New Cat Bed

I made a cat bed the other night for my two kitties.

I made it using a wonderful tutorial posted on Urban Crunch.

The tutorial is for a dog bed, but I scaled it down for a cat bed. My finished cat bed is about 18 x 23 inches. I made it this large because I was hoping that my cats would want to snuggle on it together. They have been sworn enemies for almost 8 years now, so Dave tells me it’s wishful thinking. He’s probably right, but I’m still going to hope.

I didn’t have fleece so I cut up an Ikea pillowcase and it worked amazingly well. I didn’t have polyfill on hand (weird, I know, usually I have tons of it for my pirate sock monkeys), so I used scraps of quilt batting to stuff it. It still needs some more stuffing, but it will do for now. It was the first time I’ve ever sewn a zipper into something and far from perfect, but it get’s the job done and now I’m not afraid of trying to put a zipper into something which is huge for me.

The best part was when I set it on the floor, it was like a magnet for both cats. They love it! Dave took some pictures of them enjoying it.

Here is Jelly on the new cat bed:

And here is Joie. She seems to like it best:

Oh Hello, Stress

It never rains, but it pours, right?

I’ve been super busy the last few days.

A while ago, my grandma took a bad fall. We took her to the hospital afterward and they said she was ok, except for a broken wrist. A few weeks later, she was complaining of back pain, so my mom took her to the ER. They think that she had a bad fall again and was so disoriented that she didn’t tell anyone. From the second fall she had five broken ribs and three broken vertebrae. They admitted her and found that she also had a merca infection and possibly bronchitis.

My grandma is 91 years old and has never really enjoyed life. She is ready to go and has refused treatment. Unfortunately, every time we try to sign her up for hospice, she is just too “well” and they won’t take her. So now she is at a medicare-paid rehabilitation center. If she does better, she might be able to go live back at her assisted living place. If she gets worse, they can move her to a nursing home. To complicate matters, she has been hallucinating really awful things happening to her, so she is always upset when we go to visit. And there really is no reasoning that these things aren’t happening to her, you know?

As if that weren’t enough, my mom has been really run down from running back and forth to see my grandma… and last week she (my mom) was feeling sick, so she went to the walk-in clinic where they told her it was food poisoning and gave her a prescription for Cipro. It was not food poisoning.. and the Cipro killed everything in her system except for the bacteria that was making her sick. Awesome, huh? She got a lot worse. On Sunday, I took her to the ER where they promptly admitted her and started her on IV antibiotics. It turned out to be a bad stomach infection and she’s home now, but it was a really stressful few days.

Things are a little more back to normal now – thankfully! And tomorrow is Natalie and Dave F.’s wedding, so hopefully my Dave and I can get out and have some fun.

I’ll leave you with some pictures. While my mom was in the hospital, I took care of her dog, Luci. On Monday night, Dave and I walked her to Beverly Park at sunset. It was a really nice, peaceful time that we all really needed.

Quilt Blocks and Joie

Over the weekend, Dave and I went up to Traverse City for Beth and Patrick’s wedding and it was SO beautiful! They got married on this cliff overlooking a sea of fall colors. The ceremony was so beautiful that I didn’t get any good pictures – I was too busy getting teary-eyed and eavesdropping on the guy behind me who was *very* impressed with the whole thing. Hehe.

Of course, though, we couldn’t just go to Traverse City for the weekend and have everything go smoothly. On Friday morning, we discovered that Joie had licked a huge patch of fur off her leg. So Dave left work early and took her in to the vet’s. They put a bandage on it, called it a generic infection, and gave her some antibiotics. When we got home on Sunday, we noticed that not only did the leg not look better, but she had been licking around the bandage. Unfortunately, the vet was closed by then, so we had to wait until yesterday to take her in… and of course, when we took her in.. the vet said it’s probably a fungus or infection.. but could be something as bad as feline leukemia (it probably isn’t because we’ve had her tested, but now that I know the worst case scenario, I’m going to worry!). We should know tonight…. hopefully.

To solve the licking problem.. they gave her a cone… and she spent the whole night walking backwards as if she knew her head were stuck and that if she just backed up, she could back out of the cone. There is something hilarious and somewhat unsettling to be watching tv and out of the corner of your eye see your cat walk backwards through the room.

This is what she looks like as a conie:

On a completely unrelated note, I did get some quilt blocks done for the virtual quilt bee I’m in. This month was Meghan’s month and she gave us so much freedom. Basically our instructions were to do a Christmas theme in any technique we wanted with a white on white as the background.

For my first block, I did a little reindeer. I used raw-edged applique and then “doodled” around it in brown thread. I’m really happy with how the antlers turned out because they were really scary to just “doodle” to me.

For the second block, I did a Christmas landscape using raw-edged applique again. I had a lot of fun making this one and I really like how it turned out:

I have a bunch of other projects to finish up, so here’s to hoping that I can get them posted soon!

Joie and Jelly

Dave is taking a photography class this semester for fun. It has led to some really great pictures, especially of our little kitties.

Here are two of my favorites:

I love how this picture makes Jelly look very kitten-ish and innocent… two words that I wouldn’t normally use to describe her.

In this one, I love how Joie’s fur looks against the black back drop. Plus if you look directly into her eye you’ll see the reflection of the pink feathery toy I was waving like a mad woman so she would pose for the picture.

Dave and I went to Chicago last weekend and he got a lot of great shots while we were there. I just have to bug him to get them up on his flickr, so I can share them here. Hopefully it will be soon.

Busy, per usual, I guess….

This morning I was trying to think of a time when I wasn’t super busy and really…. I couldn’t think of a time. This semester I’m taking two classes, I’m working, I’ve got a ton of half-finished projects that I would like complete… sometime.. and now I have a wedding to plan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I figure, I probably do my best work under a bit of pressure and I’m learning to love checking things off the “To Do” List.

Here are a couple I checked off last night:

Deanna’s May String Quilt Block for the Bee in My Bonnet VQB?

Check!

Cuddle with Joie Cat?

Check!

Hoping to check more off the list this weekend… and maybe even find a venue for the reception? Fingers crossed.

Craft Revival Fair

Today we went to the Craft Revival Fair at The Loving Touch in Ferndale, MI.

It actually sort of turned in a craft fair party. My cousin, Megan, was in town with her boyfriend, Tom. They came in from East Lansing for Megan’s 20th birthday. We’re going out with her family later today for dinner, but we always used to go to craft fairs together when she lived around here, so it was like old times.

Natalie, my craft fair buddy, was going, too, so we met up with her. And! My friend, Jessica, lives right down the street from The Loving Touch, so she and her boyfriend, Justin came.

After spending about an hour exploring the craft fair, we (Megan, Tom, Natalie, Jessica, Justin, Dave, and I) all went next door to the Woodward Ave Brewers (WAB) and had some delicious food.

Here’s the loot I got at the craft show:

I LOVE Courtney Fischer’s Jewelry! I got the leaf necklace for myself because I think I would like to be a necklace person…. and what better way to test the waters than with a beautiful leaf necklace? The cuff is going to be for my mom for Mother’s Day.

Anyway, now I have a few hours before Megan’s birthday dinner, so I think I’ll spend them working on pebbling this quilt:

I basted it while Dave was out of town last week and started to quilt it, but got distracted (probably by Joie, who looks positively evil in that picture – even though she is the sweetest cat ever) and didn’t finish it.

Oh and one last thing! Dave and I picked up juice from Chile last night! We got a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Camernere from a guy, Joe, who imports the juice directly from Chile. So the Chilean wine is on us… in 6-9 months!

Welcome to Sick Ward C

I’m home sick today…. ick. It’s a pain because Dave is leaving tomorrow for a conference in San Francisco where he is presenting an application he wrote and I want to be supportive and help him get ready… but for all intents and purposes, I’m a bit dead to the world.

I thought I would use this time to catch up on some photos that I meant to post earlier. I spent a big chunk of last weekend at my mom’s house getting ready for Easter. My mom was dogsitting the neighbor’s dog, Torres.

This is Torres.

He is a sweet dog… but sometimes he drives my mom’s dog, Luci, a little crazy.

This is Luci.

Luci had the last laugh when she played with his toys.

And this is my cousin, Lindsey, holding the neighbor’s cat, Fenway.

Fenway lives next door, but spends a lot of his time inviting himself in at my mom’s house. He eats the food, uses the litter box, and sleeps on fresh laundry – not quite the perfect house guest…. but he did let Lindsey carry him around a bit.

In other news, I’ve sort of lost my head. I got a little caught up in the excitement of virtual quilt bees and joined one regular one and one mini one.

The regular one is The Bee in My Bonnet and it is comprised of 12 women. We’re in the process of figuring out the details and hope to start in May. Everyone in it seems really friendly and ready to create beautiful blocks.

The mini one is through swap-bot. There are only three of us and we’re sending to each other at the same time. The plan is to send a little bit of fabric and instructions on the blocks we want to each other…. then add fabrics from our stash and make four blocks for each person. I went fabric shopping the other night:

I can’t decide what kind of blocks to request! I know that I want the dark blue to frame the blocks, but.. apart from that, I keep changing my mind. I guess I’ll have to make it up pretty soon because the fabric bundles need to go out in the mail tomorrow. Eek!

In other news, I’ll be dragging my sick butt out of bed tomorrow at 4:45am to drive Dave to the airport…. yaaayyyyy.