New Chickens: Nancy

*Note I was out of town yesterday and apparently picking a time and date under schedule doesn't make blogger publish the post then. I sorry for any inconvenience.*
   If you recall we had two new arrivals: Tooie, and a hen. This is the hen's story.  She is part Turken, also known as a necked-neck chicken. I say part because she has some feathers on the bottom of her neck (Thank Goodness.) and all the Turken pictures I have seen show a completely bald neck. I have no idea what the other part is. Something that lays very dark eggs, I guess, because not long after we got her we started getting a very dark egg almost every day.





   "I will never complain about Abe again. Ok I probably will..."

     We originally put her in the new coop, but she was a horrible bully to the other hens. Sunday morning found her standing on top of Handful pecking her. We couldn't have that. I caught her and threw her in the old coop, with her victim's larger and meaner parents; hoping they would, 'fix her wagon'. The minute I put her in the run Pecky started a fight with her. Abe was having none of that. He jumped in and started mixing it up with her. A minute later the Turken was running into the middle of the other hens to hide. Unfortunately, for her, she chose to hide next to the boss hen. The boss hen started pecking the Turken with Mohawk backing her up. The Turken ended up hiding in a nest box, her brief reign of terror over. Not that she doesn't try to restart it from time to time. Abe has to keep a constant eye on her.
    
  Here is a picture of her amongst the older girls, as you can see she is a large hen. We ended up naming her Nancy. No word yet whether she calls herself Lill.

Friday is Chinese New Year, here's hoping for a bat-tastic year of the horse.

                 Thank you for reading Bats Bizarre's offical blog. Have a bat-tastic day!

Horce Horse Jr.

   2014 is the year of the horse. It officially starts this Friday. Mom and I will be making eggrolls.

 
    I came up with Horace Jr. because I wanted to make a horse that could be displayed like my snakes. (We'll be leaving the snakes up because we'd miss them, and having a reptile in the home supposedly brings prosperity, so it'll all work out.)

   It took me 7 hours to knit the first Horace Jr.. Hopefully I will be able to get that time down. I know I spent a bit of it stopping to check the pattern's math and my assumptions and have a tendency to knit slower when I'm working on a new pattern. So, it might be possible.

  Right now I'm working on a solid black one for my Mom. She wanted one that would match her rooster ornament. It will probably become a variation on the listing with a photo.

I finished the head and body in one hour and thirty five minutes, but I still have to knit the I-cord legs, mane, and tail and sew it all together.


   Horace Jr. is a miniature version of my Horace Horse doll. He can stand on his own four feet.
Each Horse is 4 1/4" (10.795cm) tall not counting his ears when sitting up, 4" (10.16cm) on all fours, and 1 3/4" (4.445cm) wide.
 Like all of my work, each is signed with a small 'J' on the bottom.
A hook is not included.
 The yarn is 100% acrylic. Stuffing is 100% polyester. Machine washable with low heat on gentle/delicate cycle. Made in a smoke free environment. Custom colors are available; please ask before you order.
            Horace Jr. Ships every where.

Here is a link to the listing: https://www.etsy.com/listing/176453282/horace-horse-jr-chinese-new-year-doll
   
             Thank  you for reading Bats Bizarre's offical blog. Have a bat-tastic day!

New Chickens- Tooie

  On the second day of frantic construction on the new coop mom and I got a call from my Aunt. Her step-daughter who also has chickens, needed to find a new home for her three new chickens who were having a bad time with the pecking order. Mom asked if they could wait until the end of the week, because we were out of cages and the older girls are horrible about the pecking order. Plus one of the three was a bantam rooster; Abe would probably kill him. She said she could keep them in an old gerbil cage until then.

   By the weekend it was down to two, (nothing had happened to the other hen) but she started getting along better in the flock and was able to stay. The other two, not so much. So that Saturday my aunt drove up with a pet carrier containing a bantam half-Silkie rooster and a necked neck chicken. More on the necked neck next Thursday, today's blog belongs to the rooster. That's him in the door way, isn't he cute? We named him Tooie short for Cockatoo.

  At first he had trouble getting along with the girls. They were bulling him. Mom only half joked about keeping him in a birdcage in the house. But the girls stopped bothering him so much. So we're leaving him in there. Mom still talks about the bird cage though.

     He's a young boy, he hasn't started crowing yet. But it's only a matter of time. He's not a actual Silkie, he has true feathers, but he does have the extra toe, -weirdly enough it's right under his back toe-  a tuft on his head, blue-ish skin, and feathered legs that are characteristic of Silkies. He is a little fellow, so I'm not sure if he'll be able to father any chicks by the girls, maybe when we move we'll get him some bantam girls.

     He loves grass. Every time I see him eat some I swear he's going to choke, but he somehow manages to swallow the spaghetti like strands. 


  And that is the story of the new chicken coop's rooster.


Note: The USPS is raising the price of stamps on the 26th. I will be raising my cost of shipping then and adding the cost of a tracking number to all my items.   

         Thank you for reading Bats Bizarre's offical blog. Have a bat-tastic day!

Heart of Hearts Earrings

  I finally learned to solder! (sort of) I'll solder one together in one minute and the next will take me fifteen. So I still need some practice. But I'm getting there and I only ruined two heart pendants practicing.  After ruining two pendants I tried just wrapping wire to hold them together, but it wasn't very secure so I went back to soldering. I liked the wire wrapped look, so I wrap them after soldering.

  I shape the metal using a plastic jig, but I'm probably going to end up making one out of a piece of scrap wood and some finishing nails. The plastic pegs have a tendency to fall out at inopportune times. I shaped my first prototype by hand using my jewelry pliers, but that took forever and was going to drive me insane. Not the good kind of insane like I am now, either. (Yes, this is the good kind.)

  As you can probably guess, I fund the sparkly beads first and came up with the rest of the earrings later. I love sparkly beads, but have a heck of a time taking photos that accurately  show their colors. The crystal ones are especially hard, because they blend into a white background and pick up colors from other backgrounds.
 

   Now I'm not really a cutesy heart kind of girl, but even I like these earrings. I'm thinking of making a necklace version of this.

  The outer hearts are made of silver plated copper wire hand shaped into a stylized heart. The inner ones are sparkly glass beads in your choice of Fire (red with green specks in certain lights) or Ice (Clear with blue, yellow and pink tones). And the ear wires are stainless steel. The entire piece is 1 3/4" from the top of the ear wire to the bottom of the metal heart and is 1 5/16" wide at it's widest point.        
Buy yours here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/175930177/heart-of-hearts-earrings-in-fire-or-ice?ref=shop_home_active_1

                           Thank you for reading Bats Bizarre's offical blog. Have a bat-tastic day! 

Frantic Constuction

If you recall my last couple of blogs for 2013 were cancelled due to Frantic construction. My mother and I were building a second chicken house. We had been putting it off hoping we would be moving  soon, but the girls couldn't wait anymore, so we finally got to work. We started on Monday and the following Friday night Possum, Barbie, and Handful slept in the house. The next day they were joined by Miracle, Quail, Ducky, and Lee. (The girls from the 'Surprise Chicks') 

    The hen house is a metal building out of a kit. The instructions were hard to understand, but with a couple of redos and a lot of swearing we muddled through. The run was made out of panels from Barbie's dream chicken house and some chain-link we stretched between two posts we buried. The girls are happy and have eaten every bit of grass from it. Barbie laid her first egg on the day after Christmas. 




Thank you for reading Bats Bizarre's offical blog. Have a bat-tastic day!