Lonely Sewing

August 20, 2022August 15, 2022 Lazy Saturday Quilts4 Comments

My sewing room has been a bit lonely the past few weeks. I’m still sharing it with Hubby, who works from home most days. The dogs still wander in to have a snooze while I sew, but someone is missing. My sweet girl Rosie, overseer of all the projects (as you can see from the photo below), crossed the Rainbow Bridge a few weeks ago.

The sewing room was her domain, my chair her favorite bed. (I’ll probably never be able to sweep every last hair from the seat.) Whenever I moved her from the chair to her bed to work on anything, it wasn’t long before she had her face right up in my face, hoping for a few snuggles.

Rosie and her sister Belle who died in early 2020 came to live with us (and our other two cats…yes, that made 4) when they were a day old. We fed them with pipettes and, later, bottles. We burped them and, at the risk of too much information, we wiped their fannies with damp cotton balls to simulate a mamma cat cleaning them which makes them go to the bathroom. We got up in the middle of the night to do all these things for several weeks. It was just like having human babies in the house again.

It’s a strange time we find ourselves in. We are cat-free. Other than for a few months after we got married and a few months after we moved into our new home 20+ years ago, I’ve had a cat in my life since I was 5.

It’s not like we’re without any pets now. We still have two dogs and two tiny potatoes with legs (guinea pigs who actually belong to our daughter), but it feels strange to be cat-less. There is nothing quite like snuggling with a cat, no sound like a quiet purr in your ear. There is nothing quite like being woken up in the middle of the night by a cat stepping on your neck, no comfort like that same cat curling up next to your cheek.

But for now, as we enter this stage of life where our kids are heading into (or are already in) adulthood, and we think about traveling a bit more while we are still young enough to enjoy big adventures, we’ll probably stay cat-free for a while.

I did venture into my lonely room for a bit this past week to work on an English paper-piecing project. This one has been in the works for several years. As you can see, I am moving at a snail’s pace. I’m not much of a fan of hand-sewing, but adding to this project was a relaxing way to spend a couple afternoons. I should probably keep at it now that I’ve got some momentum going. We’ll see.

crafts · Quilting · Quilts · sewing · Uncategorized

A Tiny Terror

March 12, 2022March 10, 2022 Lazy Saturday QuiltsLeave a comment

Last weekend I wrote of the two tiny tyrants who share our house, or as our daughter calls them, the Guinea pigs. This week, let me introduce you to the other tiny terror in our lives:

Her name is Rosie. She’s 17 and spoiled absolutely rotten. (She would disagree on the spoiled rotten bit for two reasons. #1 – She has to live with 2 dogs and #2 – She occasionally has to wait to get her bedtime treat longer than she would like.)

Rosie, and her sister Belle (who died in early 2020), came to live with us when they were one day old. We then became a, gasp, four cat family at the time, having adopted two males from the shelter four years previously. (Sadly, the boys died several years ago.) Rosie and Belle had to be fed with bottles (even in the middle of the night), burped like babies, and taught how to do cat stuff (like use a litter box) by the humans in the family.

I was the only mama Rosie ever knew. And I didn’t shove her out of the “nest” as a normal mama cat would. Thus, a monster was created.

She’s clingy, insisting on sharing my chair when I sit down to sew. If she’s not on the chair behind me, forcing me to teeter on the very edge, she’s sitting on whatever project I’m attempting to work on. If I’m lucky she might lay in her bed nearby. Chances of that improve if I’ve got a space heater running nearby so she can toast her little whiskers.

At night she insists on sleeping as close to my face as possible, occasionally treating me to a neck stomping as she settles into position. As a person with allergies, let me just say that it’s a real treat having a cat sleep right under my nose every night. We tried evicting her from the bedroom, but her meowing skills are top notch. She can meow for hours at a time and often does so if her nightly treat is running late.

Her most recent transgression had nothing to do with neck stomping or lengthy bouts of meowing and put her firmly in top place on the naughty list for the week. Displeased with the state of 1 of her 4 (!!) litter boxes, she left me a stinky “present” right on top of the Lemon Pepper Quilt I was quilting.

I disposed of the “present” and spot cleaned the area, mentally cussing the entire time because I knew a spot clean would not suffice. There was no way I would put that quilt on the back of the couch or snuggle underneath it until it was washed.

I ordered some Shout color-catchers, knowing I did not want a repeat performance of what happened when I washed the bed quilt that took me 19 years to complete. (Blue backing that had been previously washed bled onto the front cream stars, which might not have been stopped even with a color-catcher.) As this quilt was a mix of whites and blacks and pale greens, I worried it could all be ruined with one washing.

After finishing the quilting (straight line meandering and a lot of it!) and binding AND taking photos just in case something bad happened, I said a prayer and tossed it in the wash. Thankfully, it came out looking perfect.

So, here it is, the Lemon Pepper Quilt that was on my UFO (unfinished objects) list and the third project knocked off the list this year:

*Luna is carefully checking out those quilting stitches.* *No word yet on if she approves.*

*Update on the Guinea pig hay bags from last week: Apparently I made the holes in the hay bags slightly too large. The boys are able to yank the hay out a bit too easily, thus creating mounds of hay on the floor of their enclosure which they might or might not eat. They will, for sure, act as if they have nothing to eat when the hay bags are empty despite these mounds of perfectly good hay.

Quilting · Quilts · sewing

Scrappy Cat 2.0

January 18, 2020 Lazy Saturday QuiltsLeave a comment

My Scrappy Cat table runner used up a fair amount of the scraps I had left over from making a larger quilt that I will share in the future, but there were still so many scraps left. Since I love the way the fabrics look together, I wasn’t quite ready to split them up by color and relegate them to my scrap boxes. I knew I could get at least one more project out of them. I liked the way the table runner turned out and how cheerful it looked in the kitchen, so I decided to make something similar for the kitchen island. Rather than doing a long runner, though, as I would usually do, I decided to mix things up a bit.

Using the pattern for a block named “Memory” from Quilter’s Mix and Match Blocks, I made four blocks, each measuring approximately 12 inches. I used the cats as the focal point, placing them in the center of the block. As I was dealing with scraps and wasn’t paying close enough attention as I was fussy cutting, the cats did not end up exactly in the center of each square. I shrugged this off, knowing from experience as a cat owner that cats are often found where they shouldn’t be, and let them be off-center. (Note the photo of Belle. She’s on the kitchen table, where she doesn’t belong, daring me to tell her to move.)

I used the Folded Corner Clipper by Creative Grids, a very helpful tool that I just had to purchase after seeing it demonstrated at InterQuilten in Traverse City, Michigan. No more drawing sewing lines on fabric squares when making flying geese blocks or when adding a triangle to a corner? Sign me up. It also eliminates the need to cut off the extra bits after sewing AND gives you two leftover triangles that are more useful as the edges are nice and neat.

Not to waste the perfectly good opportunity that was presented when I trimmed off all those little triangles, I sewed them up as I was sewing the blocks for my project and they’ll be perfect for some other project someday. (See photo below. Aren’t they adorable?)

As I’m still attempting to purge more batting, I found a piece in my scraps that was just the right size for my project. Yea! For quilting, I’m using both white thread and the bright pink I used for the Scrappy Cat table runner. Check back soon to see the finished project!