@)(!# Cat - January 26, 2024

Yesterday, as I was literally on my way out the door to go to the grocery store, the telephone rang.  I came back inside and answered it.  It was Nanny.  

"Do you have anything that will cut styrofoam?"

I stammered a bit as images of styrofoam in various shapes and sizes flashed through my mind.  Before I could ask what kind of foam she was cutting, she went on to explain that she was working on her ottoman.  "I took it apart - and it was hard! - but I got all the old fabric off, and there were six holes in the bottom of the board, and - "

"Nanny, what kind of styrofoam is it?  Is it the crumbly white stuff, or are you trying to cut the spongy green cushion foam?"

Back-story:  Just before Christmas, Nanny called to ask if I had any fabric that would be suitable for re-upholstering her ottoman.  (This ottoman is probably 30 years old.  It came with a glider-rocker, which went to the dump a long time ago, but the matching glider-ottoman survives, albeit with its insides showing in places.)  You might remember that earlier this year I purged my fabric stash - gave away multiple kitchen garbage bags full of fabric.  Yes, there was a wide range of upholstery fabric in those bags.  Unfortunately, I had not kept any, but I had kept a few yards of other kinds of fabric. When we hung up the phone, I went down to the sewing room, and there, on the table, lay some floral print fabric that I had been using to make cosmetic bags for Christmas gifts.  I'd already whacked on it, but there were at least two yards left - plenty for the ottoman - and it was the exact colors that Nanny uses in her living room.  I folded it up and took it to her that very minute (and used other fabrics for the bags).  When I got to her house, she said, "Oh, I wasn't in a hurry.  I'm not going to do this until after Christmas.  By the way, do you have any foam for the top cushion?"  I had kept ONE PIECE of 2"-thick cushion foam, and I came home and got it, and took it to her right then, so that I would not forget, and so that she would have it when she got ready to work.  

So, yesterday was the day she decided to tackle the project.  Yes, she was trying to cut the spongy green cushion foam.  She had scissors and knives but didn't think she could cut evenly with them.  

I had a utility knife and a scalpel, and a pair of spring-loaded scissors, and since it appeared that she was in the middle of her project, I took them to her and helped her cut foam.  As I was about to leave for the grocery store, she asked if I had any thicker fabric, for she was afraid that what I'd already given her might be too thin to hold up to the wear.  I'd had the same worries.  The fabric would be fine for throw pillows, which don't get much abuse, but Nanny USES her ottoman - her feet swell, and she props them on it - and a sturdier fabric would have been better. 

As it happened, I had unearthed a folded piece of unbleached canvas as I was inventorying my stash before Christmas.  When I got back from the grocery store, I took the canvas to her and shot out the back door before she could lure me to the dining room where the ottoman parts were spread out.  

She's tricky that way. 

* * * * * * * * 

Last week's snow/ice storm jacked up the mail/package delivery around here.  Every Monday, UPS or somebody delivers The Husband a box of pre-cooked "healthy" meals that he takes to work for lunch. He didn't get a shipment last week when it was icy, and this week's shipment (so I thought) didn't arrive until Tuesday.   Late yesterday, another one came, and I realized that someone, somewhere, had screwed up.  I checked the shipping date on the new box and went to check the date on the previous box, which I had left on the back porch, next to the settee.  The porch lighting was too dim for me to make out the tiny print, so I got a magnifying glass from the house and went back out to examine the box.  

I was bent over the box with my magnifying glass, trying to make out the date, when a cat meowed RIGHT IN MY EAR.  Startled the crap out of me - WE DON'T HAVE A CAT! - and I jumped back.  

A big gray & white cat with a head the size of a softball was perched on the back of the settee.  He has appeared on the critter-cam a few times.  For a minute, I was like, "WTF!" but remembered that earlier in the day, I had propped the door open to let in some fresh air.  Hence the cat.  I said, "GET OUT OF HERE, CAT!"

And the cat said, I don't want to.  It's raining.

The nerve of him!  

I said, "OUT!" and pointed to the door, and he eventually went out in the drizzle, but he grumbled and complained all the way down the sidewalk.  Too bad for him.  He has a house, somewhere, as is evident by his physique; let him get to it.

I closed the door behind him.  The very idea . . . . 

When The Husband got home a little later, the cat was sitting on the roof of the Wrangler, like he owned it, and wasn't inclined to move when The Husband tried to shoo him off.

Cats have no concept of ownership, unless it's that everything belongs to them.

Rain - January 25, 2024

It's been drizzly and foggy for the past couple of days, but at least it's not cold.  Last week's single-digit temperatures gave me all I wanted of winter weather.

I'm itching to start some seeds.  Yesterday I ran across an internet article that suggested mid-February as a good time to start tomatoes.  I could probably start broccoli and cabbage now, but my "incubator" is full of trauma patients:

My sweet sister-in-law gave me these plants (a cyclamen and a gerbera daisy) for my birthday, back in the summer.  They were both in bloom at the time.  I set them on the back porch where I could see them, expecting that they would eventually poop out and need better growing conditions to bloom again, but they continued to thrive and kept blooming their heads off.  I brought them inside around Thanksgiving and put them under the grow light, 12 hours each day.  They both bloomed again, but then they started looking puny. The grow light may have been too close, and I might have let them get too dry between waterings, once or twice.  

I would like to keep these guys alive, but don't really know what to do with them.  The cyclamen needs to go dormant, but I know myself; if I take that pot to the utility room, where it's dark most of the time, I will forget about it.  The daisy will need more light than I can give it on a windowsill, but it's gotta vacate the incubator so I can plant vegetable seeds.  

Or should I try to sprout the vegetables in the cold frame, which is still sitting empty in the middle of the back yard?  My sister might know.

I case you're wondering, the dead stick in the murky vase between the cyclamen and the gerbera is a rosebush cutting I tried (unsuccessfully) to root.  Parts of the stem stayed green for a long time and I kept hoping . . . alas, it now looks dead all the way up.  That plastic bag in the front contains a bowl full of dirt that has seen violet seeds, gerbera daisy seeds, hardy hibiscus seeds, none of which ever sprouted.  What did sprout was some sort of funky green moss and about a million gnats.  I keep smashing gnats through the plastic bag (I dare not open it!), but they keep coming.

Tuesday - January 23, 2024

Forty-seven degrees and raining this morning.  After last week's single-digit temps, I'll take it!

Today is Tuesday, painting class day.  One of the classmates sent a group text yesterday saying that our teacher, Gail, has covid and won't be at class, but this classmate has keys to the store and will open it up for those who want to paint and visit.  In December, I started an oil painting of an old rusty tractor.  The plan was to give it to my "son from another mother" for a Christmas gift.  However, I had forgotten how long it takes oil paint to dry; I should have started in July.  I will work on it today, but I really wish Gail could be there, because I could use some advice.

* * * * * * * * 

After yesterday's disappointing testing of the fringe embroidery designs, I sat down at the computer and pulled up copies of the designs so I could see how they were built.  I ended up trying to edit my own flamingo design to add fringe to it, but it was a big pain in the butt, one to which I was unwilling to subject myself right then.  But I learned some stuff in the process, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.  If/when I have a need for a fluffy flamingo, I'll know how to make one.  

* * * * * * * * 

A couple of years ago, I was given a book of Beatrice Potter tales - big, thick thing with ALL of her stories and illustrations.  I briefly admired it and shelved it - was delighted to have it - but never got around to looking closely at it until yesterday, when it occurred to me that it might be instructive to my critter-drawing.  

Boy, was it ever.

She made a squirrel recognizable as a squirrel with just a few strokes of a pen and some watercolor. Scratch, scratch, swish.  Pure magic.  

Each tale in the book is prefaced with a bit of history about the story - when/where it was written, and to whom she sent it.  Interesting stuff.  But man . . . the stories . . . .   When Benjamin Bunny goes missing, his father goes looking for him, switch in hand, and whips him when he finds him.  (I am old enough not to be appalled at the thought of whipping a kid with a switch.  As a child, I suffered one or two of them, myself, and will freely admit to having laid-in to mine with a wooden kitchen spoon on occasion.)  And Old Brown Owl, when he has had enough of Squirrel Nutkin, snatches the squirrel up by the tail, intending to skin him.  (I have never skinned a squirrel, but I have eaten one.)  

Conclusion:  There needs to be a Beatrix Potter revival.

The Melting - January 22, 2024

Yesterday morning when I got out of bed (at 4:30!), it was NINE DEGREES outside.  This morning's 33 degrees feels positively balmy.  Our yard is still blanketed with crunchy snow.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Little Rotten Baby's 3rd birthday party.  Her family tricked her with candles on her cake that re-light after they're blown out.  It was kind of funny.  What was not all that funny was her riding her new tricycle through a house with about 15 people in it.  Nobody's toes were safe!  

Friday, I ventured out on the icy roads to find a present for the birthday girl.  With Christmas just three weeks ago, there wasn't much she needed (or didn't already have), and with the road conditions still treacherous, I was hesitant to travel very far to find a gift.  I ended up at a dollar store in the little town down the road, where I found a baby doll with a baby-doll-sized toilet that makes flushing noises when you push a button.  I thought this was particularly funny since the LRB is currently struggling with potty-training.  

This morning, Granddaughter #1 is heading back to college w-a-y across the state.  She was supposed to have left yesterday, but the college cancelled classes for today, so she got an extra day at home.  I am worried about her drive back to school.  She is a cautious driver, but the interstate traffic between here and school is a racetrack on a good day, and with last week's crazy weather, she may run into some bad roads. 

I don't know what I will do today.  There are several half-finished watercolor portrait masterpieces littering the surfaces in the sewing room (wait, I said I was going to call it a "studio," didn't I) - in my studio.  Most of them have several badly-done previous versions in a box under the table; they are awful, and I kept only because I can use their backsides for practice.  Each unfinished masterpiece is at the scary point, the faces.  FACES ARE SO FREAKING HARD.  

Also on my mind for the last month or so is a massive illustration project I'd like to do.  Parts of it have deadlines, and one of those deadlines is not far off.  At this point, I'm waiting on email responses and hesitant to crank up the machines until I'm sure I'll be allowed to do what I'm considering.

I just downloaded a couple of machine embroidery designs from other digitizers.  Both of them use a technique that I've been wanting to learn.

I should go do that.

* * * * * * * * 

Well, I went and did that.  

Let's say I am less than impressed with my two purchases.  :-\

The technique I am trying to learn is machine-embroidered fringe.  While goofing around on Etsy yesterday, I saw an embroidered flamingo with fringe feathers.  I thought, How cute! and sat down with a pencil and sketchbook to see if I could figure out how it was done.  I could not, so I went back this morning and bought the design so that I could see how this digitizer did it.  While I was there, I looked for other fringed designs and found a floral spray that would be pretty on a zippered cosmetic bag, so I got that one, too.

Let me preface the following critique with one thing that I did that might have made a difference in the way these designs turned out:  I reduced the size of BOTH designs by a miniscule amount. - like 8/100ths of an inch - to make them fit my hoop.  It is possible that this reduction could have caused the problems I had when I sewed the designs.

In the case of the flamingo, the design path was not well thought out, and all of the stitching was very dense.  There were unnecessary jumps - one even caught on the embroidery foot as it was jumping to the next object and nearly yanked the fabric out of the hoop.  And my thread broke like crazy.  Once a fringed design finishes sewing, the bobbin threads must be clipped to allow the thread to loop.  I chose to sew the smallest design in the package, it was a CHORE to do the clipping - took me close to an hour to get it "good enough."  I will try one of the larger sizes in the package, and not jack around with the dimensions, and see if it does any better.  As it turned out, while the flamingo is totally cute, because of the time it takes to clip those threads, it is probably not a design that is practical for mass production (which is what I was considering).

The floral spray - man! - I am even less sure that my re-sizing caused the problems it produced.  Re-sizing slightly DOWN should not have caused the skipped stitches that my test produced.  And there were other problems, like running stitches instead of trims/jumps, that went right across the design.  These flaws were not in the Etsy pictures of the sew-out.  But the real trouble hit when the machine started sewing the fringed parts of the design.  I was puttering around in the studio while the machine was going, so I do not know how many times it sewed over those parts of the design, but they were THICK, and even broke my needle.  I'm scared to test it again!

But now that I've had some first-hand experience with the fringe technique, I think I'll go digitize a flamingo of my own.  ;)

Thursday - January 19, 2024

Yesterday, for the first time since last Friday, I set foot outside this house.  Don't get excited; I only went to the mailbox, and I only did that because I'd been expecting some paints in the mail and did not want to leave them out in freezing temperatures.  But once I was out, I did a walk-about in the yard and encountered this in our driveway:

 

Those are the biggest bird tracks I have ever seen (sunglasses for perspective).  I expect that they were made by a blue heron, which we occasionally see at our pond.  

While I was out, I grabbed the SD card from the critter cam to see if it had captured the intruder, but all that was on the card were a couple of neighborhood cats passing through and The Husband puttering around in the snow.

Yesterday, finally, the temperature got above freezing for a little while.  Then, last night, another cold blast arrived to re-freeze the ice on the roads.  The computer says it's 28 degrees outside now.  I expect that driving conditions are treacherous this morning. 

Yesterday was the Little Rotten Baby's 3rd birthday.  There will be a birthday party for her Saturday, and I have not bought her a gift.  With Christmas just 3 weeks ago, there's not much she needs or wants.  My plan was to go out shopping for something, but the road conditions prevented it.  I should have ordered something for her earlier in the week, but, frankly, the time got away from me and I did not realize how close we were to her birthday.  Can you say, "Bad Grandmama?"  I will have to make it up to her.  I just hope the roads will be clear enough by Saturday for us to make it to her party.

It's he-ere - January 16, 2024

Well, the snow and cold temperatures I have been dreading arrived this past weekend, as predicted.  Temperatures have dipped down into single digits and have not gotten above the 'teens for days.  We got 3 or 4 inches of snow, enough to paralyze a Southerner's world.   The Husband and I were both off work Monday for MLK Day, and both of our offices were closed because of road conditions Tuesday.  He went to work today, but I didn't - hang "office day" in this kind of weather!  I was expecting to go to the office for a meeting Friday morning, but that has been cancelled.  I haven't set foot outside the house since last Friday night's margarita outing and probably won't, until this Friday night, when we'll likely brave the roads for our weekly "toot," icy or not.  I do not have clothing for these conditions!

So I have spent the past four days essentially trapped in the house with The Husband.  Fortunately, we get along.  Between the two of us, we've watched about a thousand you-tube videos, sometimes in the same room at the same time, sometimes not.  He gassed up a propane heater for the back porch, which makes it bearable out here (yes, I'm shivering on the porch right now) for a little while at a time.  

Mostly, I've been drawing yard critters playing musical instruments, and making up stories about them in my head.  Or vice versa.  Whatever.  I've also been watching graphics editor tutorials so that I can eventually DO SOMETHING with the drawings, once they're all done, to justify all the time I'm wasting.  ;)

  

Settings - January 13, 2024

Yesterday, I finally got the fiddle-playing squirrel right.  Well, almost right.  

I started over instead of trying to fix past mistakes.  His hands are finally positioned correctly, and his face now looks like a squirrel instead of a bobcat.

(Bobcats.  There's one in the neighborhood.  I haven't seen it, but I heard it squall down by the pond early one morning.  Presumably, there are others nearby.  Now I'll have to draw one.)

Anyway . . . . 

The animal band must have a meeting spot where they jam.  My next challenge is to draw it.

Obviously, it needs to be under a nut tree.

I sketched a background earlier this week and painted it with watercolors.  After I painted the trees, I realized that the colors I'd used for the trees in the distance were summer colors, whereas the nut tree leaves were autumn colors.  AND the perspective was all wrong.  The scenery I want should be a cozy setting; the one I've painted is an expansive view.  Since I've already screwed it up, I decided to play with it.  It is laying on a table in the studio, and every time I walk by it, I pick up a paintbrush and flick in some grasses in the foreground.  It's working to tighten up the view and cozy up the feel of the place.