Rabbit Is Wise

rainy day

Call me crazy, but I love rainy days.  I've never lived in Seattle, but I'd like to think that I would fit in there without a problem.  If that would be true or not, I'll never know.  Perhaps living there would only prove to me that I do actually crave the sun...  perhaps my fondness for rainy days comes in part because they don't happen all that frequently.

I was inspired by the rain to get outside and capture what I see in my garden... to share here.

 

For the Birds...

Recently, simmering up a batch of beef stew, I thought of the idea of saving the fat to use for making birdseed balls.  I remember, as a Brownie, oh-so-many years ago, making a pinecone peanut butter birdseed feeder (kinda like this one).

So, I dutifully skimmed and saved the fat and waited for a good day to do this project, which happened to be this past week.

The fat was quite solid from being in the refrigerator, so I started by microwaving it for about 40 seconds to get it softer.  The girls helped me pour in enough birdseed to the bowl of fat to make for a wet slurry.  We then popped it in the fridge again to solidify it a bit.

Once it was more solid but not too hard, we plopped it onto a bit of plastic wrap and formed it into a ball, then put it in the fridge once again for it to get good and solid.

I then re-purposed an old onion bag, cutting the netting into a square and using a bit of wool yarn I had around the house to straight stitch around the edge.

When the suet/seed ball was solid, we placed it in the center of the netting and drew up the string.  Voila!  A hanging seed ball. 

After trudging through knee-high, untouched snow to get to a nice tree branch (and nearly throwing out my back because of the extra weight from a baby on my back), we hung the seed ball so we could see it from our living room window.

Now we just wait to see if the birds discover it (or, perhaps something else will find it first)...