a miniature barn quilt

If you've been reading my blog for long, you know I love barn art...

I added a little personality to my barn back in 2011:



And last year I painted a barn quilt on our shed:



So, of course, there was no way I wasn't going to add a little art to the chicken coop.

That almost square little door was like a blank canvas... calling to me that it needed a tiny barn quilt.



So, I'm giving it what it needs.

I found a nice design last week... (a full sized barn quilt that's for sale... wouldn't it look nice on your barn?)




And yesterday I started by measuring the door, getting the math figured out, and making a quick half-size pattern to follow.






I love the symmetry and order in quilt blocks, and this turned out to be an especially easy pattern to draw. I basically just marked out an 8x8 grid (each section 2.5") on the door and added the few angled lines and it was done.



The only complicating factor was the 2.5" piece of extra wood on the hinge side of the door (probably there to give the door a little extra strength), but it ended up being almost exactly 2.5" wide, so it wasn't hard to incorporate into the pattern.

Since it's such a small area, I decided to try taping the sections off (usually I just paint freehand)... but that ended up being a bad idea. I did get some nice straight lines but the tape messed up some of the original red paint, so I have a little more touch up on the red than I was anticipating.



So I'm free handing the rest, and the spaces are small but not too bad.  I am having to use an artist's brush for the whole thing, it's just too small for a regular paintbrush!

It works best for me to outline the space first, then fill in the middle. You can see my lines aren't perfectly straight... but that's ok... barn art is meant to be enjoyed from a distance, and none of the little wiggly spots in the lines show up from even a foot or two away.



I got about 3/4 of the first coat done yesterday, I'll go back out today and finish up the white (2-3 coats) and touch up the red tomorrow and it will be done.



A sweet little barn quilt for a sweet little coop.

I'll post some pictures when it's done...

Happy Monday

What makes me happy?

"Hay Day"...

The day the year's hay gets delivered.

It was yesterday.






Oh yeah....a full barn is nice.

Colorado skies

Yesterday was cool and by afternoon storms had started rolling in.... I love watching them race over the hills to the north of us, it's easy to watch their progress as the rain (or snow, depending on the season) gets closer and closer until finally the first drops, or flakes, splatter on the north side windows.

I could sit outside and watch the clouds all day.

Rather than fill this post up with a lot of words, I thought I'd share a few of the pictures I took yesterday of the clouds...







Evening... sun going down...

busy days...

The chicken yard is done... the coop is moved.. and our chickens are safely moved in and doing well.

It's been a busy couple of days!



I love our little coop... I found it about a year ago in my neighbor's trash pile... It was a little rough, but my "chicken partner" neighbor (who shared our little flock of chickens and kept them on her land) and I fixed it up.

It's still a work in progress though... Yesterday I put trim around the little window, and today I'll trim out the rest of that side...



...to match the nest box side. It also got a new coat of paint (leftover barn paint), I do love the barn red with the crisp white...



The coop sits outside the chicken yard fence, but snug against it, and I cut a hole in the fence that matches the opening out of the coop, then stapled the fence to that side of the coop. Not only does that save space in the chicken yard (which isn't big anyway...) but I can clean the coop and gather eggs from outside the yard... easy peasy!

To finish up the chicken yard, R and I bent a piece of cattle panel and created an archway over the gate...




In addition to fancying up the gate, it gives a place to attach the tree netting to.




The entire chicken yard is covered with tree netting to keep the hawks out. I had a few branches that were hanging low and had to come off the big cottonwood that ended up inside the fence, so I cut the highest branch off about a foot from the trunk of the tree, added an open eye screw to it, and use that hook to hold the tree netting up... kind of circus tent style. The sides of the tree netting are attached to the fencing (and arch) with zip-ties.

The hens settled in quickly (despite Cody getting into the chicken yard the first evening and chasing them around!) and seem happy to dig and peck around in the dirt and mulch.



It was a lot of work, but I'm so happy to have our chickens right outside the back door. We bought these chickens as tiny chicks last spring, and they've lived in the shared coop at the  neighbor's ever since... It's very nice to just walk out the back door (instead of through the front pasture and over the hill) for fresh eggs!

boredom...

... is the mother of invention.

Yes, necessity is too...

...but boredom (and schizophrenia) was the fuel for a little inventive fun M and I had yesterday.

He's been sick a lot the past week or so, his gastroparesis has been flaring up and he's thrown up his evening meds several times. Consequently, he's been more obsessive and unsettled lately... getting stuck on things, unable to shift gears, and just generally unhappy (and making everyone else unhappy at the same time).

Yesterday afternoon he was so unsettled... and nothing seemed to be helping him relax... even offering playing a game.... which is almost always calming to him.

He was too unsettled to decide on a game...

So I made him a new one.

While he sat on the front porch, unhappy, unable to make a decision, and too unsettled to focus on anything...

I grabbed a chunk of 4x4 left over from the pumpkin patch fence and quickly cut it into 5 squares (each ended up about 3.75" per side).

M was already coming to look for me in just the 10 minutes it took to do the cutting, so I grabbed the drill and a big drill bit and headed out to the front yard.

I didn't tell him what I was working on at first... trying to pique his interest... and it did. He was focused, watching me drilling for a few minutes and quickly realized I was making a die.

By the time I'd started drilling the second wood cube, he was excited and saying I should make five of them... which I was... so we could play yahtzee (one of his favorite games) with them... which had been my dastardly plan all along.





I didn't take time to sand them, since I knew he wouldn't be able to maintain focus for that long, so there were a few splinters, but otherwise the game was a success.

I chalked out a huge scoresheet on the small paved part of the driveway and we got a fair amount of exercise tossing the giant dice and then gathering them all back up again for the next "roll".



I beat him 301 to 273... I rolled a yahtzee.

By the time we were done playing, he was much more settled... the novelty of the game, and the bit of outdoor exercise seemed to have interrupted the stuck place he was in and the rest of the afternoon was much easier...




I'm still picking splinters out of my fingers though, I think I'll sand our new dice down before our next "yard yahtzee" game.

Happy Monday

What makes me happy?

The chicken yard is done and ready for our chickens...




The coop will go where the 2x6 is against the fence, we hope to have it.. and the chickens, moved today.



One of our wood posts is taller than the other... something I'll trim down someday when I have the manpower. (I don't like using the sawzall, especially over my head like that...)

To give a sense of where it is in relation to the house, here's the view out my (sun glare-y, dirty) dining room window...




How nice to have this job finished... and the kids, especially R, can't wait for the chickens to get here. Fun times!

Pumpkin Patch fence: finished!

The pumpkin patch fence is finally finished... and I do love it. It was worth all the work, sweat, money and frustration that went into it. (And I hope it lasts so long it never needs replacing!)



From a distance it probably doesn't look much different than it did the last time I posted about it. Back then the only thing left was to decide what to do with the area between the header board and the pickets... In the original photo I found of the beautiful deer proof fence, that area is filled with and open lattice type arrangement made of wood. We nixed that idea right away though, since our fence is much smaller (both in area and height) and we thought that much wood would look overwhelming... and also because that much wood would have been very expensive.

And we're all about saving money. :)

After talking over several hundred (give or take) options for that space, and struggling over problems with each option, I had an idea... drill through the 4x4's and run wire horizontally through the open space. Joe wasn't sure at first if it would work,  but we talked about it and I bought some wire and it ended up being the perfect solution. I bought 14 gauge electric fence wire (only $35.) and it ended up being MORE than enough. It only took a couple of days to string the wire... and then came the part I'd been looking forward to.

Fancy-ing that wire up!



For Mother's Day my grandkids (and daughter E) made me over a hundred pony bead suncatchers... just for this fence. Aren't they beautiful?



There are hearts, and two different sizes of circles, each one unique and each one special. (Kind of like the grandkids who made them! ;)

My oldest granddaughter even made me a very cool, very large, pumpkin suncatcher, which now hangs in a place of honor next to the garden gate...



The suncatchers are not only beautiful... they serve a purpose. I hung them with the same electric fence wire we strung horizontally (to keep the deer from leaning over between the pickets and the header to nibble my garden), and they are spaced to provide vertical support for that horizontal wire... keeping the deer from spreading the wire apart... to eat my garden.

So, there it is... completely finished...



...and just in time too, since now I have the chicken fence to work on!

I built the gate for the chicken yard yesterday and hope to get it hung today... I had to buy a couple of 1x4's for it, but I mostly just used wood leftover from the pumpkin fence.

Here is it, just propped in place waiting to be hung...



The sun is out... so it's back outside to work!