The Chicken Who Came for Christmas

Guess who Patrick spied pecking around in our backyard yesterday afternoon? A chicken.

Our Binghamton backyard. Not in Gilbertsville, where there's poultry a-plenty, but in urban, residential West Side Binghamton. In the snow.

And being the irrepressible animal-lover that he is, he caught it. He walked around the block. He asked the mailman if anyone around here kept chickens. (They're actually legal in Binghamton; we have a neighbor down the street with hens.) Negative.

And now we have a chicken. And what are we going to do?

I grew up with a flock of barnyard chickens, and so there's a soft spot in my heart. I've been planning on someday having a flock in Gilbertsville (someday being the operative word) once we've endeared ourselves to our neighbors enough that they won't come over to bludgeon us when our rooster starts crowing at 4:30am. But that was going to be someday. Not now. Not here. Not sitting in a cat carrier on the kitchen table.

But there she is, peering out skeptically at us. There she is, gobbling up the rolled oats and kale I fed her, and sleeping with her head tucked under her wing. In the cat carrier. Oh dear.

Last night, the subjects of our spoken sentences were things like "chicken wire panels," "heat lamp," and "pecking order." We named her, too, and that's never a good sign. Oh dear. I think she may be staying. Though she fits with no plans, she has made her agenda clear. When something feathered shows up in your life in mid-December, you make due. You give it the best home you can.

Really good sugar cookies.

How's everyone out there in blogland? Are you having fun, flipping errantly back and forth between regular, domestic, cozy Sweetfern and Caulk-Gun Wielding Sweetfern? I feel pleasantly schizophrenic, myself. In Gilbertsville, it's like, LET'S GO! GET THINGS DONE! EAT CANDY BARS FOR LUNCH! I DON'T CARE! And back home, it's like, hey man, maybe I'll make some sugar cookies. Maybe I'll spend all evening with my tree, my kitchen, and my cat, just savoring the put-together-ness of our house. (And thinking, too, of how long it's going to be before Gilbertsville is anywhere near as organized and orchestrated.)

It's nice, in a way. I can be a badass caulk-gun wielder on weekends, busting out projects all Rosie the Riveter-like, and then come home to my kitchen and embrace my inner domestic diva. It's the best of both worlds.

So, yeah. Anyway. The cookies.

I think Pete has been missing us fiercely over the weekends we've been gone. He's a people cat. This is why he chose to sit next to my stand mixer and endure Christmas music in the coldest room of the house, watching interestedly as I mixed up the dough.

Anyone want the recipe? It's a ringer, I'll guarantee. Even if you're on the phone with your mom, yakking away about Christmas plans and presents, and burn the first two sheets, they still taste amazing.

Mom's Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla

2 tsp baking powder

2 3/4 cups flour

Cream the butter and sugar together in the bowl of a stand mixer, while your curious gray cat looks on. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until smooth. Meanwhile, whisk the flour and baking powder together in a small bowl. Add the flour in thirds, while the mixer churns away on low speed, allowing about thirty seconds between additions.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees, and grease up some cookie sheets.

Flour your counter and roll out the dough. Cut your shapes. I'm a snowflake girl, personally, but my mom's standbys were cows, pigs, and sheep.

Bake the cookies for 6-7 minutes. Carefully lift the cookies off the trays after about two minutes of cooling time, and transfer them to wire racks. Makes enough for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, plus some broken ones for you and your husband to eat with tea.

Do you have any can't-live-without-them Christmas cookie recipes?

New House Progress, Extended Version

Last weekend I promised you pictures of our progress. Maybe because this was our sixth consecutive weekend of work, or maybe because of the endless trim-painting, I found myself taking a "camera break" quite often this weekend. It's good. It's an excuse to put down the brush. Or the drill. Or the caulk-gun. This was Friday night.

FRIDAY

Patrick had a gig in Norwich. I debated going with him, but opted, in the end, to stay "home" and get my craft room floor ready for painting. I cranked Ani Difranco and howled along to Gravel, something I hadn't done in a long time. It's the kind of thing that's best when you're alone in the house, in the echo-y splendor of a carpet-less room.

We took up the carpet in this room last weekend, and I was pleased to discover some lovely wideplank floors underneath. The plan is to paint the floors upstairs, and sand and refinish the floors downstairs. I borrowed this idea from SouleMama. She and her family closed on their hundred-and-fifty-plus-year-old farmhouse in September, and I've been quietly (and reverently) watching their progress, taking notes and finding inspiration along the way.

After prepping the floor, I had time on my hands. I tackled a closet. I pulled up the DISGUSTING sticky linoleum. I vacuumed up the mouse turds and the errant kitty litter bits that had made their way underneath. The floor left behind about a half inch of nasty yellow adhesive-- and what, oh what, are we going to do about that? (Advice, anyone, on how to remove floor adhesive?)

Then I painted the closet shelves. This closet is off the upstairs kitchen (from when the house was made into two apartments). The kitchen is going to become our laundry room, and I'm thinking this will make a perfect linen closet.

I spent the balance of the evening propped up on the air mattress watching Season 6 of the Simpsons on our laptop. It was a good Friday night.

SATURDAY

I took some pictures to show you all, while Patrick and I padded around with our mugs of tea and breakfast sandwiches from the general store.

You can see before pictures from all of these rooms right here.

Great Room. Formerly purple-wallpapered. A mantle and some built-in bookshelves, as well as an ambitious decorative painting project are in the works for this. After we clear out the mess.

Front room. This is going to be Patrick's music space. The trim, formerly greenish beige (EW!) was my main project last weekend. THREE COATS. Oh, the madness.

Dining Room. We pulled the carpeting in here first. Check out those gorgeous floors. A little sand-and-refinish is all they'll take. And, oh yes, the sconces are GOING.

Eventually, we got down to work. Patrick replaced a bunch of sockets which had been painted, and screwed on new switchplates and socket plates. I turned my attention back to my craft room floor. This is the before picture, from August:

This is where we stood Saturday morning. Do you like the color? It's intense, but I love it. Playful and inspiring and passionate, just like the creating I'll be doing in this space.

I sanded, vacuumed, and primed.

I used a sander hooked up to a shop vac-- and I heartily recommend that. It's a lot more pleasant than crawling around on all fours in a cloud of lead paint dust.

After one coat of primer and two coats of paint, this was the scene Sunday morning:

SUNDAY

Ahhhhhh. It's taken us five weeks, but we finally have one room completely ready. Floors, trim, ceiling, and walls. The trim took us three coats. The walls took three coats. The floors took three coats. Miraculously, the ceiling only took one. So maybe you see, now, why it's taken us five weeks!

We spent the rest of Sunday painting trim downstairs.

Lord a-mighty, is there a LOT of trim.

Once it got dark out, we rinsed our brushes and pulled up a carpet. Pulling up carpet has become our instant-gratification morale-booster of choice. When we're both flopped dejectedly on the air mattress with Diesel on Sunday afternoon, groaning with aches and worn out from working, it's the only thing that will reliably rouse us.

Our choice was the upstairs stairwell, which I unfortunately don't have a before picture of. This is the stairwell that got walled over when they converted the house to two units. We pulled up the carpet. Patrick crawled around drawing out hundreds of enormous screws with his drill, while I paced and smiled. Then we peeled back the tar paper. And there was a trap door.

This is why we bought an old house. For treats and surprises like this, for the thrill of domestic archaeology. We pulled a few more screws, and then cre-a-a-a-k, up it came.

It turned out to be covering and enclosing the top couple of steps, and underneath was all the banister and balustrades they'd torn out when they made the conversion. All in pretty decent shape, aside from a hearty dose of dust.

I'll be honest. I would've preferred a time capsule, a box of old photos, or even a pile of random junk. A sheaf of old wallpaper. I'm the type to prefer romance and intrigue over practicality. But really, it's pretty cool to have the original woodwork. All this is part of the house, part of its story, and it'll be easily resurrected and re-installed. Not to mention, a big money-saver, too!

Next weekend, we'll finish re-opening the stairwell, and boy am I looking forward to that. Anything for a break from trim-painting!

O, Christmas Tree

Nothing is better than coming home to a dark house and immediately plugging in the Christmas tree. Instant mood lifter. We decorated on Tuesday night, putting all the familiar decorations in all the familiar places.

For the last time.

Next year, there will be a different house to decorate. I carry that thought-- that we are leaving this house-- in my mind constantly, marking time and taking note. It's making these holidays more meaningful, somehow, knowing this will be the last time in our first house together.

Next year, there will be new sights to savor. The table runner will find a new table to grace, the stockings may have to sit out a year (!) while we forage for and install a mantle in Gilbertsville. (In exchange for two extra bedrooms, 500 extra square feet, coffered ceilings, and land, we did have to make some concessions.) Next year we will have a full-size tree.

And speaking of trees, Sweetfern Handmade's Third Annual Christmas Tree Tour will take place next Friday, December 17th. If you'd like to be included (and you have a picture of your Christmas tree up on your blog) leave a comment on this post!

What transitions are you marking this season?

Tutorial: A Christmas Forest

What's Christmas without a little festive decor? Each year I add some Christmas handmades, slowly growing my collection of holiday decorations. This year, a little Christmas forest has sprouted on our Hoosier cabinet.

These little guys are so easy to make, and so adaptable, too. They're great to do with kids, very quick, and they use fabric scraps. What's not to love about that?

Easy Christmas Forest

Materials:

Assorted fabric scraps

Medium-weight iron-on interfacing

Scissors

A sewing machine with coordinating thread

Each tree is made up of three or four little fabric "cones" stacked on top of each other. To make a cone, cut two matching squares of scrap fabric. Five inches by five inches is a good size for a base cone, but feel free to experiment.

Press interfacing to the wrong sides of both squares. I like this project because it allows me to use up odd-sized pieces of interfacing that are forever accumulating in my studio.

Lay the two squares right sides together with the interfacing out, and sew along two of the sides. Trim the corner.

Trim the bottom of the cone into a rounded, tree-like shape, and turn it right-side out.

Repeat these steps, cutting smaller or larger squares of different fabrics. Rummage through the scraps and sew up a bunch of cones, without thinking about how they're going to fit together as trees. The really fun part is assembling them into trees. If you'd like, you can stitch the finished trees together with a single stitch through the centers of the cones. Leaving them un-sewn, the trees can be assembled differently every year, and cones can be added and traded accordingly.

For more durability, you could zig-zag stitch the edges of the cones. It's up to you. Because the cones are interfaced, fraying shouldn't pose a problem.

This would be a great project to share with kids. You could choose the scraps together, and let your child handle the simple cutting while you iron and stitch. Then assemble the trees together.

Happy sewing!

Check out another neat holiday decor tutorial!

A wintry weekend in Gilbertsville. With cookies.

This one picture pretty much sums up the entirety of our weekend. It snowed. I worked in the front room downstairs, painting copious amounts of trim. I drank a lot of tea from my Grassroots mug. And the cookies. Oh yes, the cookies.

This is a story about cookies.

The short version goes something like this: We are about to move to a town of less than four hundred people, and we want to make friends. I've written before about how much I love good neighbors, how good they can make life feel. They're important. It's about civic responsibility.

So when I learned, through Facebook of all places, that our across-the-street neighbor recently became a widower, I wrote him a card. This is the same neighbor who walked over and welcomed us during the summer, when we were innocently trespassing on our future home. He offered his hand and his smile, and said things like, "You're going to love it here." I slipped my note under his door and walked away.

The next morning, he knocked on our door and delivered cookies. Chocolate chip. Fresh from the oven. Yes, we are going to love it here.

We already do.

This morning, everything aches. Everything. My legs from constant bending and squatting, my left arm from forever holding the paint tray aloft, the top of my head from where I cracked it on the ceiling when attempting an enthusiastic sprint down the back stairs. (CAUTION: LOW CLEARANCE!) And I just can't wait to do it all again next weekend.

And I promise to take more pictures! Somehow I got swept up in the progress we were making and forgot to document it. For shame.