The State of Illinois Department of Agriculture has a program that recognizes farms that have been farmed continuously by the same family for set periods of times. There are three designations that can be applied for: a centennial farm, a sesquicentennial farm, and a bicentennial farm.

Falling in between the centennial and bicentennial designations, the sesquicentennial farm designation marks that awkward and hard-to-reach number of 150 years, and that is the age the farm reached in 2002.

This is how one of the buildings looked in June of 2012 at the 160 year mark:

The land this farmhouse is built on was originally purchased by John Buchta, a Prussian immigrant, who after his arrival in St. Louis, had gone to California and mined for gold in the Gold Rush.

After some success, he returned to the St. Louis area and bought 120 acres of farm land in Madison County, Illinois; those same 120 acres are still in the family and still being farmed.

Because of this, when my Buchta relations have a family reunion, it is about both the land, and the people who have inhabited it, so when I decided to make yarn bomb to commemorate this year’s long distance reunion, I settled on this particular building because it was the easiest one for me to star with, and yesterday I finished all sixteen squares of the yarn bomb:

Which meant that today, I had to join all sixteen of the squares.

I started by joining them top-to-bottom into four rows

Then I joined the sides:

and all that was left to do was to staple it to my back fence.

Which I did:

There are a few bells and whistles I would like to add to the piece, and as soon as I finish work on the Hello Kitty inspired great granny square, I will trick it out just a touch more, moving forward one stitch at a time.