Chicken

Hickety pickety my fine hen
She lays eggs for gentlemen -
Some pastel, some purple, some cheerful and gay
Some spotty, some silly, our fine hens doth lay!

Ladies and gentlemen,
I am pleased to finally share with you -

Chicken!

A whole coop of Chickens, in fact.

Meet Tilly- our Buff Orpington

Edwina, our not-so-Barred-Rock Plymouth
and Snowball, our Leghorn,
so named by the girls after reading this book.


All fat and comfortable-looking,

with that ain't-no-one-gonna-ruffle-our -feathers look.

The idea came from the girls when we were reading
The Children of Willow Farm last year.

When Emily and Jenna are not being princesses,
fairies or Narnians, they like to play farm. Specifically,
they did a lot of egg-gathering after reading the
Willow Farm book. And I thought, well, they need
some real chickens. Life-size ones, that they
could tuck under their arms and carry about
like pretend-real farmers.
Chickens that look like chickens
and lay eggs
of the plastic dollar-store variety
(we have a ton of those from past Easters)
as well as the more outrageous wooden kind.
The girls and I painted these last fall. Jenna and Kate,
especially, love the feel and sound of the wooden eggs
knocking together in their little hands, but they are,
after all, only decorative (and luridly so!)

Unlike the plain, pastel, plastic kind

that, if sat on long enough,

might just hatch out somethings teeny and peepy.

Ah yes, an altogether happy brood.
This must be what Chicken Playdates look like:

Are you guffawing yet? Oh if you could have seen
me when I finished Tilly last October (yes, the kids
have been playing Chicken Farm for what, five
months now) and popped out egg after egg in my
sewing room all by my giddy self, so relieved was I
to finally get her out of my head. And heard me laugh
out loud because she was by far the funniest,
funniest, funniest thing I'd ever made. The girls
couldn't believe their eyes when they
saw her lay an egg.

Wish I'd gotten their reaction on video.

I love being a mom of little kids!

I am so glad that you finally got to
meet our Chickens (aren't they silly?)!
And just in time for Spring, too, when the
farmyard welcomes its animal babies.

Want your own egg-laying Chicken?

Here's the pattern

containing the templates and instructions to make both Chicken

and her Chick (plastic egg not included).

They were so easy to make that we hatched
enough to run Chicken Daycare while their
moms were out Doing Hen Stuff.

The pattern is an instant pdf download with 8 pages
of instructions and 4 pages of templates.
The Chickens lay eggs when they are squeezed
(they are popped in through an opening in their backs)
and it took Emily and Jenna only a little practice to
begin coaxing eggs out of Tilly, Snowball and Edwina!

Given that Chicken was inspired by a farm book,
and a person can't have a fun farm with only chickens,
there might just be more livestock appearing here soon!

Go here to buy the Chicken Pattern and read the download instructions.