Tag Archives: rabbits

Evening

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The bunnies are loose in the apartment…

First, I want you to revel in all of Linus’ glory… and then you should notice all the FUR in the air. It’s that time of year, time for a shave this weekend.

Seriously.

At the Park

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The bunnies and I made three trips to the park this summer. We met many new people (we even happened to go with Star on a day that the Freaker group set up their mobile grilled cheese mobile at the park!) and did some pretty chill lounging in the sand.

Fiona… photo bombing on the right there at the Freaker Mobile.

Bunny backs are a common sight when you’re at the end of a leash…  Linus got a kick out of watching what the Freaker gang was up to on the other side of the tree.

And then Linus met the tiniest pocket kitten I’ve ever seen! She was undaunted about his considerable size and tried to pounce on his face. He didn’t even notice.

Sterling Farm

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It’s SPRING! And lovely outside. That means that the babies are getting bigger, the goats are getting friskier and the pigs are lolling around in steaming piles of muck.

Odin, guard llama extraordinaire does NOT like to be touched. However, he doesn’t mind it in the least if you want to gaze at him in an admiring fashion…

One of the new lamby-lambs feeling rather brave and sturdy. The mother ewes are now back at Bonnieview and the lambs are doing just dandily out on pasture.

And last of the hoofed creatures is Thyme, the friendliest nubian milk goat you’ll probably ever meet. She spends a good chunk of her day with her elbow hooked over the door of her pen waiting for some sort of action to walk by.

I realize that I haven’t put up any pictures of my favorite animals at the farm: the meat rabbits. There are roughly 100 rabbits ranging from babies still in the nest box to the momma rabbits.

This is the second of three batches of babies. Still small enough to chill in a nest box. Since then there are three more nest boxes with babies still sleeping in puddles of their mothers fur, too small to do anything but squirm around and squeak.

These are the first batch of babies from a few months ago… too big to stay with their mothers and too small to eat.

And here’s the big buck, all on his own. Apparently he hasn’t been too prolific so there’s been some debate about what to do with him. Joe and I keep joking that Linus should make a trip down to the farm… before we realized that he’s actually sterile. Ah well, it’s better that way…

Batik Madness

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I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to come up with an easy, fun and social dorm activity that everyone can do AND that results in a product that will leave the common spaces much, much prettier than they are right now. They’re rather barren and no fun to hang out in. Then I read about how to do batik with kids.

Traditionally, batik is a method of dying fabric that utilizes hot wax on fabric to create a design that remains white once the fabric is dyed and the wax is removed. It’s a beautiful technique but hard to do because of the hot wax, hot dye and large amount of time and skill that is required…

Until you replace hot wax with washable Elmer’s glue and dye with watered down acrylic paint. Then it’s a fast, easy and immensely teachable technique! I got the idea from Craftzine who got the idea from the blog This Artist Woman. I got enough materials for everyone in the dorm (21 people) to make two murals, one per floor. At less than $20 this wound up being a really easy and inexpensive way to get everyone together. Now, we haven’t done it yet but I did do my own test swatch so that I have something to show everybody when we do start to roll up our sleeves and get cracking. This is the example of batik on Craftzine that caught my eye in the first place:

This is a really pretty example. All of the white lines were created by drawing that pattern out with glue on the fabric, letting it dry, painting acrylic paint on, letting that dry, washing the glue off and then voila! It’s done! So I gave it a try…

This is a small swatch of fabric, about five inches wide and two feet long. I’ve applied the glue and the paint here and I’m waiting for it to dry before I wash the glue out.

And here is the finished piece! The white areas really glow when the fabric is held up to the light and I think this would be a great way to make some curtains later on down the road.

I would really recommend this project and the tutorial over at The Artist Woman. It’s concise, easy to follow and the process is easy enough for school children to do. Plus the finished product looks so good, it’s hard not to get excited about the whole idea.

I can’t wait to see what the dorm winds up painting on their fabric murals. I’ll be posting pictures as soon as they get going!

Worry Bunnies

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So, I’ve finished a great number of little worry bunnies and here they are! I’ve heard from a little Star that someone might be interested in one…

The four along the bottom haven’t been stuffed yet, and the yellow bunny in the second row hasn’t been sewn up yet, but the rest are all done. The ones that aren’t quite finished yet certainly can be in a jiff.

These are the unfinished, but almost finished buns. There’s a wee bit of a discount if you get two o’them.