Petey teaches the kittens

I made a faux spider for the kitties. Petey demonstrated what it's for & Ashley tried to grab it too. Junior just watched it. I took Junior for her shots today, she gained almost 12 ounces in 10 days. I think that she will outgrow Ashley very soon.

Portrait of Jesus

As you can see, the cross on his chest that helped give him his name has stretched with his weight gain & is no longer as distinct as it used to be. He weighs 19+ pounds & doesn't appear to be losing any weight despite the diet cat food & the active games that the kittens get him into.

Wild vicious feral kitten

Yeah, right, so evil!. Junior loves Charlie. She thinks that he's her own private jungle gym. She'll cuddle with me, but only as a second choice. She's enjoying playing with Ashley. Right now, Ashley weighs more & has much longer legs, but with an estimated 1-2 months difference in their ages, we're betting that Junior will outgrow Ashley very soon. For those who are interested in quilts, that's charlie's favorite & the first real quilt that I ever made.







Look at those short little legs & that round little baby face.

caught

Bill Bailey is at the vet's waiting for a spay & Junior (her female look-a-like kitten) is living in our bathroom & being treated for an upper respiratory infection with gooky eyes. 3 more kittens to catch & tame.

update on wild kitties

They don't like me to be outside with them. I'm only allowed to sit at the far end of the porch so these pictures were taken through the storm door. A steady diet of kitten chow seems to be making very healthy kitties. I've set a Havaheart trap baited with tuna to try to catch Bill Bailey for spaying. 12 hours & I haven't caught her yet.

My kitties are NOT spoiled... (well maybe a little)

At left, Petey & Ashley playing "Whack-a-mole" with a custom designed Hoover box.



Feeling a need to pamper my indoor kitties a bit, I sat down a few nights ago with my leather/fur scrap bag & made a few kitty toys Clockwise from center top: gray fox leg fur with buckskin tail, white snakeskin with suede tail, blue fox with snakeskin tail, ittybitty white buckskin with suede tail, muskrat(?) with green snakeskin belly & suede tail & white buckskin with white snakeskin belly & tail & a blue fox mohawk. All but the gray fox have noisemakers inside- pill bottles or small tins with beads inside or jingle bells. Ashley prefers the furry ones.

Wild kittens

So beautiful! but I'm sad. I've been trying to tame a stray kitty since July, so I could take her to get spayed & have an outdoor cat. We've made some progress-from running as fast as she could if she even caught a glimpse of me anywhere in the yard to letting me open the storm door a crack & drop treats on the door mat while she sits 2 feet away or letting me come slowly out the door & sit in a chair 6 feet from the porch railing where she's eating. Saturday, Charlie discovered that she has 4 kittens in our woodshed. 1 black, 2 gray & a very cute gray & white one who wouldn't come out while I was sitting there. The pictures aren't very good. The sun was going down & I was getting cold.

I told Charlie that I was going to name one of them "Meatloaf" because they're the same size as a loaf pan. Now I have 5 wild kitties to tame & get neutered. I'm guessing that they are between 5-8 weeks old. They have little carrot tails, but they were very interested in the fish & gravy cat food that I put out, so I'm assuming that mom (Billie Jean Bailey) is beginning to wean them.

The snake is done

Maybe it's done. I may decide to change his tongue. I don't think that it's bold enough. It's 23 X 40". It looks much flatter in the pictures. I stuffed the snake & tree trunks & quilted the background very closely to make them stand out even more.

4in1 sandwich

I have to brag about the sandwiches that I made today. Yesterday I made a 9" round sourdough bread using the starter that I just got from King Arthur I'm very pleased with the sourdough starter:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/detail.jsp?id=7996
I got the crock, too. Charlie told me to order whatever I wanted from the catalog, so I got the sourdough & crock & 2 heavy cookie sheets to replace my @*##! "nonstick" ones.
Back to the sandwiches... I used 1 slice of bread from the middle of the loaf, spread butter lightly on 1 side & broiled until toasty. Flipping the slices over, I put Dijon mustard on Charlie's (Yuck). I put ham on 1/2 of the slice & pastrami on the other half. Then dividing in the other direction, I put swiss on half & cheddar on the other half. Under the broiler for a nice melt & bubble. Yum!

Jesus & Ashley-good friends

Jesus & Ashley are becoming close friends. They play & bathe each other. Jesus is very patient, but he does let her know when she's gone too far. Ashley is washing Jesus' neck.
Ashley is washing Jesus' ear.
YUCK! Earwax!!!

Peek-a pileated woodpecker

He's very shy. I used my zoom (10X) full on, high res with major cropping. I was about 75 feet away & half behind a spruce tree. He ducked behind the tree & then when my camera clicked, he took off flying & cussing at me.
I tried again from about 100 feet away. I got him this time.

Kitty games

Ashley is getting very good at fetch.

























Before she gives the mousie back, it needs to marinate in a shoe.
























Sometimes it gets marinated in a BIG shoe



















Hehehe! That purple thing tickles!
















Jesus says, "This sparkly catnip flavored ball is delightful!

Ashley the weed

Just a quick note. We went to the vet yesterday for the second set of shots & Ashley weighs 3 pounds even- up from 2 pounds 3 weeks ago.

Queen of the couch

One for the Awwww factor. Ashley is growing fast. She's filling out, full of energy & appears to Be in very good health. She still wants to cuddle, but only when she's worn herself out playing. We're going for her second set of kitten shots tomorrow & I'm sure that our vet will be impressed.

Quilt retreat

I went on a quilt retreat Friday evening until Sunday afternoon. I put borders on this quilt & it's backing, layered them with the batting & safety pin basted. I tried basting on tables instead of stretching everything on the floor as I usually do-bad idea.












After 6 hours of pinning. I turned it over & saw that there were many wrinkles pinned in. I got disgusted, folded it up & worked on the other project that I'd brought-my version of a "stack the deck quilt"-8 sets of 6 fabrics with different triangles in each set. I didn't know how big it would turn out, until I sewed the blocks together.
It's approximately 60" X 62". I was thinking about bordering & making it bed size, but I decided that I like it just the way it is, so it will be a baby quilt for the next gift that I need to make. (larger than normal, but a good size for putting a baby on the floor.) To my knowledge, nobody's pregnant yet, but maybe this will be an incentive. With all the largish spaces, this will be fun to quilt!


































Sunday, after I got the Triangle quilt together, I unpinned the bear quilt. I'm seriously considering having a long arm quilter quilt the bear quilt. It's 108" X 120" & I just don't feel like I need the aches & pains of wrasslin it through the machine.

More Ashley pictures

Ashley & Muskrat (AKA Batman, The Grey Mouser, Shadow, Tom Drooley...

Not quite friends yet, but not enemys.

Kissy, kissy. Jesus loves Ashley. (or she has tuna breath)

She loves her toys! Look at those long back legs.

My miraculous chicken soup

Last night, Ashley ate a little of the chicken broth that I made. This morning, she's sneezing a lot less, had a 30+ minute wild playtime with her toy mouse & then enthusiatically chowed down on her kitten chow. After seeing her for 2 days with no appetite & only enough energy to sneeze & huddle in a little nest in a sweater on the floor, I have to conclude that she's feeling much better.

Ashley update

It appears that complete taillessness sometimes comes with bowel problems. If you've ever watched a kitty pooping, you may have noticed that they use their tail as a pump to help with the evacuation. Poor little Ashley sometimes gets a turd half out & there it stays. I've been trying to add fiber (canned pumpkin) to her diet to keep her stools soft. On Sunday, she came down with an upper respiratory problem-just sneezing so far & lack of appetite. I made chicken soup with garlic (I left out the hot peppers which I usually add when we have colds. She seems to enjoy the soup, but isn't eating a lot of it. Poor little cuddlebunny.

A rescue

Last Wednesday, after a long day of travel, etc, Bobby, Lani & I returned to our motel in North Carolina at about 11:00PM to hear a continuous meowing in the parking lot. After searching for a while, Lani helped me find this little starving kitten in the wheel well of a parked car. As soon as I picked her up, she began purring & rubbing her face on mine. Lani & I both had the same reaction upon seeing a hairless pink raw puckery spot where her tail should be. Poor little kitty had lost her tail in an accident- NO!, she was born with no tail & her little anus sits a little high. I closed her in the bathroom & we went searching for an all night grocery store for supplies.
I was afraid that we'd have to buy her chicken McNuggets or a big Mac, but we found a Walmart & bought a litter box, litter, food bowl & kitten chow.

On Thursday, we spent the morning & half the afternoon helping with funeral arrangements. When I got back to the motel room, she had used the litter box after a bout of grass & leaf filled diarrhea. She has consistantly used the box ever since.

Her name is Ashley. My vet & I think that she's 3-4 months old because she's in the big ear stage although she's very small. Her little anus still has a problem & bleeds when she moves her bowels, but we've been using triple antibiotic on it, as recommended by my vet & I think that it's improving. She's still a little cuddlebunny, but she's started to have enough energy to play.

A sad day

Today was my baby sister, Jane's 47th birthday. I mailed her a box of books & left a message on her machine at 6:30 that she would get them in about a week.
At 8:30, my older sister, Gerry called. She had just talked to Jane's husband who told her that Jane's employee had found her lying dead on the ground about 2 hours before. Jane had had problems with high blood pressure & cholesterol, but she had told me that she had both under control.
I'm still numb. I hadn't really believed in the mortality of my sibs.

Quilting, feltmaking & dying

I've been busy quilting, making felt & dying. I've been working on my snake quilt since June. First, I paper pieced the snake:


Next, I appliqued him to the back of my background, & appliqued the tree trunks. I love that birch bark print. I used batting behind the tree trunks & snake to raise them above the background.

I layered the top with more batting (thinner) & a backing & I free motion quilted around every fern to sink the background & make the snake & trees stand out more. The free motion quilting took forever! I then cut the background fabric from in front of the snake. I'm getting close to finishing. I need to satin stitch around the snake, give him a face & handstitch the binding & sleeve to the back.

Feltmaking- Just a little-Petey gave me the idea. He was making felt (AKA mats) in his armpits. After I brush him, I always say "I've got enough fur to make another cat." Sooooo... I took some brushed out fur & rubbed it between my hands. It felted very fast. So far I've made ears. I'm not sure if I'll make a whole cat or not.

Now dying-stop reading here if you're squeamish. When we went to Seneca Lake, we were able to buy green glo-worms. I did a little net research & discovered that I could buy the worn food/dye. Fish really love these green worms.

If a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work...

...Then today was like winning the lottery. Nothing in picture for scale-the largest Perch was 11 inches long.

new Buck & deer

Yesterday our new Buck stove fireplace insert was delivered & partially installed. They need to come back to install the fitting that connects the stove to the new stainless steel flue liner & they will be replacing one of the side windows that cracked when they tightened the holding screw too tight. (Hint-maybe it's NOT a good idea to use a cordless screw gun.)

We bought the brass leaping deer & the 3 gallon jug last week in Geneva, NY at a bargain used/antique store.

Ross, Jenn & kids visit

Ross & Jenn brought Griffin & Logan for a visit on July 22nd. I've taken way too long getting these pictures up, but I think that you'll agree that it was worth the wait.








Griffin, Ross, Jenn & Logan on the porch swing.





















Ross & the amazing 4 legged Logan.

















Griffin & his long legs.















The kids loved my wagon full of rocks.


















Griffin sitting in the camo porch chair.


























Logan the Pirate, sailing past the pond.



















Medusa-boy Logan.





















Snakes are always fun.