Thor the gray tabby really wants to be near Sophie the dilute calico cat. I’m not sure if it is adoration, or just fun for him to get in her personal space.
He sings to her too, plurts and trills. Sophie is remarkably calm about the whole situation, he only gets a bat with a paw when he gets really close.
I made a chicken pot pie and when it came to making the vent holes on the top crust, the necessary pattern seemed obvious.
This was my first chicken pot pie I’ve made, and I mostly followed the recipe from the Gluten Free Gourmet Comfort Foods book, but used her pie crust instead of the biscuit mix. Next time, I will thicken my favorite chicken soup recipe for the filling.
My youngest loves coloring books, but it is difficult for her to find uncolored pages in the bound books after a while. I took my heavy duty guillotine paper cutter and cut off the spine of the coloring book, freeing the pages so they could be sorted into colored and uncolored.
My youngest was pleasantly surprised with the fresh stack of ready-to-color sheets, and I was pleased with how fast and clean the cutter worked. Tearing sheets out of a book is often messy and frustrating. By cutting a 1/4 inch off the spine, the pages are freed from the glue easily.
Once my concept was proved, my youngest agreed to let me process the rest of the books. Any book that only had one or two colored pages I left alone, but the books that were mostly colored were cut and sorted.
I now also have a stack of colored sheets that can be displayed and scanned easily for posterity.
In June of 2016 I was experimenting with the 3Doodler, a pen shaped device that extrudes hot plastic, like a 3D printer, but hand driven rather than computer driven. I decided to make a walleye fish, for my Dad, to experiment with construction.
The biggest frustration with the project was the tool. The version of 3D doodler I was using needed more breaks than I did, and I would have to walk away and let it rest, which is not ideal in the middle of a creative storm.
The favorite scratching post in the house needed a fix-up.
When I last rewrapped this post, I took some of the carpet off the top to provide a higher area for scratching since I have longer cats. From the picture, it really wasn’t necessary, even the big cats scratch the middle of the post. To rewrap this time, I purchased 160 feet of 1/4 inch jute rope.
My future self is not going to be pleased with me, because as I wrapped the rope, I stapled it down on the back every few inches. Last time, I only stapled the top and bottom, which made it easy to remove, but I believe shortened the time of use. The last wrap lasted slightly less than a year.
The most helpful thing this time around was that my eldest held the rope above the scratching post, so it was easier for me to wrap the post from the bottom up smoothly.
The new rope, while marketed as 1/4 inch, has a smaller diameter than the old rope, and a tighter twist. It will be interesting to see if it holds up better.
Critters and Craft 