Martha Stewart Living Egg Dyeing TIPS!!!!

Martha Stewart - I am your BIGGEST fan!
The Feathered Egg.com is mentioned on this month's craft page, as a source for blown goose eggs and I have plenty and I am SO pleased.....

SO pleased that I went and did the craft myself... which explains the weird color of my fingers, and my shirt, and my kitchen, and also - unfortunately - my face.

And I have an urgent and important tip for the Martha Stewart Living 2010 Easter Egg dye craft. The goose eggs (and duck eggs) require MUCH more vinegar and food coloring to make a nice pastel finish.

The magazine directs one teaspoon, and goose (and duck) eggs need at least 1/2 a cup. That's half a CUP. And for a really deep dye color, a full cup - which makes the eggshell sizzle and foam, but also fills the kitchen with vinegar fumes.

I also had to use 20 - 40 drops of color... and the egg will float on top of the dye bath, so I kept it spinning with my finger tip. That made a lovely even pastel finish.

Sometimes the goose eggs come out with a unique and interesting mottled texture. Sometimes they come out with an even finish. Goose eggs that have not had a light acid wash will have a deeper dye uptake, but any scratches in the naturally present invisible membrane on the egg surface will show up clearly as white lines in the dye finish. The acid wash makes the finish lighter and more pastel - but also evens it out.

True blue Pysanky egg artists (Ukrainian Egg Dyeing Art) would have an utter heart attack at the idea of using acid washed eggs for dye crafting.... but they also use super fresh unblown eggs that sink in the dye bath, never washed, supremely carefully handled for utter surface perfection - and it shows in their amazing art results.

Blown eggs float imperturbably on the surface of the dye bath. This means that if I walk away, trying to set up another dye bath, the egg will develop weird looking dye lines as it bobs away. So I have to keep it spinning with my finger tip... which works beautifully, but then my finger tip gets very thoroughly dyed.

But once all my dye baths were set up... each full of at least half a cup of vinegar and at least 10 drops of food color (for the lightest pastel bath), and 50 drops (for the darkest pastel bath).... my eggs began to really look like the pictures in the magazine.
Kind of.
Oh all RIGHT! Not so much, because my electrical tape fell off halfway through because my eggs were kind of wet when I put it on. And because I didn't really take the time to cut out the pretty pretty shapes. And because I mixed colors when I shouldn't have.

But in my MIND they look like the ones in the magazine.
Gawd I love that magazine!

Now if I could just figure out a way to mention my book, "Just A Couple Of Chickens", which is now available on amazon.com or on my website... I'd be all set.

Happy Easter Everyone! Use more vinegar, use more dye..... and break out those magic erasers to handle the aftermath!

Hot Chick Tips

Spring is Hot Chick Time.
It's the time all those peeping little cuties get plopped under heat lamps and encouraged to grow into responsible egg-producing pillars of barnyard society.

I've collected a short list of the hottest chick tips in the biz from the best experts ever hatched... the kind of things they don't tell you in the library books, feed store flyers, or hatchery catalogs. The kinds of things that you CAN find in my book.... "Just A Couple Of Chickens" by Corinne Tippett, which is now available on amazon.com. (he he he, crafty and seamless book mention - voila!)

My experts are age 11 and 7, so you know these tips are hot.


Tip #1.... Catch the chicks gently by making a cage of your fingers.
It's fun to play with them by picking them up and putting them down again, but you have to be careful not to strangle them. At least, it's fun for us, but it might not be so fun for the chick.

Tip #2... The chicks panic easily, so come up to the brooder quietly and try not to yell.
If you jump up at them, they will scatter all over and knock over their water, but don't take it personally if they always run away from you. They don't know yet that you love them.

Tip #3... The poop won't hurt you.
Chick poop is not that horrible. It washes off. You do have to very very gently wash the poop off their bums if it sticks together in a big mess. Use a warm washcloth but don't scrub, it's easy to hurt their little bottoms. Let it dissolve off.

Tip #4... Put their water higher than their bums. That way they can drink, but they can't poop in the water. They love to poop in their water.

Tip #5... They sleep just like we do when they are little. They stretch out under the heat lamp. If you sneak up very very quietly at night, you can see them do it and it's really cute. They won't do that when they are all grown up.

And finally, it takes about 20 weeks for the hens to begin laying. They will lay even if there is no rooster. If your hen is still not yet laying after 30 weeks, she is probably a rooster.
Happy Spring and Happy Easter!

Baddy-anniversary

March ushers in a dark-ish anniversary at our house...
not a black-edged anniversary really,
more of a smoky gray... the smoke is the haze of our burned credit history.

It's the one year anniversary of our bankruptcy discharge.
Which I would love to forget... it's not like anyone around here is going to complain about a lack of roses for that day....
Except that how we are managing in the face of such things is one of the key missions of this blog. Kind of the whole point, other than chook stories, which have been few lately.
(Next time)

So to mark this one year anniversary, I marched down to my local bank with $500 very carefully hoarded dollars from my emergency fund and plunked it down for a secured credit card.

I will find out in about three weeks if the bank will extend me the courtesy of putting my $500 in their hands in exchange for a $500 limit credit card, which I can then use to begin rebuilding my credit score.

The financial wizards out there tell me that I must do this to begin to re-establish credit.
And that it will take a very long time...
....first of all because a big part of credit history is how old the credit account is...
....second of all because another part of credit history is the debt owed to balance possible ratio...
They say that I should charge up to 25% of the balance, then pay it off on time, every time.

There is some debate as to whether I should carry over a small balance and pay that interest rate - some see paying the interest as a cost of rebuilding credit.
Others see it as a total waste of money and believe that simply charging the 25% (up to $125 and no more in this case) and then paying it off on time every time will do the same thing.

Since the interest rate for the card I'm a-courtin' is 23%, I'm with the pay-it-all-off guys. I'm already in for $35 a year in fees, so I'm already paying my dues.

So we can all wait with drum-rolling anticipation to see if I am graciously allowed to carry a no-risk-to-them totally-secured-prepaid-fee-laden-high-interest credit card by my bank......
Who said Bitter Betty.... somebody referrin' to me?

In a helpful tangent to this post... I finally found out why my blog posts were looking so screwed up when I cut and pasted them out of Word....
it's all the background formatting of course,
like I knew that,
I didn't know that...
so when I took the GoogOracle's advice and cut from Word, pasted to TextEdit or Notepad, then set the style to default, then cut and pasted to blogger, it behaved itself nicely. No background formatting carried over from the text editor. Ahhhhhhhh....

Mom says that I'm mentioning my book, "Just A Couple Of Chickens" by Corinne Tippett, which is now available on amazon.com too many times in my blog posts.
I say,
wha?
your signal is breaking up.. breaking up....
heh heh heh.

My Leap of Faith

I hang in the air, mid leap, like one of those ultra slo-mos NBC is pumping out of Olympians (crashing) in Vancouver... only I don't look so shiny. I've taken the plunge... stepping off the edge of familiarity, now midway through my scout mission in Portland, Oregon where am I seeking new beginnings (better schools).

But at the same time, I am frenetically busy promoting the book
(Just A Couple Of Chickens by Corinne Tippett, available now on amazon.com!)
and managing Andrew manage the business
(www.TheFeatheredEgg.com)
and job hunting
(corinnetippett@gmail.com.)
(hire me, I'm really good...)

So a close up of my cameo slo-mo would reveal something nuttier than a bag of squirrels and just as hairy.

There are plenty of job postings here (for pharmacists) but there are also plenty of applicants. I'm in an invisible crowd of highly skilled people that I can neither see nor hear. Together, we upload pdf versions of our resumes, sweated to perfection, then spend another 20 mins (or more!) per application re-entering all that information field by field into the impassively demanding robot hiring matron. One employer at a time, one education center at a time. We find their keywords (we hope), and cleverly spin them into our text entries.

I walked to the library on a recent sunny day (!) and was shocked to find the library full of (non-homeless) people on that weekday afternoon. The waiting list for the internet computers was long and everyone was limited to a single hour of use. I do believe that fact makes it an official truth that a person could not conduct a job search using only the public library. There simply isn't enough time to find and fill out the applications and hit send before the librarian does her hourly chair clearing. Twenty years ago, I did my first job searches from the library. Times change.

I am reluctant to reveal that I may be jumping ship on Santa Fe, New Mexico. I love the place where I live, where I've raised my chickens, where I've walked with my dogs. Where my children were born. You won't find me dissing the town, especially since I might be going back there if these job portal robots don't show me some joy, (but....)

Isn't it time that someone (other than me) says something about the fact that all but two of the Santa Fe Elementary Schools failed the every-child-left-behind standards in 2009? The system and testing structure were (nasty turds) left behind by the Bush administration but still, the standards are set by the school's own states, and shouldn't that failure at least trigger some community wide discussion? The Santa Fe schools are left to struggle with the consequences by themselves... putting at risk the jobs of some of the BEST principals in the system (rock on Mr. Lee!)

None of the Portland schools failed the standards but there are still no end of public forums and neighborhood meetings going on here about how to improve their schools.

So, gyrating madly, I hang suspended mid-leap in my attempt to start a new life post-personal apocalypse. All of my coaches are praying that I stick my landing. I'm just hoping I don't break every metaphor in my body.

and

Just A Couple Of Chickens by Corinne Tippett is available now at amazon.com!

Bring It On 2010

Assuming that I make it far enough in this life odyssey to look back on 2010.... it will go down in history as the year that the Spirit World began to speak to me in the same voice as CNN.

Fur reals.

(We interrupt this blog to announce "Just A Couple Of Chickens" by Corinne Tippett available now on Amazon.com!)

My sisters, who are Amazons, and I spent the new year at a hot spring in New Mexico, a true power place. And the part that I remember, apart from the best mojitos you've ever tasted, was the Medicine Wheel.

"There's a powerful mystical medicine wheel on the top of the mesa," said the store manager to my younger sister, who was snuffling the scented soaps.
"Nice," said my sister.
"I can't tell you where it is," he continued, "you have to find it on your own."
"Also nice," said my sister, with another soap in hand.
"Sometimes it's a crow that points the way," he said. "Sometimes it's a rabbit."
"Okay," said my sister.
"Or sometimes, people just hear it calling," he finished and watched her face closely.
"Do you have this in a lotion?" she said.
"Just try it," he said, crestfallen.
"Okay," she said, confused.

We went for a walk.
"Should we try for the Medicine Wheel?" I asked, weighing the hazards of my very lame shoes against the adventure of actually finding the wheel.
"Do you see any crows?" my other sister asked.
"What?" said my shopping sister.
"Do you see any rabbits?" she continued.
"Rabbits?" we echoed and saw none.
"Well," I said, "What about that gigantic cloud finger pointing down at the mesa from that forty foot tall single puffy cloud right in front of us?" I said.

And so it was.
It pointed directly to the medicine wheel.
"Seriously," I said later, "Did you not see that cloud?"

We sat in the medicine wheel, in true New Mexico power place hot springs style, and I opened my mind to the invisible world.
"It's going to be okay," was the first powerful message that came through loud and clear.
"It's all about freewill," was the next, "Everything is a tool in the hand of freewill."
"You don't travel alone when you follow your path," was the last.
Then all I got was pins and needles from my numb feet.

"I got the message that it's going to be okay," announced my younger sister.
"So did I!" I exclaimed.
"That's what I was sending," admitted my older sister.
"Weird!" we all said.

It was cool. And even if we can't go back to the hot spring for a while due to some unfortunate side effects of mojitos and sisterhood....

I'm currently following my path, climbing my Everest, and I don't feel alone. The voice of the medicine wheel still rings in my ears. It sounds like the hot blond guy on CNN with the two last names.

Book Two is writing itself.... and Book One is Available On Amazon! WooooHoooo!

Now Available on Amazon.com

Very pleased to announce...
Very happy to declare....
"Just A Couple Of Chickens" by Corinne Tippett
is now available on Amazon.com

yesssssssaaaaa!
amazon, amazon, ama-ama-amazon!
I've embedded a link in the title above for easy amazoning.

It is available new for $14.95
One copy seems to be already available used for $17.12.... I'm not sure whassup with that.
Maybe that is the same philosophy as the current TV commercials selling buffalo nickels for only $19.95 each.
Strange times.

But still.... Now available on Amazon.com, wahooooooo!
Next week... back to stories of real life, the kind of chit we can't make up, but for now, Wahooooo!

Just A Couple Of Chickens.... Is READY!

With great drama, anticipation, slavering, and fanfare.....

The Book Is Ready!

"Just A Couple Of Chickens"
by Corinne Tippett

It is available at www.createspace.com/3413537.

This is the print on demand system through amazon.com... the place I decided to publish my masterpiece. The books are printed and shipped as they are ordered, which explains the approximate two to three weeks for delivery.

Soon, I will have stacks of books to sell through my website, but I have to get them printed first.
But, hey, the book is ready!

Ding dong the book is ready, the book is ready, the book is ready....
Ding dong the book the book is ready!!!!!!!

I must celebrate. Where is the wine, the cheese, the refined sugar!
Where is my marketing plan?
No, first the wine..........

"Just A Couple Of Chickens" by Corinne Tippett