Category: kitties

the sweetest girl

Two years ago my beloved Skeeter got cancer and died. I never mentioned it here or anywhere else online because I was too sad, because the world is too shitty, because I was sick to death of the internet and putting anything personal on it. Then maybe a month later a friend told me that her relative, whom I’ve never met, made a comment to her that I didn’t seem too broken up about my cat dying. That comment, received at a time when I was pretty broken up about my cat dying, actually, put me into a slow simmer that eventually ended in my taking myself off all social media, forever. And I’m a lot happier and healthier for it, so thank you, shitty person I’ll never meet!

Skeeter was the most difficult cat we’ll ever live with: sweet, loving, and stupid, crippled by anxiety and a bully to our other cat, who wasn’t too broken up at her disappearance from our home. We gave her a safe place to be herself and we loved her (and tried to keep her off the other cat’s back).

Skeeter was a great lover of textiles, so here’s a little collection of her coziest moments.

a tortiouseshell cat sitting on a triangular blue shawl that is laid out on a mattress
Here she is blocking a shawl.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a yellow and red banner
She’s helping sew a heraldic banner (vairy gules and or).

closeup of a sleepint tortoiseshell cat on a white crocheted blanket
Casually slipping her claws into a crocheted afghan my mum made for my Gramma.

a tortoiseshell cat lying in a pile of fabric in a drying rack
In the printmaking studio drying rack.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a red carpet
She loved this rug so much I had to take off its fringe and stitch a clear vinyl binding strip over its edges to protect them.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a blue and gray quilt, with scissors and thread in the foreground
Here she is basting a quilt.

a tortoiseshell cat lying curled up on a gold velvet rocking chair
Her last picture.

studio update

I’ve been moving furniture and presses around in the studio for the past month, trying to figure out a way to get the natural dye operation into the same space where the printmaking and bookbinding happen, because it’s the space with all the good lighting and the ventilation. It’s a big, exhausting job. But it’s starting to feel like it’s going to work out, and it’s shaping up to actually feel more spacious than before. If I can find somewhere for all the STUFF to go.

studioprogressjanuary30

This is what the south wall looks like as of yesterday. I moved that gray table on the right, with the extremely heavy Nolan flatbed press on it that’s too heavy for Peter and I to lift together anymore, all the way over next to the doorway by shifting and scooching, shifting and scooching kind of like how the Easter Island heads were put in place. That was literally the only work I could do that day. Then the press table, which used to jut out into the middle of the room, got pivoted against the wall (with that Chandler & Price Pilot press on it, which is very heavy but not too heavy to lift), and the drying rack in the corner also pivoted 90°. And suddenly this whole space feels wide open, and for the first time in this studio all the letterpress furniture and spacing is on the same side of the room as the presses. Now I can’t wait to get back to printing in here, except for the chaos I’m not showing you over on the other side of the room.

That handpainted Tabor Metal Fabricators sign came from the business my Granddad came to Canada to operate. They made those truck trailers that carry cars, and when the business folded my tricycle, which my dad had taken into work to fix, got abandoned in the locked-up building and when I was a teenager I would regularly stop by that still shuttered building on my jaunts through the industrial park, peering through the murky windows trying to spot my trike in all the abandoned junk that was in there.

I use that sign to block the studio doorway, moving it into place every single time I leave the room so this very cute asshole won’t try to come in and poop on the floor. She has a thing for concrete.

wandainthestudio

Don’t let that sweet face fool you. This is an absolute monster.

hey how’s it going, eh

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a space online to keep a little diary, out of the hands of billionaires? It’s been a while but I’m ready to write here again even if I’m the only person who looks at it.

looking down from the top of porch steps at a garden with a cat on the sidewalk

Here’s Girlie, one of our local stray cats, viewed from the porch behind the mess of our late summer garden. This is just after she tried to run up our young hackberry tree after a bunch of sparrows, because Girlie isn’t exactly clever about what’s worth her efforts.