Portrait of a Chicken
Lizzy Chicken, begging at the window last night.
That’s it. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
3 comments June 11th, 2007
Posts filed under 'Chix'
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
We’re down to mere hours until Kimber and I will be on Salt Spring Island for the Fibre Fest. A whole weekend of fibery goodness. The weather looks like it will be perfect, the house we’re renting looks like it, too, will be perfect, and other than forgetting the camera battery and charger (Critterboy is bringing them in with him, so I can pick them up downtown before I leave), I’m pretty sure I’m packed and ready to go. Woo!
The only lameness here is that Critterboy may well be on his way to San Francisco before I get back, which is gonna be suckful as all hell.
Oooh! And we have three new baby chickies! These are a cross between Noodle and Rocky the Polish rooster, so they’re super tiny and have fuzzy feet and beards. They’re all kinds of cute. I’ll photo them when I get back. Promise.
edit: Critterboy just sent me an IM letting me know he forgot the battery. Ack!
July 21st, 2005
MD* Weekend Photos!
*MD is for Mother’s Day in this case, since some of us (who are. not. bitter.) didn’t get to go to that little sheep thing back east. So there.
Where, oh where, shall we start? Hmmm? ooh! Cake! Yes, let’s start with CAKE!
What you can’t quite see is that the sprinkles on top spell out “happy knitting”. The Booger made that and brought it down for me. It’s got everything a cake should have. Cakey goodness, lots of frosting, Teddy Grahams, and sprinkles. Sweet!
The other thing she brought with wasn’t quite so sweet. At least not quite so sweet smelling…
and let me just say that it’s a damn shame that computer monitors aren’t scratch n’ sniff, ‘cos that, my friends, stinks to high heaven.
Stinky up close!
O and I spent about half the day Saturday washing half of that fleece. For size comparison, the tire and bumper you see in the corner there are a full-size Dodge pickup. That fleece is huge. And did I mention the stinky part? We’re pretty sure that one is from one of the Scottish Blackface rams on the island. They’re fairly wild critters, roaming freely in the woods most of the year up there, so the fleece is chock full of vegetable matter and is kind of matted in places. And it stinks.
Decatur has a sizeable herd of sheep going at this point. Most of them are Scottish Black Face, and a few are Dorsets. The annual island sheep shearing was the last weekend in April, and since they just give away all the fleeces, O asked for and got some. Ten of them. TEN. Eesh. That’s a LOT of stinky. She has big plans for all of it, though, so it’s all good.
Speaking of stinky things that come in groups of ten…
Chicklet update!
They’re continuing to grow, and DAMN if they’re not cute anymore. So sad. Chicklet gallery updated with current pix. Enjoy.
And, just to prove that I haven’t totally lost interest in spinning…
That’s spun up from some mystery batts that I got from Franquemont Fibers on eBay. It’s lovely stuff that’s been a joy to spin. And it has sparkly stuff in it, which is a total bonus. No clue what was in the batt, but it’s mostly wool with some other stuff.
There’s been more, I just don’t have pix to show of any of the rest of it. O’s Rogue is coming along - we’re down to one and 2/3 sleeve left. She better not outgrow it before I finish it…
So there. I may not have gotten to go to MS$W, but I had a damn fine MD weekend anyway.
May 10th, 2005
DAMN! Who knew I had this much yarn???
Holy crap.
I was reading Norma’s blog the other day, and got hatefully inspired by her stash documentation project. Then I got curious as to just how much yarn really is in the basement… Silly me.
Mission Falls Cotton? Yeah, apparently I got that. 50 skeins I’ve uncovered so far. FIFTY, people. And I haven’t even found all of it yet - I know I’ve got at least another 15 skeins tucked away in a partially finished project box.
The beginnings of the madness can be seen in the gallery. Descriptions will be added as soon as I can face it. And keep in mind that what you see there tonight is only the beginning. The tip of the iceberg. And I haven’t even started in with the fiber yet. Pounds and pounds and pounds of that too. Oy.
And for your chicken update, there’s a new gallery of chicklets .
April 27th, 2005
Soooo not a happy camper…
(warning, profanity to ensue, not that it’s particularly necessary to warn y’all about that, since you probably all know I’m a total pottymouth at this point, but whatever, some delicate flower may stumble upon this post and be all freaked out, so there you go. you’ve been warned.)
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! Let’s just start there.
A while back I got a bunch of (oh my god yummy) yarn from Peace Fleece, including 6 skeins of Zarya Fog in dyelot #7902. Of which I’ve been working on their Everyday Cardigan. Since my blocking space is limited, I washed and blocked the fronts and the back last night, so they could be dry by the time I finished the second sleeve, and I’d have room to block both of the sleeves at the same time.
I got up this morning and went to take them off the blocking board… The fronts? They look great. See:
But the back?… What. The. FUCK.
See where I changed skeins? Yeah, I do too. Fucking hell. And the orangey/brown blotchiness? Where the fucking hell did that come from? And no, it doesn’t wash out. Tried that.
So, yeah. NOT happy about that. Not sure what I’m going to *do* about that. CritterBoy says it’s fine, that I’m just being hypersensitive and that nobody would ever notice either thing. Meh. I know they’re there. Therefore, it must be fixed. Shit. shitshitshitshitshit.
BUGGER.
On a brighter note, peep#3 has hatched and is doing well. Last week’s peeps are growing nicely, and have started to get their cheek tufts and some sort of top o’ the head tuftiness too. Lord only knows what they’re going to look like when they’se all growed up. The other four? Not so cute anymore. No, really. What, you don’t believe me? Here;
and we can’t have a pic like that without some cute to balance it out:
Awwwwwwww! Them’s good eatin’!*
No, I have no intention of actually eating them. It just seemed like the thing to say…
April 15th, 2005
PEEPS!!!
Woo! The first peep is here! Out of the shell, fluffy and yellow, and ohmygod cute.
But I’m gonna make you wait for it.
First, we have two of the eggs as they were when I checked on them at around 9 last night:
What you can’t see here is that the one on the left has a cracked area on top that is just barely jutting out.
Then, we have the same two eggs around noon today:
Yeah, huge difference… I had no idea this process took anywhere near this long. Due to my crappy photography skills you can’t see that the peeps are visible through the holes at this point and are moving. The one in the brown shell is PEEPING. REALLY LOUDLY.
Then, going out to check again at 2ish… I found… PEEP!
Holy carp! It worked!
And, ‘cos it’s too cute not to share:
And yes, at less than an hour old, it has already learned how to sit in its food dish:
April 6th, 2005
Science is cool!
Three quickie sciency links to get your week going:
Some seriously cool research into feeding silk worms colored food to change the color of their silk.
Synthetic spider silk! All the cooler because it’s made from things most of us eat on a regular basis. Kick Arse.
And, for those of you with a high tolerance for squick: Silk Worm Guts! (this is a DAMN cool thing, but there is dissection involved, so if you’re easily grossed out, don’t go there. Go here instead)
In further news… I’ve done some more dyeing. I have liked none of it thus far. Very lame. And tomorrow should be the day! Chicklets! Hatching! One can only hope. I have the day off, so with any luck I’ll be able to catch the action and capture it on film for y’all. ‘Cos I know you’re on the edge of your seats just waiting for that.
I’ll also have new pics of Kabob, Satay, Tandoori, and Butter for you tomorrow, so you can see just how cute they aren’t anymore.
April 5th, 2005
You doubted the level of ugly?
Let me preface this by saying that the colors that I used to dye this were a deep acidy green, a greenish blue, and a deep blue. None of the colors you are about to see were involved to start with. Where they came from, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
Ready? Here ya go: Ugly Town. Don’t say you weren’t warned. ‘Cos ya were.
Speaking of ugly… oh, wait, no. These aren’t ugly. Cute as the dickens, those are. (wtf are dickens, anyway?) (don’t answer that).
The wee ones are growing! And getting ready to run for office, apparently, judging by the look on Tandoori’s face here…
And here we see that a)Kabob has grown more than the others, leading us to believe that it’s probably a boy, b)he/she/it doesn’t like standing on cardboard, and c)it has no fear of leaping off said cardboard into whatever lies beneath.
And here we have the totally crappy little movie of the chicken in the egg. It’s not the tiniest file, and it’s not the clearest thing, but you can, kinda, see the chicklet in the egg. Try right-clicking and saving it to your computer and giving it time to download….
That concludes your chicklet and ugly roving update for the evening. Tune in next time when we explore…. something else.
March 29th, 2005
DAMN that’s ugly…
In typical me fashion, I got a wild hair tonight and decided to jump right in to that dyeing-ones-own-roving thing. As a sys-admin, I really really really ought to have that whole RTFM thing down by now, but, well, yeah. It’s vastly more amusing to actualy *do* something than it is to *read about* something. So I busted out with the Wilton’s and the vinegar and I went to town.
Ugly Town, apparently.
If I can face the shame, I’ll post pictures at some point. Right now I’m in denial. It’s better that way.
On the chicken front - the babies are rapidly growing, and the eggs! Oh, the eggs! I candled the eggs again tonight, and one of them has a thin enough shell that I could see CHICKEN! Not just CHICKEN!, mind you, but MOVING CHICKEN. With heart beating. Pitter pat, pitter pat. Holy CRAP it was cool. Straight out of some Nova special, that was. If I could find the damn tripod and figure out a way to hold it all still and have the camera take a little video in the dark, I so would. All y’all need to see this.
March 28th, 2005
More chicken excitement
Yeah, yeah, I know. Chickens don’t have dick to do with knitting, but whatEVER. This is NEWS, baby!
CritterBoy and I have three full-grown chickens (Noodle, Sesame, and the silkie).
Noodle is the hen that crows, Sesame is just pretty and obnoxious, but
a good layer, and the silkie, at least right now, is doin’ nothin’ but
sittin’ on the next being broody as all hell.
Now, go back a
few months to last summer, when CB came home with the silkie and the
two others that we affectionately called “The Nuggets”, both of whom
were bobble-headed chickens - one a Buff Laced Polish, the other a Silver Polish. (Hey, wait, does this look familiar?). Sadly, both of the bobbles turned out to be roosters,
so they had to go. In this case they both went to my friend G at work.
The silver one died mysteriously about a week after going to his new
home, but the buff has grown and flourished and is gettin’ all kinds of
chicken-on-chicken action. So G has fertile eggs. Buff Laced
Polish/Auracana cross fertile eggs. But no broody hen. Sooo… you can
see where this is going, can’t you?
Last week G brought me three eggs. I put them under the silkie, just to see what would happen. She, of course, has been savagely sitting on them, dutifully turning them, and being all kinds of excited about being allowed to sit on them. I candled the three eggs last night, and one of them I’m pretty sure isn’t doing anything. One I can’t quite tell, but I think it might be incubating, and the third one? Oh yeah, TOTALLY growing a chicken in there. Hoo-ee! Two weeks from tomorrow we should have another chicklet! If I could figure out how to take pictures of the developing chicklet I would totally do it, so stay tuned and I’ll see if I can’t figure that one out.
This concludes your chicken update for today. No knitting or spinning has really happened that’s worth talking about. I will, however, take some pix of the chicklets tonight when I get home - two days and they’re visibly bigger! Hooray for frighteningly rapid growth!
March 22nd, 2005