It’s on. I registered for Thing-a-Day again. They’re using Posterous this year, so I created a Posterous stream for it. I am hoping that this judgmental cat will help keep me on track.

Is there anything else on Posterous I should be following?

Lately, however, it has acquired pride of place in his rotation:

So I ripped out all my failed stitches and tried French knots in 5 different sizes … in these breaking waves. Yay!

The eyes are much lighter in this picture only partly because they light was different; in the first picture, the fabric and floss were still wet from being rinsed.

This is from a simple design I sketched (and then, oddly, ended up reversing horizontally when I freehanded the silhouette onto the felt).

Learning a different stitch (split stitch). I made a nest out of herringbone stitches, but it ended up looking just plain awful!

[larger]

I don’t really know how to explain this Victorian streak I’m manifesting, but this month is turning out to be a good excuse to try out lots of little things.

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.

I ended up making a lot more cuts to get more spreads and thus needing to “bind” my book, which I did with jewelry wire and beads. With less cutting than I originally used but 1 cut more than the single-sided version calls for, the book still doesn’t need to have a spine or stitching and can have 4 spreads. I used the following pattern (in which you would fold on the dotted lines and cut on the solid lines):

My goal was to do all the printing on a single sheet of paper, and then fold and cut to get a tiny book that needed no binding. (I did glue the blank [backs of the] pages.) And I got this:

There. Now I can move on to accordion books and stab-stitch books.

Last week, I noticed that someone had spontaneously added some protection in the form of a frou-frou drinks umbrella to my dinosaur installation (Thing 3: Dinosaur Plea):

Not a moment too soon, either, because, starting with very small ones far up in the stairwell, and moving down and getting larger, our dinosaur became directly threatened.

Followed a few days later by about what you’d expect:

Next week: a 2-part conclusion!

I’ve always felt bad about the way those pages looked as the years went on – a project that clearly went nowhere but described as if it were, in fact, still yesterday.

So today I tore down those old pages and replaced them with a simple container for the cover art, with links to each (available) artist (one is MIA). The first piece I acquired for the project was this wonderful illustration of Medusa, by Hope Larson:

I haven’t fixed the text alignment further down the page, but you know what? It’s almost midnight, and I’m tired, so this is good enough!

This tasseled cushion (velvet, metallic fabric for edging, batting, silvery tassels, pewter button) is the final piece of my modification of the Cat Chaise. The cushion is tied to the frame of the chaise with silvery ribbon (hidden from prying claws).

How does he feel about it?

Mr Bun seemed traumatized by the unnecessary destruction of a cardboard box, but I predict he will have napped on it within 12 hours.

The plea reads:

We don’t need manned missions into space! That is mere vanity! For now, we are getting better information from probes and rovers! Let NASA focus on cataloguing, tracking, and developing strategies to deflect meteors that are heading for Earth! Learn from our experience! Quickly! Before it is too late!

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?

Oh yeah.

This particular thing is made of felt, buttons, and polyester batting, and is inspired by this: www.geist.com/comix – Thanks, Eve Corbel!