Sewing With Cats

Good morning, my friends. Things are looking up here at the Three Cats Ranch. For one thing...we sprang ahead. Some of you might have "sprung" ahead. The dictionary seems confused about which past tense of "spring" we should be using. To my ears, "sprang" seems to be the more energetic of the two, so I'll go with that.

And let's just consider the fact that springing ahead, Pi Day, and St. Patrick's Day are all falling within the same week. It makes the coming week seem downright exhilarating, doesn't it?

And we can't complain about the weather this morning. We have no new snow. We're expecting a lot of warm rain today. Looking out at the field yesterday, the snow was retreating. The table is clear, there are no more muffin tops in our flower pots, and I can make my way to the bird feeders without knee-high boots.

When I got home from the farmer's market yesterday, it was nearing lunch time. While I was eating my lunch, Smitty waited at the top of the stairs. When it's time to sew, he grows impatient. Yesterday, however, he used the time to practice his new pose for "Tongue-out Tuesday."

 

This is the "awake" version of a pose he sometimes strikes when he's asleep. Yeah...you can consider the cat "woke." He lives with a social worker, and so what are you going to do? And Tuesday is Pi Day, so it's important to fix his face just right.

In the sewing room, Sadie was putting on her most cute face. This is the one that usually helps her to score a catnip offering.

Having consumed the offering, it was time for napping.

As for me, I had a couple of hours to sew. I've been sewing the sections together as I'm able. When the first section was finished and sewn to the left side, it looked like this.

Continuing on, I had several more sections sewn together, but not yet sewn to one another. This is where I left it for the day.

There are four more sections to make before it's finished. Sections "R" and "S" are just one piece each, and so it shouldn't take long to finish this off.

The next several days will be busy kitchen days. I'm trying two new recipes today. One is a Cranberry-Glazed Pork Roast, which is a test recipe from America's Test Kitchens. I'll be able to show it to you, but I won't be able to say any more until it appears in the magazine. Also, I'm trying a recipe for some orange rolls. They can be made two days ahead and then baked off when I'm ready for them. I was planning to make them ahead to take for our now-canceled camping trip. There are several foods I was planning to make ahead. I purchased all the ingredients, and so now I'm on the hook to make them, even though the camping trip is off. Oh well. It'll all taste just as good if we eat it at home.

So, with all that going on, I'm only hoping I can finish off this block today. If so, I'll just continue on with my list of WIPs. There is plenty to keep me busy today and all week long.