Summer fruits

Some recent fruits of the garden...

'Black Beauty' aubergine

Brandywine tomato with assorted (smaller) others behind

 

A cat 'growing' in an empty bit of vegetable bed (can't you just see the vitamin D production underway?)

Happy New Year!

The New Year, full of promises... Like finishing this Buttony jumper, and posting 4 months of backlogged projects...

I blame having to go to an office everyday for the chronic disruption to blogging service.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all from me and my sleepy cat.

Handkerchief Corners Quilt

I realised that I've been keeping this blog for just over a year, so happy blogging birthday to me! I started last year with the quilt I made for Dominic and Carolyn's wedding. It was the first, and so far, only, full-sized quilt I've made (despite many good intentions!). I had, however, made a lap quilt beforehand. Thinking back, it came to me that I'd never photographed it so here we have, well over a year late, my Handkerchief Corners quilt.
It was initially going to be full-size but I thought I'd better learn how to bind and quilt somehow before embarking on the quilt for Dominic and Carolyn so I stopped at lap size in order to get it finished. It now measures 106cm square.
I took these pictures in the garden on a very bright day, just before I went to New York. In actuality the colours are a little richer than they appear here - a combination of the sun and my bog-standard camera conspired to bleach them. I love the backing fabric. I'm not sure what it's called - I bought it with lots of other retro 30s fabrics in Branson, Missouri two years ago.
As you can see, Emily appreciates the burrowing potential of a folded quilt! She deserves a special mention today for having been a brave kitty and making it through her neutering operation with minimum fuss. She is back home, and, having got past the wobbly stage, is now in fully-fledged-chemical-madness-stage which involves knocking over all food and water bowls and then marching repeatedly over your humans, purring all the time but never settling down. It doesn't help that she isn't allowed to go out for a while - the vet said to keep her in for EIGHT days. I don't think the carpets (or the cat, or the humans) will be able to stand that! At least the madness is packaged in such cuteness:Going back to the topic of weddings - I heard today that my wonderful bridesmaid Abby is getting married (about time too!). I'm so thrilled for her and Misha. I wonder if this means more commemorative quilting is called for...

Digging for Victory

This was our garden in March. Neater and tidier but still suffering from the broken fence problem. Having finally plucked up the courage to speak to our neighbour on the right, Sandee, I discovered that she'd been thinking about getting her Dad to repair the fence anyway. And repair it he did - he made a fantastic job of it, a million times better than Miles and I would have managed on our own. And they refused to accept any money from us! Sweet, lovely people.

The installing of the new fence meant I could finally start my vegetable plot. After much sweat and toil I managed to make a very rudimentary raised bed and felt, frankly, very pleased with myself! So here we have the veg plot and new fence at the beginning of this month.
After a halcyon period during which I convinced myself that some pellets from the garden centre would be enough to deter the cats, I gave in and installed some more forceful defences. Thank you, chicken wire.I have planted a few different things: (working backwards from the foreground) various salad, tomatoes, beetroot, peas, perpetual spinach, one pumpkin and two courgettes (under the cloches), pak choi and radishes. My containers of herbs and salad are doing well, with the mint and rocket trying to out-do each other. The little cat on the doormat is Belle, Emily's friend from downstairs and one of the many local cats who think that my raised bed is a giant toilet!
I'm also trying some chillies and aubergine but they're not looking very impressive. I planted them as plugs nearly two months ago and this is as far as they've got. Oh well, at least the cats leave them alone so maybe there's hope yet!

Emily Entertainment

After a request for some Emily updates here we have a selection of illustrative portraits (which I am finally able to load having found my camera cable. Hurrah!).

As a growing cat, Emily divides her time between attacking things

and sleeping.

The purple cushion is her joint-favourite spot (the other is on Miles' desk, tucked behind the curtain). She is also good at helping me work. Here she is sitting in a surprisingly human position and looking rather sleepy .

This pose, with the crossed paws, reminds me of those primary school portraits they make you have. She should be leaning on a prop pillar!

The Ginger Giant or Kitty Kapers - part 2

Not much has been going on here apart from work, work, work. Now punctuated by sickness. Boo.

One of my many recent work things was an academic conference at which I had the excellent fortune to meet Maura of Paper Bluebird. After hearing rumours that she and a colleague were looking for fabric shopping opportunities in London, I felt like the bat logo (or pincushion logo, I guess) had been flashed on the sky and jumped to their aid! Once we got down to talking fabric I discovered that, apart from being a fascinating scholar with an interest in Victorian suburbia, she was a craft blogger who follows many of my favourite crafters too. Ah, serendipity. So lovely to make a new friend who straddles two worlds!

Away from the internet and back home, having Emily the kitten is making everything brighter. She is currently helping me mark A-level scripts by eating my biro. Being so cat focused recently, Miles pointed out that I really should share with the world the truth about Pip, my parents' ginger cat. He has been the cute kitten in the photo on my blog banner since I started writing lechatlunatique last year.




However, he is no longer a pip. He is, in fact, the Ginger Giant! Seen here with my father as a point of comparison!



He has truly become one of the biggest cats I have ever seen! Despite being the size of a small dog he is still utterly gorgeous and one of the most sweet-natured cats you will ever, ever meet. He continues to be devoted to his sister and her daughters, and takes his uncle role very seriously. He can be seen here with Emily's sister, Primrose. It's all too cute!

Kitty Kapers

Please say hello to our new four-legged friend, Emily.

Our big excitement on getting back from holiday was adopting one of Agnes' kittens, so last Sunday Miles and I went over to my parents' house and collected little Emily. She was good as gold on her tube and bus journeys, even going to sleep (I've never known any cat to do that in a carry basket!).

This week she has made herself thoroughly at home, and then this weekend she's started to explore the garden too. Although, like any kitten she spends most of her time bouncing around, scrambling up furniture and pouncing on anything that moves, she has also shown a propensity for curling up next to me while I'm reading on the sofa. Too cute!

Kitten update

The kittens have been coming on in leaps and bounds (well, mostly wobbly crawls and whines at the moment!). Here they are on 24th February:


and again on 6th March:

Obviously, they're still doing much the same things - feeding and sleeping in a kitten pile, but they have got much bigger and have opened their eyes. They'll be bouncing out of that box in no time. We have reviewed the gender situation and discovered that my original readings were wrong - in fact there is one boy and three girls (my career as a veterinarian crashes and burns before it's even started!). In the picture above, the boy is second from the right - he is the darkest and biggest. Since discovering that it is a brother and three sisters, the names coming into consideration are, obviously, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne (after the Brontës), or Chekhov's three sisters, Olga, Masha and Irina (the brother is generally called Prozorov - more a dog name than a cat name, I feel!). My current vote is for the Brontës but we shall wait and see.

Pip is still rather wary of them but is happy that Agnes occasionally wants to come out of the box and play with him in the garden - they're only really kittens themselves (Agnes turned one yesterday and Pip's birthday will be on Good Friday). Here they are on Thursday evening, back to one of their favourite positions - lounging on the breakfast bar (with Pip merrily disregarding the presence of Mum's laptop):


I'm trying to picture the poor old breakfast bar when 6 cats want to get on it!

Clever Cat

The beautiful and very clever Agnes had her kittens last Saturday! There are four, two boys and two girls. Three are dark with assorted markings, but seem to be getting a little lighter already, while one looks very much like her mother. The names are still a work in progress. At the moment Dickens is offering some inspiration, as he has done for Thornton Rodway cats for many years, although the second source, Brambly Hedge books, are coming in a strong second.

Pip seems to be somewhat confused by the whole process, understandably. However, he's not eaten the kittens so far, so at least that's a good sign!

PregnaCat and the 1001 Poses

So it seems like only minutes ago that my parents aquired the new kittens but time marches on and little Agnes is now expecting kittens herself! This has generated great excitement and the lavishing of perhaps excessive levels of attention (how many cats have you ever met that got an ultrasound?!). Anyway, as D-day draws near I have been roped in as standby nurse and have spent a few days cat sitting while Dad's been out. While I'm not sure I'd be a great help to Agnes during her delivery, it does mean that I get to witness the many, many sleeping positions she is working her way through. I guess I'd want to keep the weight off if I was that rotund.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, PregnaCat and the 1001 Poses.

Meanwhile, on the other armchair, Pip gets in some quality time with Ted (a dismembered toy head, which, when he was little, he would sleep cuddled up to like a teddy bear).

As I think you can see, however, from the wild look in Pip's eyes, their relationship is complex!

When he's in the right mood you can get Pip to play 'fetch' with Ted. Pip the enormous cat-dog! If only I could get it on video I'm sure £250 from You've Been Framed would be mine for the taking!

Cat-isfaction

Our little friends Agnes and Pip came to stay with us for a whole seven days last week as my parents were away on holiday. We took them back home last night and I'm missing them already. It was wonderful to have them for so long as they really settled in - after a couple of days there wasn't even any hiding under the bed. There were some early problems with our feet (and other body parts) being attacked in the middle of the night but we worked out a good system which saw the cats spend the nights in the kitchen with access to their food, litter and no human toes.

I was excited to see that my lap quilt was a big hit with Pip - praise indeed for the handcrafts, I feel. Here he is snoozing with paws over his eyes on the living room floor...

...and here a little more alert on a dining chair.

I made them a little ball of cotton to play with which was so popular I made them another to take back to Mum and Dads'.

This was a super easy (and effective) toy - I hand-wound some cotton yarn and then with the final 20cm or so threaded on a yarn needle I fed the end up and down through the ball to secure as much of the yarn as I could. This way the cats can abuse it as much as they like but it's very hard to unravel! Actually the pink yarn was from Noel, and since she's a cat lover, I hope she won't mind the use I put it to!

I will leave you with this incredibly cute picture of Pip.

As the British sometimes say, 'pip, pip for now'.

Life on the Inside

This last week has passed in a blur of staring at the computer screen and not much else. The chapter I've been working on is based on the three books in the picture above - I feel like I know them inside out, which I guess from the point of view of my PhD is a good thing but it does get a bit claustrophobic. This feeling is certainly reinforced by stretches of 48 hours plus not leaving the house! Spending that much time in the same environment does always encourage me to try and see the old angles with new eyes, though. The picture below is the view from our bedroom which I normally think is pretty grim but I realised that by focusing on the green and white of the foliage and the brown of the brick it's actually rather nice. This does mean ignoring the concreted over garden of our neighbours, filled with washing and the enormous satellite dish which the people downstairs put on our wall, but that's the beauty of framing!

My reward on Friday was dinner at Mum and Dad's which of course offered amongst its many attractions (good food, lovely company)...cats!

Pity the video is so dark - sorry! But I love how you can see the thought to go for Pip's jugular run through Agnes' head before she does it. They make me giggle those two.

What I Did on My Bank Holiday

Given that the weather has now returned to regulation overcast it seems like a good time to celebrate the surprise sunshine which blessed the bank holiday weekend.

Miles and I had a lovely weekend filled with cats and family visiting. Mum and Dad's kittens (well actually gangly adolescents now) came to stay with us on Saturday as part of our training programme which will hopefully mean that they can come and stay with us when my parents go away, rather than us having to up sticks to west London for the week. Pip and Agnes are getting very good on the tube (I think they've had 7 journeys on it now) and, thanks to a ballsed up Piccadilly line on Saturday, they've now done one bus ride too.

They seem to like our bedroom the most and the pictures show them not helping me change the duvet.

On the Monday we went round to Miles' brother's to view the bounty of their wedding list which had just been delivered. I was delighted to see that all the linen they'd asked for is blue and goes very well with the quilt that I made for them!

We spent the afternoon playing darts in the garden (so much harder than it looks!) and then Miles and I went blackberry picking with his parents in the wild little woody bit that covers one of the train tunnels.

Yesterday, I got round to cooking up our share of the Bounds Green Blackberry Bounty with some cooking apples and then used the puree to make a charlotte (so tasty we've almost finished it between the two of us!).

On the craft front, I'm plugging away at my ripple crochet blanket. I'd like to finish it by Christmas which should be possible - I think I have about one third done so far. Better get up some speed surfing those ripply waves!