Inspired by last week’s Chicken Shawl, a friend whipped up an actual Chicken Sweater for me! I am beholden not to reveal her identity. Also, I am unable to confirm or deny that she is the knitter responsible for the sweater on Dirty Biter’s statue. (Which by the way was recently a front page story in the Skagit Valley Herald.)
Here, Dolly models the lovely red sweater. We decided that wrangling a chicken into holding still while wearing clothes and having pictures taken was a two-person job. I held Dolly, while she took these lovely pictures:
Her Chicken Sweater was a remarkable bit of engineering. It featured two velcro fastenings AND a button.
Lovely, no? She based it on the Chux Tux knitting pattern, but had to adapt it for a baby chicken.
In other chicken news, last week I finished the small/temporary chicken tractor enough that they could take their first trips outside.
Don’t they look small and overwhelmed by the big wide world? Oh, they loved it. They scratched and pecked and flapped and ate bugs and squabbled over bits of dandelion leaf, and generally had a grand old time.
They attracted quite a lot of attention from the neighbors.
Ironically, it is the neighbor who looks least interested (the one on the left) who managed to trash the chicken tractor not 24 hours after this picture was taken. No chickens were harmed, but it did represent a bit of a setback. I had planned for this chicken tractor to be temporary, but not that temporary.
Meet Chicken Tractor the Second, still in the early stages of construction. It should be completed by next weekend, depending on how the events of this week shake out. In the mean time, the chickens remain stuck inside, in their brood box, which they are rapidly outgrowing.
In related news, I am so fucking tired of having chickens in my living room, you can hardly imagine.
This will probably be the last substantial chicken update for a little while. *sing-song* I don’t think you’ll mi-i-i-nd, though!
The dog trashed the chicken tractor but didn’t touch the chickens? That confirms the eternal cat hypothesis: dogs are dumb.
According to John Waters, Flannery O’Connor was so obsessed with her chickens that she made clothes for them. And it’s a well documented fact that she taught a chicken to walk backwards.
What I’m saying is, have you ever considered short story writing?
I liked how that story you linked to mentioned tree sweaters.
Those last two photos look artistically blurred in the background. Did you mess with them?
Oh, those awkward teen years. That chick needs a clown sweater like nobody’s business.
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2005/12/if_you_want_to_.html
But you’ll miss the little peepers when they’re gone…
I may have to sew chicken aprons (aka saddles) for our hens – the roosters pretty well tread off all the girls’ back feathers. Horny little b*st*rds…
My, how they’ve grown!
[...] dinner. And all the silverware must match. 3. Think of something brilliant to knit, like this or this or this. 4. Buy a new-new car. 5. Teach obscure classes at a small artsy university in Oregon or [...]