Had the sweaters been made out of an acrylic I wouldn’t have both­ered because acrylic is so much cheaper in the stores that it’s not worth the work.

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Basi­cally, all I had to do was sep­a­rate the sweater pieces — hood, sleeves, back, placket, etc and then unravel them. I used no fancy tools besides a seam rip­per, and just wound the yarn around my arm, like you would do with an exten­sion cord. It didn’t take me very long as once I had the sec­tions sep­a­rated I could wind the yarn while watch­ing TV with­out pay­ing atten­tion. It was def­i­nitely a good work­out for my “mama arms”! Because the sweaters were made of cot­ton yarn I washed them first as there was no risk of felt­ing, but now that it’s unrav­eled it’s kinky as shown by the pic­tures. So I’ll soak it in hot water and then hang it out to dry with a lit­tle bit of weight on it. The top pic­ture is on a full sized cof­fee table for an idea of how much yarn one sweater gave me. Oh, and both had about 8 really cute but­tons on them that I can reuse too.

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A few tidbits:

• Uncer­tain if it is wool or not? Soak it overnight in straight bleach. If it dis­solves then it is wool. If noth­ing changes then it is prob­a­bly acrylic.
• Angora is oh so soft and pretty in a com­pleted sweater but does not unravel well. Either does any­thing furry, eye­lashy or bumpy.
• Try not to cut any of the yarn while pulling out the seams. You’ll have to splice it back together.
• Make sue to label your fin­ished yarn so you remem­ber the fiber con­tent of your fin­ished prod­uct. Here are some PDF labels from MysticSpiral.com
• Don’t like the color but the yarn is won­der­ful? Dye it!
• Rethink lace-weight sweaters. If you’re doing every­thing by hand, you’ll never fin­ish unrav­el­ing. I know I didn’t.
• Watch out for but­ton holes. If they are on a sep­a­rate placket then just dis­card the placket. If the but­ton holes are cut and sewn into the body of the sweater that yarn will be cut and not con­tin­u­ous. Either splice the yarn back together, dis­card the button-holed sec­tion or look for a dif­fer­ent sweater. 

Here are a cou­ple tuto­ri­als if you are interested:

• www.neauveau.com/recycledyarn.html
• http://laughingpurplegoldfish.blogspot.com/2008/10/recycling-yarn-from-jumper.html
• http://dawnprickett.blogspot.com/2008/01/recycling-sweaters-for-yarn.html
• http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/thrifty.html
• http://www.craftleftovers.com/blog/archives/401

Oh and if you have any wool or cot­ton sweaters lay­ing around that you don’t want and they aren’t serged I’d love to have them!

The theme for the Back Tack 4 Swap that is. I know my part­ner has received her good­ies, so here’s an almost full reveal of what I sent.

Gold {some­thing that sparkles}:

A sim­ple neck­lace made with hemp and fair trade glass beads. I bought enough to make one for myself too. I also included an altered jour­nal which had a lit­tle bit of shim­mer to it.

Frank­in­cense {some­thing that smells or tastes good}:

These are home­made soaps and an assort­ment of itty bitty choco­late bars. The soap was fun, easy and such a blast to make, even Declan helped. We will be mak­ing more soon.

Myrrh {a lit­tle some­thing for you}:

Another beau­ti­ful Emme­line apron, com­plete wth pock­ets (with extra good­ies inside) and dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing. This is the 5^th one I’ve made, still not one for myself yet. I need to learn a bet­ter way to pho­to­graph an apron. Not pic­tured are 4 lit­tle Otedamas that are just adorably addic­tive, both to make and play with.

That’s all for now. We’re off to the Tamale Fes­ti­val today, and maybe a lit­tle craft fair that I heard some buzz about. I’ll let you know.

 Manic Mon­day for July 21

What’s your favorite beach in the world?

I’ve actu­ally only been to a few beaches… The beach in San Diego was crowded, dirty and pretty much ghetto — not my first choice. The only other beach I’ve been to are the ones in Rocky Point, Mex­ico. So I’ll have to answer this ques­tion after I’ve trav­eled the world a lit­tle bit more.

What’s the next coun­try you want to visit?

Ire­land, hands down, though Ger­many, Bel­gium and Asu­trailia are all pretty evenly tied for second.

What one thing are you crav­ing today?

Does peace and quiet count? Or a maid? I am crav­ing a meal that some­one else cooks for me and cleans up after­wards. Or a prime rib from Out­back, I always crave those. Or Honey Hot chicken wings from The Vine. I should prob­a­bly go cook din­ner now.