Free Roaming

When we went to bed last night, Smitty was happily playing mouse hockey in the kitchen with a new mouse toy Mike brought home for Maggie. Maggie didn't care that much about it, but Smitty loved it. Usually, Smitty comes and gets in bed with me, but he only came around once last night. That seemed normal enough because of said new mouse toy.

When I got up this morning, I noticed with a bit of horror that the previously-only-propped-open-an-inch-or-so laundry room door was wide open.

Somehow, someone nosed their way through the door. For now, I'm not saying who did it.

Hey, man...don't look at me...

There's no evidence to indict either party. Nevertheless, it was instantly clear that the kitties had full unsupervised access to one another for at least part of the night.

Yesterday I grew tired of watching them every minute of the day and decided we'd made little progress from a few days ago with human intervention. I decided to give them more access to one another in an attempt to normalize their routine.

There were a few scuffles, but nothing more. By evening, I fed them in the same room together. They ate peacefully for about five minutes, until Smitty finished eating and decided it was time to jump on Maggie.

For Maggie's part, she's found several places she can retreat to when she feels threatened by Smitty, and so it's working out to pay a little less attention and let them work it out on their own.

But to finish up with this morning's discovery, my first concern was to locate Maggie. Understand that locating Maggie always means bending at the waist until one is completely upside down and looking under the narrowest of underlings. I found her under the couch. Smitty happened to be in the bathroom with Mike and so all was well, at least temporarily. A quick check of the rest of the house did not reveal any blood, guts, or gore. Phew. That was quite a relief.

Today I'm giving them full access, and they've been unsupervised for the past several hours...although I've been lending a listening ear, let me tell you. Smitty climbed up into his He Man Woman Hater's Clubhouse fairly early. I'm thinking he was awake most of the night, and so his morning nap came early.

When he wasn't skulking around looking for Maggie yesterday, he was helping me adjust my tension after switching to the "natural" cotton quilting thread.

With all the cat goings on, I didn't get a start on quilting until rather late in the day. I have just one block to show for my efforts, but the sashings around the block are also quilted. For the block, I'm sticking with my plan of stitching in the ditch around the edges of the embroidered block. Also, I'm quilting snowdrifts into the snow, outlining the snowlady, and then quilting some little falling snow lines to connect the embroidered snowflakes.

I don't want the quilting to detract from the embroidery, and so I'm keeping it light.

For the sashings, I'm doing a snowflake stipple, which is my name for a regular stipple with a few primitive snowflakes thrown in.

This morning, I finished off the second little stitchery for the Written in Thread quilt.

I think the handmaiden is very cute. When I work on this again, I'll be doing the fabric store and the quilts hanging outside. There's probably a way to block out the irrelevant parts of the image below, but I don't know how to do it. You'll have to settle for my pink scribbling. It's the part below the pink line, and I hope I've made this clear enough.

So now I'm once again fresh out of hand stitching, and that means that I'm going to focus my attention on making up hand stitching pieces for today. There are at least four hand-stitched blocks for the Live, Love, Teach quilt on my January/February list of goals. Also, I'm going to make up the next block for the Gingerbread Square quilt. The next one is the 7th of nine blocks: Sugar Hill Inn.

If there's time this afternoon, I'll get back to my quilting. I'll bring my lightbox upstairs from the sewing room so that I can sit at the dining room table and see out the window. Besides, that will give me a better chance at supervising Thing One and Thing Two.