A few weeks back, a friend on Facebook sent me this picture.
Cats? Plants? You know I just HAD to have it. I immediately started scouring the interwebs to find where I could buy them. Good ol’ Amazon came to the rescue.
They arrived the other day in the most hilarious box.
(Don’t tell kitty he’s in the slightly less mysterious and less passionate Canada). I decided they looked better without the scarves (which are removable), and I didn’t have any cool tail-like cacti to plant in them, but I did have some Sansevieria Cylindrica (Cylindrical Snake plant) that would work just as well.
Ahahahah – they crack me up every time I look at them.
“Mom…. Dad stole my nap spot. Make him get out of the bed. I don’t want to share!!!”
Here’s the back story. I’ve mentioned before that Rupert is a cat of routine. And he doesn’t like his routine broken. A general day goes like this:
While he always sleeps with us, around sunrise he abandons the bed to watch the birds until Dave gets up to feed the other cats. He doesn’t always eat, but he makes sure to get in the way of feeding as much as possible. Then he runs to the couch, and rolls and flops while Dave has his coffee and pets him.
After his petting session, he comes back upstairs where I am usually still sleeping (I am not an early riser). He usually sits on the end of the bed and waits for me to get up, so he can steal the warm spot. If I’m not out of bed by 9:30, he’ll start pacing and yelling at me to get up – he wants that warm spot! On occasion, he’ll give up and snuggle up on me (almost as good as the warm spot, but he’d rather not share).
Once I’m out of bed, and he’s curled up in the warm spot, he doesn’t budge. He’ll spend the ENTIRE day in bed. Sometimes he’ll come down around dinner time, but most times we don’t see him until after 9 p.m. Then we have to have cat nip, play with the laser light, harass Relic, and just generally be a pain until it’s time for Dave and I to go to bed. Then the whole thing starts all over again.
So it’s very rare to see Rupert in daylight… except when Dave decides to take an afternoon nap. Then I’m subjected to looks from Rupert, as above.
Because apparently a 6lb kitty can’t share a queen-sized bed….
This weeks prompt for the Round Robin quilt was geese, and unlike last week, I had no trouble with it. The hardest part was determining direction I wanted my geese to go.
It also gave me a chance to try the no-waste geese method.
I do need a little more practice with it, but it was a pretty efficient way to make the geese. It’s ideal when you need a lot of geese.
Once my geese were made, it was just a matter of sewing them together and sewing them onto the quilt… easy peasy!
Because I used a pattern fabric for the background of my geese, they don’t pop as much as they could… but I kind of like the more subtle look for this border.
And those corners….
Aren’t quite the same fabric. I ran out of the same stuff, and didn’t have enough for the corners. But that’s the neat thing about this bundle… several of the floral patterns are VERY close…. from a few feet back, they are almost interchangeable.
And now we wait for prompt four! This is so much fun!
The last week at work has had me insanly busy, so other than putting the “plus” border on my Round Robin quilt, I did’t have time to sew a stitch.
By the time Saturday came, I was ready to sew, sew, sew. As I mentioned yesterday, we got lots of cold and snow now, so I needed something cheerful. My baby owl quilt was just the thing. Everything was cut, so it didn’t take very long to finish up the remaining pinwheel flowers.
They got sewn around the owl, and a border added… and boom…
And adorable, colourful quilt top ready for quilting.
As alway, I have the perfect chunk of flannel for the back…
And the purple plaid leftover from Queen of the Crossroads will make excellent binding. If the weather isn’t too bad this weekend (there’s a possibility of a snowstorm), I’ll get it quilted and ready for the shop.
I’ve been a good girl and worked steady and faithfully on Dave’s Valentine socks and as a result…
The first one is finished. Though Relic isn’t too sure about his new career as a footwear model.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to, but I ended up carrying the pattern right down the foot
The cable is only worked on every other column, and only on every seventh row, so it didn’t slow me up too much and kept the knitting interesting. Part of me wished I’d chosen a more cheerful yarn though… we got a dumping of snow, and the temps have dropped so my world is rather cold and grey right now.
Oh well – 12 more days to finish this – then I can cast on for something more cheerful!
It’s about this time of year that I really start pining for my garden. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have it me very hard yet. Maybe it’s because it’s beena fairly mild winter so far… they kept saying there was a polar vortex on the way, but it hasn’t really materialized. And we haven’t had much snow. Every week or so, we get a good dumping, but then it’s melted a day or two later.
Also, I’ve no grand plans for expansion or new things this year… as we hope to be in a new home by summer. It doesn’t make sense to do any more here. Still, on grocery day, I couldn’t resist bring these happy little mini daffodils home with me from the grocery store.
(You can see how green it is outside through the window).
None of my indoor plants are blooming, but they are all doing pretty well. I got a few new planters for some of my succulents.
It;s an odd little trio of friends (elephant, owl and bear) but they came as a set.
The owl hold a pup from one of my plants – it’s my first time propagating them, so hopefully he does well. The parent got a cool new planter too.
I found him on Amazon and he was so cool, I just couldn’t resist. He’s hanging off a curtain rod in the bathroom right now, but he’ll get a proper hook soon.
I wanted to repot all the babies on this big beast (which was started as a cutting from one of my Mom’s plants, about seven years ago), but those babies are rooted around the momma so tight and so deep, I’m going to have to depot the whole thing to get them apart. It will have to wait until spring, when I can do it outside!
Is there anything green and growing in your world right now?
This week’s prompt for my Round Robin quilt was “plus signs” and I admit, I struggled with it a bit. I couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work with my quilt. Piano keys work quite nicely with Jane Austen… but plus signs….? They don’t seem very Austen-ish.
So I pondered it for a day or two. Finally, as Burton and I were cat-napping on the couch,
…it came to me. The next day, I got cutting and sewing.
Four plus signs were made, and then I got to sewing strips.
Not long after that, my plus signs became the cornerstone of a pretty blue border.
I love how it looks, and I’m definitely enjoying this challenge!
With the Winters Frost socks off the needles (thank you for all the lovely comments – the day I posted we got hammered with snow, so I finished them just in time!), I had nothing else on the needles. At all!
That just won’t do. And with Valentine’s Day just a few short weeks away, I really should be motoring on a pair of socks for Dave. It’s pretty standard that I give Dave a pair of socks for V-day (and some jelly beans and jujubes). So now….
… that’s just what I’m doing. The pattern is Walking with Emma. It’s a nice, unisex, cabled sock pattern with four different variations in the pattern. I’m doing variation C. The yarn is some Alley Cat BFL I dyed up in man colours for Dave a while ago (last year I think, but it might have been the year before). AS you can see it’s a lovely mix of blues. I worried it might be a touch too busy for the cables. I tried it on his Petty Harbour socks last year, and it was definitely too much for them.
But it’s not too bad here. And those cables will pop even more when stretched out on his leg and foot. Now I’ve got about 18 days to finish them. It will be tight, but I’m pretty sure I can do it!
Wandering Cat Studio 