A new series: Strange Places My Cat Sits

Saturday is Caturday, as any good reader of I Can Has Cheezburger? knows.

And so in honour of Caturdays, I am introducing a new series. It will feature the three pussins - Podae, Fatpuss and the Grimth - but mainly the Grimth. 

Grimth sits in many strange places. They are not the sort of spot that anyone would think comfortable. He loves to lie across something lumpy, or squeeze up into a tiny spot, or crook his head at an angle that makes you think his neck is broken. 

He is a strange pussin. And thus was Strange Places My Cat Sits born.

Strange Places My Cat Sits: Ironing Board Leg

Melbourne, I heart you!

Seriously, is there anything better than coming home after a long time away?

 I love seeing that autumn fell while I was gone, all the trees have lost their leaves and the streets look completely different. I love that there's a nip in the air that bites my cheeks and that I'm wearing long sleeves for the first time in six weeks. I love that I can have a cup of tea and not die from heat exposure. I love that my house is warm and cosy and that walking into it feels like walking into a big, comfortable hug.

I especially love coming home to packages. Packages totally rock, especially when they're from my mum and they have presents inside. Presents! More mittens! A jumper for the stall! And a kiddies' cardie!

And something else - I present (ha! ha!) to you the second half of my birthday twinset.

I am rapt with this cardigan, it is wonderful and the perfect complement to my short-sleeved top which arrived before I left for the top end of Australia (and which I have consequently not even worn once).

And Grimth clearly approves of it as well.

I had put it down for less than ten seconds when he arrived, like some sort of supersonic-twinset-sensing-machine - he truly can smell cuddliness at a hundred paces, that animal - and he took up residence immediately. As is his natural right, of course.

Erm, Grimth, that's MINE, and I do NOT appreciate you furring it up for me before I've even worn it! Humph.

Lots of sandwich today and not much meat

(This photo has nothing to do with today's post, I just thought it was cute. Grimth is always very cranky when he wakes up.)

Thank you everyone for your lovely comments so far! - I am reading them and making little neurotic notes in my head about what you like on my blog, so that I can be sure to do more of it this year in 2010. (Have no idea what I'm talking about? Enter the giveaway here ....)

As an aside, I think one of the comments that makes me happiest - and they're all lovely - is about the length of my posts, which I agree are usually waaaaaaaaay longer than your average blog post.

The fact that this doesn't make you all want to tear your hair out is a great comfort to me, because when I was starting out last year I read one of those How-To-Write-A-Blog thingies online, and as one of its Absolutely Essential Rules it declaimed "make your posts short, because people don't want to wade through endless reams of your boring crap" .. or something along those lines. I may be paraphrasing.

This shot terror into my heart. Right away, I thought: well that's it for me then, I'm a goner even before I've started.

I've always been a verbose writer you see - to put it diplomatically- and I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep my posts short. Hell, I didn't even want to. I never had any trouble with word counts in essays and exams, my issue was always taking out the extra dross and just leaving the gold. Too much sandwich and not enough meat, as one of my music teachers, the excellent Mr Genner once said. Though of course I didn't appreciate it at the time. [An excellent way of ensuring you have more meat, by the way, if you're writing something and it's too long, is to go through every single sentence and take out an adjective. Or more, if you can. For example, when edited, that sentence just there could read "A good method of editing is to eliminate superfluous words." But see how much less interesting it is? I rest my case.]

I find it really challenging to be succinct and pithy. I'd much rather give you the unedited stream of consciousness that babbles away in my head. After all, this is my blog! I'm totally allowed to do that! There are no rules on the interweb!

(PS and this is for Jennie: today's post included the words "declaimed", "dross", "superfluous" and "paraphrasing", just for you!)

What a helpful pussin

Here is the quilt I am trying to work on at the moment. Sigh. It's a Christmas present for a work colleague whose friend is having a baby, due on Christmas Day.

Grimth loves quilts. In fact, he loves helping me with my sewing ALL the time. He loves to get up on the material, and chew my pins (yes, he has this very strange metal fetish, and will try to chew pins, scissors, the edge of the sewing machine, the corner of the laptop, and even the copper roofing on a little lamp I have in the corridor. There are teethmarks in it.) - and generally be very helpful and try to assist in every way possible.

If I spread out some material, he's onto it like a flash. He loves to roll around in the fabric and get curled up into a big tangle mess of legs and folds. Here at least he waited until I was doing some pinning......

I'm working on a big range of Christmas orders at the moment. And I'm not quite sure where I'm finding the time to do them, in between the four (four!) markets I have scheduled between now and Sunday week. I *thought* I was spending every waking minute sewing for those markets, but apparently I've managed to find time to get the orders done as well. How lucky!

Stay tuned for photos tomorrow of the dodgy ladybird I'm constructing. I've never done a ladybird before, and I am just working out of my head rather than from pattern, and this may yet turn out to be the fatal error. Right now it looks more like a turtle than a ladybird. So some artistic assistance may be required ... which is fine as long as it doesn't come from the pussin!

The biggest hair ball ever

Spring has sprung.... with a vengeance!

It seems only right and proper that after the interminable weeks of winter, which I despaired would ever end, spring has finally sprung in Melbourne.Saturday was 32 degrees, Sunday was 34, and I'm told today is going to nudge into 35. I have only two words for that. At last!

Naturally though, the pussins all thought the weather was unbearable and they lay around inside stretched out on the wooden floors trying to cool down. At one point the Amateur Actress went into the bathroom and shrieked involuntarily - because there was the great furry Grimth curled up in the sink, happily snoozing in the cool porcelain. Now that's what I call a proper fur ball!

I quite like the hot weather, and you know what I love the most about it? I'm a bit embarrassed to say. It's tragic, it really is. It shows what a sewing loser I am.

Okay, here it is. I love that it's great weather for drying fabric. I know, I know - isn't that terribly domestically boring? You know you're truly growing older when you wake up in the heat and think My, what a fantastic drying day this is!

It's true though. All winter long (which seems to have lasted about ten years) I've been collecting lengths of fabric that I haven't been able to use, because I haven't been able to wash or - more importantly - dry it. You know I never buy less than 5 metre lengths if I can help it, and that adds up to a lot of material to hang about the place. I'm anti-tumbledryer because I can't bear the thought of how much energy that uses up when the sun is free. It's just a matter of waiting for the sun to appear so that I can shamelessly exploit it.

So over the weekend I made up for lost time, I can tell you. Here is what I washed:

• black, turquoise and white voile
• navy and orange floral cotton
• navy and white polka dots
• red, aubergine, navy and green broadcloth
• purple corduroy
• Moda Sweetwater "Authentic" quilting cotton
• Aunt Grace Ties One On - scotty dogs in red and white stripes
• The Kitty Chronicle linen blend
• The Name Of the Black Cat is Lola by Trefle
• Gothic Rose by Amy Butler
• Temple Garland in Lotus, by Amy Butler
• Moda Wonderland butterflies in tomato
• Moda Wonderland butterflies in mustard

Of course I put all the water from the washing machine onto the garden as well, which means that the plants are very well watered despite the heat and the water restrictions. Waste not, want not ....

Fat Black Puss

It never ceases to amaze me what people will search for on the internets.  First though, let me digress briefly. There's a point, I promise, and I'll get to it.

If you're a regular reader of my blog (hello to both of you) you're no doubt aware of the three furry babies in my life: Podae, Fatpuss and Grimth. I should write a book about them called The Very Furry Babies. It would sell to Very Little People and their Very Nice Parents, I'm sure.

I love these animals, even though they can be incredibly capricious and frustrating at times. They won't sit on my lap - I know, three cats and not one of them is a lap-sitter, which surely is the primary function of a cat? I should ask for a refund. And they vomit in hard-to-reach places from time to time. And every now and again I get a small, bloodied corpse deposited in the bedroom as a token of love. And they like nothing more than to smooch on me and fur up my clothes in the split-second before I leave the house ... but I take it all in my stride.

It's the price I pay for unconditional love, you see, and I consider it a small one. And after all,they do shower me with the odd burst of affection and caterwauling, Fatpuss especially (the caterwauling that is). Podder is better with affection, and Grimth? He's mainly food-driven. Though he does quite like a scratch on the head in the morning and will close his eyes in ecstasy if you get the spot juuuuuuust riiiiiiiiight.

Ahem, I've become distracted. What was I saying? Oh yes - that I blog about them every now and again, and tell you adoring stories of their latest adventures and quirks. Much as I've just done. See how I did that?

And when I blog about them, I tag each of the blog entries with their names. Podae, Fatpuss and Grimth. Which leads me to the point, after all. Sometimes when reviewing my blog stats I'm intrigued to see how people find me. Often it's through keywords they enter into Google. Vintage tea towels is a favourite, as is Ode to Friday, and oddly, who sang Lazy Sunday Afternoon as well.

But my favourite has got to be the one tag people are most definitely NOT searching for. Not in the context I use it, that's for sure.

Let me be direct. Fat Puss. Fat Pusses. Furry Fat Puss. Fat Black Puss.

Yep, you know what I mean. And I can guarantee that a photo of my lovely furry fat black puss, such as the one at the top of this post, is not what they are after!!!

So this post is in honour of my lovely furry fat black puss, and his clear internet - ahem, attraction. Fatpuss, you're the tops.

Feeding the Fathead (and trying not to!)

Ah, another Monday, another day spent swimming in the stinking, toothless yaw of paid employment .....

But really I shouldn't complain. (And yet I do - I do!!) I'm just glad to be home now, surrounded by the furry babies and my sewing projects.

It's very cold this evening, and the babies were all inside when I got home. Fathead greeted me like a shark, eddying around my ankles and looking up at me with giant saucer eyes, desperate to be fed as soon as possible. He just about tripped me up as I came in the front door and stuck close to my legs as I went into the bedroom.

Diet chompies dispensed (he ate a couple and miaowed in dissatisfaction), I changed out of my work outfit and headed down to the kitchen - Fatpuss hot on my heels - to feed Podae and Grimth, who are both still allowed to eat their normal food.

I doled out two big globs of kangaroo mince and they tucked in. Poor old Fatpuss sat there woefully, looking terribly sad and bewildered. Why me? he seemed to ask. What did I do wrong? How come they get the nice food and I get cardboard pellets? Don't you love me any more?

I swear, if that cat could talk I couldn't possibly demonstrate the resolve I do. I stayed strong, made sure the other two ate their dinner, fended off the Fathead when he tried to ram his head in and get some .... it was exhausting. Check out the expression on his face in the photo.

When they finished I collapsed in a crumpled heap and ate six chocolate chip cookies out of sheer stress and guilt. The diet might be working for Fatpuss but it's certainly not working for me - who is the *true* Fathead in this situation?!

Rain, glorious rain!

Ah, it's pouring down rain tonight here in Melbourne - at last! I am very happy about this. The pussins are not.

I love the sound of the rain on the roof. I love the way it makes the ground smell good, and I love the way it helps my garden perk up after weeks and weeks and weeks of dry, dusty weather.

The pussins do not love the rain though. None of them.

Podder hates the slightest bit of damp - he won't even walk on the grass after I've done the watering. He consciously and deliberately objects to the rain.

The other two however .... they're a bit different.

Fatpuss is the funniest. He's got such fat, thick fur that he usually doesn't feel the rain for some time, especially if it's a light dusting. He will sit outside with the rain gently falling on him for hours, and then finally, when the water starts to penetrate his fur and touch his skin after what seems like an age, reality dawns upon him.

It's quite amusing to watch. One minute he's there in the garden, checking things out, snapping at cabbage moths, examining the dirt .... and the next minute his eyes are as wide as saucers as he realises what's happening. You can see it in his face as he recoils in horror:

"oh my GOD! I am WET! It's WET out here! Its - it's RAINING ON ME!!!!!!!!!"

And then he'll dash for the back door and miaow like someone's holding him down and threatening to withdraw his food supply, until one of us lets him in.

The Grimthlet too, he's a different kettle of fish. He knows it's raining on him, but he engages in a silent battle of wills with the weather, steadfastly stoic in the belief that he can stop the rain through sheer mental effort ... that, or outlast it, at least.

Of course this never works. But he'll sit out there resolutely, frowning crossly and willing the rain to stop, certain that he's going to win this one through sheer stubbornness and obstinacy, despite all evidence to the contrary.

And then we have one cranky puss on our hands.

My Creative Space

Look at my creative space. Just look at it!

Oh, I know it's cute (very, very cute in fact) but it is also bloody frustrating at times! See what he's cuddled up on? That would be my corduroy. My black corduroy. That I was trying to make a new Catticus with. Which he came up and sat on. And then stretched out on. And then went to sleep on.

Gah. Save me from furry babies spreading their lovely fur all over my lovely corduroy.

I couldn't move him though, could I ...

So it's just as well I'm a snot factory today and can't contemplate trying to do anything that involves sharp implements or needles of any kind.

I've got the sick

What is the onomatopaeic sound of a sore throat?

I ask because I've got it. I've got the sick. If I were writing this phonetically it would sound like this:

"I've godd de sick. By throad is all swoahden up an dit's hard to swaddow. I hab a fad tongue! Id feels like subwund pud a razor inside by deck and scraybed id ub and down. "

So no work today.

Instead, I'm joining in with Tinniegirl's week of Loot, Glorious Loot, and today I'm showing off the marvellous buttons I got at Camberwell market on the weekend (where I also got the spectacular blood box. Oh how I love you, my beautiful blood box.)

These buttons are fabulous, they're all bigger than a 20cent piece - which makes them the perfect size for eyes on my soft toys. And what amazing colours! Have I mentioned lately how much I love colours? Colourful buttons rock.

Looking closely, you'll see two tiny black ones at the front with diamantes in the centre. They remind me of diamonds set in jet, one of my favourite jewellery settings. These two lovelies came from CravingsFrocks at the Thornubury market on Saturday. They're beautiful, and they're my favourite.

See also the benzoic acid apothecary jar I mentioned a couple of posts back? I love this jar too.

Right now though, it's time to go back to bed.

As a parting gesture, here is a photo of Grimth the devil cat enjoying my blood box as well.

See, it has a very broad appeal - not just to me and my weird obsession.

Good Friday? It's been a GREAT Friday!

As the black orpington came towards him, the Miniature Genius quavered with studied delight. Not having seen a chicken before, this was quite something. There were fraggle chickens, and white chickens, and bantam chickens, and ducks, and golden cockerels ... so many chickens! In one only place!

He started bokking quietly. Bok! Bok! Ba-gok!

The Miniature Genius does a pretty good chicken impression, I have to say. He can also do Rawr, for the tiger and the lion we saw yesterday at the Melbourne Zoo, and he can say Giraffe, but as they don't make any noise he can't do an impression.

But my goodness, how quickly he's learning new words at the moment. He's on the cusp of turning two, but his vocabulary is extensive. I know three-year-olds who can only say "bacon", and only under intense pressure. This one, though, will repeat just about anything you say. Except my name of course, which has four syllables and is an understandable mouthful.

That's part of the reason we call him the Miniature Genius, though he's also such a serious and considered child that I'm thinking of changing it to the Sober Judge.

Anyway, the visit to the Collingwood Children's Farm was a rip-roaring success, and was probably pipped only by the meerkats at the Zoo yesterday. It's been quite a busy weekend.

The Sister Of My Heart and I have celebrated this rare opportunity to spend so much continuous time with each. Each afternoon at 430, we've toasted the event with a champagne cocktail while the Sober Judge sleeps. Delightful!

Take one champagne flute. Add two centimetres of Chambord, beautiful black raspberry liquer. Pour champagne to the top. Sit back and enjoy.

It's a perfect recipe.

While I'm loving them both being here, the pussins in the house are not quite sure. Fatpuss disappeared under the bed at the first sound of the Sober Judge's dulcet tones, and we think he may have built a fortress under there. The positive side effect is that he's not eating while he's under the bed, so his diet is going quite well at present. I think Fatpuss was scarred by a small child a couple of years ago, when a two-year-old called Gideon spent three hours running up and down the corridor squealing at the Fatpuss. He's never quite recovered.

Grimth is slightly unsure about this small and unpredictable creature now roaming the house. He slinks up curiously, and then turns tail and runs at the slightest movement.

Podae though? He's all smiles and waggy tail, and thank goodness for that. Because without at least one cat to pat, the Sober Judge would be quite upset!

Seventeen courses of feast ... and famine

So the Fatpuss had a weigh-in at the vet last night.

After the kicking and screaming stopped - he does so love the vet - we plonked him on the scales, and guess what?

He is right on target! He's meant to lose 70 grams a week, and that's exactly what he's done.

It hasn't been easy. He starved himself for the first week, clearly reasoning that if he just stuck it out, eventually we'd give in and go back to feeding him. He mourned, and smooched, and flirted, and stomped off in a fury. He tried everything.

But ha, it didn't work. It may have killed me to watch him, knowing how desperate he was, but I held my resolve.

And around Day 8, the penny finally dropped, and he started eating the new diet chompies.

Podder is quite pleased with the diet chompies as well, so he's tucking into them regularly. But the Grimth ... now that's a different story.

He doesn't like chompies, so he won't eat them. Which means he doesn't eat a thing during the time we're at work, he hangs out for dinner time when we get home. At which point he virtually inhales his food, and then seconds later, sicks it back up again because he's shocked his poor hungry tummy.

We had about 10 days of this. Gorging and vomiting, gorging and vomiting.There was a very bulimic tinge about the house during those days. He began losing weight, because he couldn't keep any nutrition down. And this was meant to be the diet for the Fathead, not the baby!

So now we've managed to train him. He gets a ten-cent-piece sized blob of food to begin with, and he has to wait ten minutes before he gets another one. And so on, until about an hour and a half later, he's finally eaten (and kept down) a reasonable amount.

He's not happy about it. He's taken up residence on a dining chair, and he perches there scowling at me until I rattle the food container. If only he'd eat the chompies!

So we've got one cat who wants to eat ALL day but is only allowed to eat twice a day. And one cat who only wants to eat TWICE a day, but has to be given it in a seventeen course meal.

Cripes! The effort I go to for the furry babies. Thank goodness the Podder is easily pleased.

Love Friday ... and working from home

It's fantastically fabulous Friday again! Hip-hip-hooray!

Today I'm working from home, which makes me Love Friday even more than usual.
.

I'm lucky that my organisation has a very good flexible working program, which essentially means that when you need to work from home, you can.

And right now I have a speech to work on for one of my senior executives, so the peace and quiet at home is a wonderful thing. And the great big pile of cushions you see here? I'm resting on them with my laptop right now. Ahhhhh.....

I'm a child of the open-plan office, having worked in them for most of my professional life.

There were a couple of blissful, luxurious stints there where I was able to temporarily have an office, with a lovely door that I could close when necessary, but those were the exception rather than the rule.

So I can work open-plan pretty well, as I've had fifteen-odd years of practice. I tune out the white noise and focus on what I'm doing.

What I can't tune out though, is the interruptions. My day is full of interruptions from people stopping by to say hello, ask a question, find a fact, or just chat about life, the universe and everything. That's not conducive to speechwriting. To write effectively, I need a long stretch of time that I can settle into it.

But home, now THAT is conducive. All I have to do is write, play the occasional game of fetch with the Grimth and his battered old mouse toy (he loves to fetch), and answer emails and telephone calls. If I like, I can do the washing. But I don't have to.

And I often find that when I work from home I end up getting more done than I would in the office, because I don't lost time to interruptions and distractions. I generally log onto the computer much earlier, around 730am, and get a whack of stuff done even before breakfast. Which is exactly what I did today.

I'm feeling very virtuous now, so as it's morning tea time, I think I will take a break and sew a pencil case for the market tomorrow. I've earnt it.

Fatpuss on strike!

The Fatpuss is very doleful today. He does not like the diet food. Or the new regime that accompanies it.

This morning he sniffed at the new diet chompie, inhaled one, coughed, spat it out again, and snorted at me in disgust.

He alternated between hopefulness (as I walked towards the Former Home of Fat Chompies) and despair (as I walked past).

In the end, as I continued to ignore his pleading, he resorted to flirting with me in an effort to make me give in.

He jumped onto the bed. He turned round in a circle, arching his back. He waggled his tail and blinked a long, slow blink at me.

He activated the subsonic purr, grumbling deep inside his throat as he batted his eyelids. He even rolled onto his side (no easy task given the amount of stomach he has to heft over in the process) and stuck a leg into the air, elongating his neck in an invitation to pat him.

Pat me, he crooned silently. Pat me, and succumb to my glorious voluptuousness. And then feed me Fat Chompies.

I gave in - to the pats, that is, and we had a lovely little affection exchange. That is, I patted him and ignored the subtext, and he endured me patting him in an effort to reinforce it.

I'm sure that by the time I get home this evening he will have conscripted Podae and Grimth, forced them to write large signs with ideological slogans, and will have them picketing the doorway in protest.

If I make it inside without a dead mouse being thrown at me, I'll be mightily surprised.

Fat Puss Slim

Well, the verdict is in. Cat Weightwatchers says something must be done about the Fatpuss. We've got to make the Fat Puss Slim.

Here is a photo of him expressing his feelings about the news.

We went back to the vet to check his paw again - only this time I had to take the Grimth for a vaccination booster as well.

Driving there, a trip that takes all of 15 minutes, they at least made the effort to harmonise their catastrophic (cat-astrophic! ha! ha!) yowling beautifully, it was like fingernails down a blackboard, except Right. Inside. My. Head. Strangely though, when Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata came onto the radio, they both quietened down considerably. I must remember that in future.

Once at the vet, they both squeezed themselves into the smallest spaces possible before the examinations. Here is Grimth in the smallest space possible.

A number of conclusions were reached following their examinations.

1. The Fathead's paw is improving, but we have to keep him inside for a week. This also means we have to keep Podae and Grimth mostly inside as well, because we can't have two pusses running around outside without the third, and we can't keep the catflap closed because then Podder and the Grimth would be stuck outside, and that would be both torturous to Fatticus as well as mean to the other two. And that means My One True Love and I have a real task on our hands to keep them inside together, not letting them squeeze out the front door as we leave for the day, not letting them open the bathroom window with their little paws, no, just sitting on the sofa looking longingly at the outdoors. Result: three deeply irritated pussins.

2. Grimth is adorably cute. See Exhibit A, above. Ignore the slightly resentful expression on his face. This is due to the FIV and FE vaccination jabs, which went fine. He weighs 5.6 kilos and shouldn't be allowed to gain any more weight.

3. (And this is the worst part). Fatpuss is overweight - okay, no surprise there. It's his name for a reason. He weighs 7.05 kilos. Which is less than his top-heavy record of nearly 8 kilos over a year ago, but not nearly good enough. Apparently he should be more at the 5.5 kilo range, which means more the weight that Grimth is. So he's been put a special diet and isn't allowed to eat any other food. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada. Not a single Fat Chompie treat is allowed to pass his lips. No chicken livers on a Saturday morning. No kangaroo mince. No tinned wet food. Nothing. Nothing but the new special high-fibre, low calorie food.

This might sound simple enough, but consider that there are three cats inside the house (all currently wandering around in bewilderment at not being allowed outside.) We can't leave chompies out during the day. And it means feeding them separately for the FOUR MONTHS it's going to take to get Fatpuss to lose 1.5 kilos, if he shifts the weight at the recommended retail amount of 70 grams a week. Cripes.

Podder is going to be disturbed. He's such a light eater that he takes two mouthfuls of wet food and pushes the plate away - Oh, I'm so full, I couldn't eat another bite. Then he spends the rest of the day grazing on dry chompies - he loves chompies, any kind, it doesn't matter which brand or flavour. If he could live solely on chompies he would. Fish chompies, chicken chompies, iron filing chompies, he'd eat them.

And Grimth, well, he just likes to hoover up whatever he can find. I swear if we could plug him in he'd be the most efficient vacuum cleaner ever. He's like those pool cleaners that just work their way methodically across the bottom, sucking everything up.

And Fatpuss lives for his Fat Chompie treats! We use them to reinforce his positive behaviour, and they're specially designed to help pusses keep their teeth clean. (The good news from the vet is that Fathead has excellent teeth.)

So this morning we tried to feed them separately, with the Fathead in the laundry. Podae took a bite of wet food and went away, Grimth steadily ate the rest of it up, Fatpuss had a mouthful of the new chompie and stopped, I walked away from the closed laundry door for a minute, and when I returned Podae had pushed it open and was busily eating all the Fathead's chompies while the Fathead moaned about the cat flap being closed.

Gah. I know it's for a good reason. We want the Fatpuss to live a long and healthy life, free from diabetes and arthritis and all the other weight-related afflictions that can strike a portly puss. And once he loses weight he'll have more energy and be more active, and probably happier as a result.

It's not going be easy, but we've really got to try and make the Fat Puss Slim.

My creative space

Today I'm playing My Creative Space courtesy of Kootoyoo - hop on over to her blog and check out what other people's creative spaces look like too. Her space is always so much tidier than mine!

As you can see in the photo though, my creative space is also often occupied by a cat of some kind (insert resigned sigh here).

On this occasion it's Grimth, our third puss and second British Shorthair. That is, he's the same brand as Fatpuss, but a different colour - Grimth is technically known as a lilac, but he actually looks like a deep cream or very pale chocolate. It's because he's the product of a chocolate shorthair crossed with a blue shorthair, it produces a very interesting colour. And he's got stripes, too, though they're very faint.

Anyway, enough about the pussin. I'm actually here to talk about what's under him!

You can see a collection of printed fabrics underneath his growing bulk. These are a bunch of tea-towels I picked up in Mildura on the weekend. I'm going to make them into something ... I'm just not quite sure what yet.

But I think there's definitely an opportunity to capitalise on the Australiana kitsch embodied by these souvenir tea towels. What do you think ... tote bags? Cushion covers? Laptop cases? Skirts?

I particularly like the ones that have flowers and birds on them, though I also got a few with native animals - kangaroos, koalas, echidnas and wombats - as there's always a desire for that kind of stuff overseas. I think I like the bright, vibrant colours as well; they're so attention-grabbing, and they just scream SOUVENIR!!!!!!

Whatever I end up making, it's going to go in my new Etsy shop (which is currently under construction) - watch this space ......

The cutest culprits ever

I tried very, very hard to be creative when I finally got home last night after the stultifying training day.

First though, I went to my bedroom to placate my mobile phone. It took some effort, but after a decent amount of stroking and patting and soothing, I think it forgave me.

Of course, there was the moment at first when it refused to listen to me, went flat and shut itself off in a mark of protest, but this morning we seem to be back on an even keel again.

I've promised to always, always check my bag for it before leaving the house in the future.

After setting things to rights, I decided it was time to do some sewing as a way to decompress. But when I went to my sewing area (that's what I call the unholy pile of crap on the dining table where I keep everything I'm working on, and a good deal of stuff that I'm not working on but which seems to need to be piled up around me for total effectiveness) - this is what I found.

And he seemed very comfy indeed, all curled up on my fabrics. How could you disturb something so gorgeous, and fast fast asleep?

So I chose instead to work on a project that's already halfway through. And that's when Grimth decided to help me. He loves to help.

Look at him helping me here, with his little paw on the needle and his loving eyes gazing up at me, half-lidded.

You couldn't be angry though, when the culprit is so very, very cute. I decided to read a book instead.