Monday 8 March 2010

Easter Chicks!


This is a photo of Tilly beside a huge vinyard in France, when the weather starts to change I usually get a bit of a 'yearning', I think I was supposed to live in a much warmer country and a minor error 'upstairs' resulted in my being born and living at the North end of a pretty chilly island, we do have nice summers but they tend to last a day or two, sometimes even a week!

The promise of Spring is in the air, I have snowdrops in the garden and the chickens are getting frisky, Tilly and I decided to try our hand at producing some Easter Chicks, unable to wait for nature to take its course and provide us with a broody hen we have taken matters into our own hands and put 16 of our best eggs into an incubator, we now have to wait 21 days to see if we have any success. Incubation is not an easy task we have found, our incubator is old and though the modern versions control temperature, humidity and even turn the eggs for you, ours does not.

We have to check the temperature and humidity with alarming frequency, the little soon to be chicks also need turning many times during the day (and night if Tilly has anything to do with it)!

The whole process is so exciting, we can hardly wait to find out how
many of our eggs will hatch, I will update the blog and am hoping to film the eventual hatching, providing they don't appear in the middle of the night of course.

We collected an assortment of eggs, some silkie, bantam, wellsummer, light sussex and brown hens.

I have managed to get some work done too, I've been working a lot with my drum carder and produced some very interesting? blends.

I have also been working on some handpainted merino fibre, spinning it into a single ply thick 'n' thin yarn, these are great fun to do and lovely to knit with. One customer has added a couple of projects to Ravelry, they look great - she worked wonders with my yarn!


I also became a Great-Aunt on Saturday, I'm sure I'm not old or wise enough to be a great-anything but yet I am! A lovely baby girl was born into the Cook family and I for one, can't wait to meet her! ♥♥♥♥♥♥