January 10, 2014

Ollie's egg-laying hen pull-toy!







I included a small picture of this in my mosaic of handmade Christmas gifts, but I felt I ought to do it more justice, so here I am elaborating on this totally brilliant and completely one of a kind toy that Jason and I made. 

You see, as Ollie pulls it along, the hen actually lays an egg!

And the egg doesn't just pop out right away, that's the beauty of it. Her red wheels turn, and she bobbles back and forth as she goes, and then all of a sudden - bloop! out comes the egg! It's actually quite funny, and very clever. 

Jason designed and built the hen, and I painted it. A collaboration. 

This is a bit after-the-fact, but this past Christmas season, or rather months before, we decided that we wanted to make our family's gifts. For the things we did not make ourselves, we also extended the plan to include free or quality thrifted items. We made this decision both out of necessity and genuine desire. We had a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work, and difficult sometimes to find the time to work on secret projects when we are already such a busy family. We made things for the kids, for one another, and for my parents and sister! It was quite the party. Isabella jumped on board and made things for the boys, and Jude made some sweet wooden cars for little Ollie. Very fun (:

And now that it is a new year and the holiday season is behind us (even though our tree is still up and hasn't even dropped a needle yet) we are as busy as ever with our chickens, sheep and goat, our plans to build a greenhouse and garden fencing and dreaming of beehives, and something we have always wanted to do but thought would be much farther off in the future ~ harvesting our own maple syrup! We have been reading up on using a freezing method to separate the water from the syrup and this definitely seems to make the most sense for us, being a small homestead and not a huge operation. We have a whole maple grove and it's not such a huge distance from the house, so that's a good thing (:

3 comments:

  1. First off, that toy is just so dear - amazing that you made it yourself! The hand painted design is beautiful.
    And second, funny that you mention about freezing the maple syrup, because I just read an issue in "Back Home" magazine for the first time, and someone wrote in to talk about the article "Make The Water Go Away", which apparently was about freezing your maple syrup. The guy tried it and thought it worked. Coincidentally, he is also in Canada.

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  2. You and Jason are both very talented :-))

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  3. That's a wonderful toy!!!

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