I am NOT becoming a cat lady

Yes, I know I just posted about Felis Domesticus. But you need to see what I have to contend with at home. (Ignore the dusty apartment, made uglier by the addition of the cat's hair absolutely everywhere.)

You can't see me, sitting on the sofa and minding my own business as the beast prowls around the cookie jar (three guesses what I'd been stuffing my face with moments before).

The beast becomes curious. She must like the hippo cookie jar we scored at the flea market.

Or perhaps she's drawn by the sweet aroma of cookies?

No, she just can't leave loose round objects well enough alone. She actually managed to get a cookie out of the jar, but it slipped from her claws before she could bat it to the floor.

I never fail to marvel at the extent of her evildoings, and I offer these photos as evidence of the nastiness felinekind gets up to. But hear this: just because I'm putting photos of my the Other's cat up on a blog, I am by no means becoming a crazy cat lady. I don't even like cats. I particularly don't like Felis Domesticus here, especially when she's conniving ways to steal my sweets.

An innocent face conceals a sinister soul.

As for hippos, more on them as the week goes progresses....

If you're the Other, don't look

Sigh. 'Twas a long week of work deadlines, but I found my afternoon free today, so I plopped down for a bit of hand-sewing. I've recently taken to stockpiling patterns (and untold megabytes of any other PDF I can get my grubby digital mitts on) in nicely organized folders, which is lovely to browse but not tremendously useful unless I'm actually going to make something. So knowing the Other needed a pincushion for his slowly blossoming sewing exploits, I printed out this hedgehog pattern from Urban Debris and whipped it up. The Other gets a pincushion, I get a nice afternoon project, and my patterns folder gets some justification.

Cute, isn't he? I've been sewing a lot of small felt stuff in the last couple weeks 'cause it's quick, easy, and relaxing, and I can't seem to get the sewing room tidy enough to start cutting for the next quilt top. But I'm under deadline for a wedding quilt, so must get arse in gear!

Quilting Her Majesty

I've been hand quilting Her Majesty's Stamp Collection off and on for a while. I traced the main contours of the portrait that appears on the Machin series of British stamps in EQ6, printed it out and taped it together (twice, actually—measure first, dumbo), transferred it to the quilt top, basted, and finally curled up to start quilting. It's been going in fits and starts because, though I love quilting by hand, the tiny circles in her necklace and crown make me strop, and because I didn't initially trace the crown detail very well, so I'm having to make it up as I go. But the crown is all that remains to be done, along with the 1 from the "£1" in the corner (also traced from the stamp).

All that remains, that is, of the portrait itself. The background still has to be quilted somehow. It's a little hard to make the quilted face out, as you can tell from the photo—I'm OK with the subtlety, but I do want to make the texture stand out a little more. The original plan was to just quilt a quarter-inch inside each of the pieced squares that fall outside the portrait, but I'm wondering if echo quilting around the portrait itself, all the way out to the border, is a better plan. Any thoughts?

Oh, and the Other will give me a slap if I don't mention that using the portrait as the quilting design was his idea. Thanks Other!