Tag Archives: cat

Thing 15: Frederick Quilt

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has tutorials on just the kinds of things I like to make. This time it’s the cat quilt. My cat’s never seen a fish, and for some reason I thought sewing a circle would be hard after my lumpy catnip-toy experience, so I decided to be clever and do a children’s book cover. I suspect my cat at least saw a mouse when he was living under a porch before I took him home, so I chose Frederick, the art for which lends itself very well to the appliqué technique used in the EMSL project. (I used the catnip-toy fabric for the back.)

Thing 15: Frederick Quilt Thing 15: Frederick Quilt - Back (Detail)

It wasn’t until I was actually sitting down at the sewing machine that I realized I’d set myself up for a crash course in sewing on a curve. I think I did OK, although I’m starting to see why quilters like having fancy anti-pucker features in their machines. And if my cat could just pull himself away from the cat chaise, we might see what he thinks of his new quilt.

Princess (landscape)

Thing-a-day 2

So far so good on www.thing-a-day.com this year. Mr Bun is not thrilled about my new sewing machine, so today’s thing is for him.

Thing 2 Front and Back

This particular thing is made of silly Valentine’s Day fabric from the remnants bin (I know, hard to believe!), stuffed with batting with a fragrant catnip center. I felt a bit bad about my sloppy hemming – I have a lot to learn about sewing (machine and manual) on a curve. Did he like it anyway?

Entrapment Going In for the Kill

Oh yeah.

Snowed In

Snowed In

Seattle usually gets a snowstorm that washes away in a couple of days, maybe once or twice in a winter. Occasionally, it’s a lot of snow + a cold system that keeps it on the ground for a week. This year it was multiple storms in quick succession with occasional, desultory warming leaving zones of slush and ice, making this hilly region a disaster area for a week and a half. Even our best insulated family member is completely over it.

Tired of My Camera

Tired of My Camera

Three-Day Novel was a trial for my cat, too. I was around the apartment all the time. I was staring at the screen and not paying attention to him. I was going back and forth between the kitchen and my computer and not stopping to fill his bowl. Or replace the (perfectly good but apparently dull) food therein.

Monday afternoon, he looked so pretty in the sun that I came over to take some pictures of him, and he was having absolutely none of that.

Rescue Me

I live in my current apartment but instead of a U-shaped hallway around a stairwell, it has one long hallway to the back of the building with a single door leading to a back yard and patio. Some of the neighbors leave the door open, reasoning that the back yard is fairly secure. We let our pets out there.

My next-door neighbor is a movie buff who collects weird things that had belonged to the stars. She works in a law office or maybe some kind of political organization, and she isn’t home very much. I work at home so I can spend a lot of time outdoors during the day. Sometimes my cat takes walks with me.

A mountain lion had started hanging around the building. It is large and black. Sometimes it stretches out in the street or on the sidewalk outside the building. I wave my arms and yell whenever I see it. I stop letting my cat out. If he whines a lot when I go to the door, I tuck him into my shirt instead of letting him walk on his own. Soon, every outing involves seeing the mountain lion, and because we are in the middle of the city, the Park Service refuses to come and remove it.

I come home one day surprised not to see it in the street. When I get inside, I see it in the hallway, lying on the floor between my door and my neighbor’s. She is at work, and I go there to return her keys. She works in an office that circles around 2 sets of escalators and takes up several floors. She is avoiding me, and I keep catching little glimpses of her from the escalator well. The receptionist tries to track her down for me, but although she is extremely competent, my neighbor eludes her as well. Finally we speak. She says she doesn’t understand why there is a problem and repeatedly asks me to keep my voice down because she is at work. Whenever I start to give her the keys, she pushes my hand away. She talks to me for a few minutes at a time, then vanishes, then reappears, over and over.

I go back to our apartment building, still with her keys, and our hallway has been transformed into a garden courtyard. Another neighbor is crouching down, reaching out to the mountain lion, making kitty-kitty noises at it. I scream at the neighbor, grab him, and push him behind me. Then I wave my arms and yell at the mountain lion, walking toward it on tip toe. The mountain lion does not move.

I open the neighbor’s front door, and the mountain lion brushes past me, leaping into the apartment, where it finds a filthy life-size doll representing a child of about 6 years old, lying in the middle of a main room cluttered and stacked with memorabilia. The doll has human hair on its head, delicately painted features, and one remaining eye. The mountain lion rolls around in the small clear space with the doll and then drags it by an arm out of the building through the back yard and disappears.