What's New at Sleepy Cat Studio

Archive for May, 2009

Journals

I recently delved into my treasure trove to create some unique blank journals with collage covers.

Continue Reading May 30th, 2009

Just squeaking this in before the end of the month—Mama Cat seemed like the perfect cat for the month that has Mother’s Day. She is not technically our cat, she’s the neighborhood cat. She’’s a beautiful dark tortoiseshell kitty with a peach colored bib over her chin and throat.

When she first showed up a couple years ago, Mama Cat was extremely wary and I couldn’t get near her. Now she trusts me and will actually roll over for the occasional belly rub. When I’m outside in the garden, she’s a good companion, taking a mild interest in whatever I’m doing and enjoying a good chin rub. She keeps up an easy conversation of whispery meows and purrs. She obviously enjoys life and kneads her paws up and down to show it. She currently has a litter of six kittens who will be weaned soon and then she’ll be off to the vet’s to be spayed and vaccinated. I hope to find homes for her kittens and ideally a home for her as well.
Mama Cat

May 27th, 2009

Some New Stuff

This is my first year for the tour and I have the jitters! The thought of around 200 people coming to my home (albeit not all at once) makes me cringe and at the same time is pretty exciting.

Continue Reading May 27th, 2009

Thanks…

….to everyone who came to the Brown County Spring Blossom Arts Festival! Despite pouring rain on Friday and a bit of mud on Saturday, the show was a success. There was a good line up of artists and fairly non-stop good music. I do hope next year the powers that be will agree to put all the artists’ tents in one location, instead of splitting them into two groups. But it was fantastic to see the folks coming out to support local art!

If you missed that show, or simply can’t get enough of good, hand made art, come see me at my next show—the 54th and Monon Arts Fair—see the Sleepy Cat Studio events calendar for details. Due to nearly selling out of hand painted wine glasses and mugs, I’ve taken advantage of a rainy day and have created some new designs. Rain is forecast for tomorrow too—perhaps I’ll paint some book marks or miniature paintings. My collection of fun charm bracelets was seriously depleted too, so that’s another thing I’ll be working on. Hope to have pictures of all these soon! Now back to work….

May 13th, 2009

Cats and Home Repair

We live in an old farm house and before we owned it, it had been remodeled somewhat… how can I say this nicely? Remodeled creatively? Where the bathtub pipes go into the wall, there’s a hole big enough for a cat to get into. We know this from previous experience. So the hole is usually covered up, but due to a recent plumbing problem the hole was not quite securely covered.

After a long day working in the garden (got those tomatoes in) we were enjoying dinner and a movie, when we heard faint meows coming from the wall behind the bathtub. Okay, it shouldn’t have been a big deal. On the other side of that wall is the mud room, with a built in boot box. All we had to do was take off the top, and pry open the back of the boot box which would give us access to the interior of the wall. We had had to do this once previously with a different cat.

So we do this, thinking to easily rescue the kitty and get back to the movie. Well, the cat in question was Chloe, one of the barn kittens we took in and she’s now around eight months old- small and inquisitive- a bad combination. In the wall was a vertical section of 2X4, with holes in it for the water pipes to go through. Whoever installed it for some reason had drilled an extra three inch diameter hole, just the right size for Chloe to get her head stuck in. We could not get her to maneuver her head out of the hole. We decided if we could take the 2X4 out of the wall, maybe then we could wiggle her loose from the board.

I’ll skip the tale of the sawing, hammering, chiseling, and the poor cat shredding us with her claws. I will mention we had to cut through three water pipes. So now we had a cat no longer trapped in the wall, but try as we might, we still couldn’t get her head out of that hole. We decided to take her to the vet and see if they could sedate Chloe and get the board off. Of course it was late on a Saturday night, no local vets open, which meant a trip to the emergency vet clinic an hour and a half away. Chloe, being a barn cat, is not the tamest cat under the best of circumstances and I was a bit nervous about holding her on my lap in a small car for an hour and a half while she had a 2X4 with nails sticking out of it hanging around her neck. But we wrapped her up snugly, arrived safely, and within minutes the vet somehow got Chloe’s head loose without sedating her. Amazingly they didn’t charge us anything! We got home after 2a.m. and crawled into bed.

The next morning Eric was off to the hardware store and soon had the pipes and wall put back together, with the hole securely closed up. End of story? Not quite. Later in the day I wondered where Shadow was. She’s Chloe’s sister and can be a little shy so I wasn’t too worried that I hadn’t seen her. But when I was feeding the cats in the kitchen, I heard a faint meow coming from the basement. Okay, so she got in there when Eric went down to turn the water back on, no big deal, right? Just open the door and let her out. Only when I did that, no kitty came and I heard a metallic sound that made my blood run cold.

Little kitty footsteps, walking inside the ductwork of the furnace. Did I mention the creative remodeling? In the mud room where we had had to rip things out, is a section of ductwork with no vent cover on it because it vents into a built in cabinet for the sink. A vent cover was installed into the base of this thing- hard to describe- but when everything was ripped out to free Chloe, a small access to the open ductwork was exposed. So now we had a cat lost in the maze of ductwork, and I had visions of shivering through the winter, refusing to turn on the furnace and dropping cat kibble down the vents. Miracle of miracles, she found her way back to where she went in and I was able to lure her out with canned cat food. All’s well that ends well, said Eric, though he added that his opinion of Chloe and Shadow is a bit lower now. I just wish I’d thought to take pictures.

1 comment May 6th, 2009