Showing posts with label les chats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label les chats. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Les miaou miaous...

Happy first days of Spring everyone! We've had a few little strings of perfect days so far, complete with botanical garden picnics, iced chai and short sleeves, but now that it's officially real life Springtime, the weather in Portland, as it is wont to do, has reset to freezing rain and hail. Siiigh. Soo I'm spending the day tucked away indoors, warm and cozy, drawing cats, cats, cats for a cute upcoming project, which reminds me that if we're not acquainted on twitter or instagram you may not have met some of the newest members of our household, who I've been meaning to post about forevvver!

Almost a year ago to the day, we adopted this little ragamuffin, Uschi: quite possibly the worlds cutest feral Persian kitten, from the lovely Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood. She was found wandering the streets of Portland with a hurt paw, a kitty flu, and her fur all in mats, but we kind of knew she was the one and basically stalked the shelter, calling to check on her progress daily, until she was ready to adopt. We thought she might take a while to warm up to us, but she was almost immediately super cuddly, full of purrs and super excited to have a whole house full of cozy nap spots and sunny windowsills: A few months later we decided that she might like a little brother, and adopted this tiny creature, Wolfi: As the proud owner of what may be the tiniest catpaws in the world and weighing in at all of seven pounds, we thought he may have been a teacup kitten, but he's been getting bigger and bigger ever since. He was also semi-feral, and found in the same neighborhood as Uschi, so we were hoping they might be acquainted from their street cat days and be fast friends. It's taken them a while, but they now have a couple of ridiculously cute cat friend rituals, from birdwatching together on the windowsills to their daily mid-morning paw holding catnap: Also part of our new extended family, approximately one million tiny cactus and succulents just waking up from their winter hibernation and growing out of their pots: I enrolled in a ceramics program last Fall, and I think it's safe to say at this point that I'm completely obsessed. The first semester focused on the wheel, so we now have these mini vignettes of tiny hand thrown pottery all over the house, including some super awkward early glazing experiments, but these are probably some of my favorites, made just after our trip to Palm Springs, in an attempt to create teeny tiny replicas of the amazing giant white stoneware planters we spotted outside of practically every mid-century municipal building in Southern California!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Farewell Miss Maybelle...


This is probably one of the saddest things I will ever write, about one of the saddest days I've ever had in my entire life. My dearly beloved constant companion, devoted sidekick, and be-whiskered best friend Maybelle passed away early last week. She had been going through a patch of ill-health since earlier this year, complete with weekly visits to her favorite vet and tons of cuddles, and we knew this day was coming, but it was still way, way, way more heartbreaking than I could ever have possibly imagined. She's been with me for so long that I can't even remember what life was like without her, but I know that it will never be the same.

We've been trying to cheer ourselves up by looking through a million photos, reminiscing about her antics and marveling at how she really was the cutest cat in the world, with her crazy big eyes, freckle face, cleopatra eyeliner and fluffy white boots. These are a few of the last pictures I got to take of her, about a week before she fell ill, when she decided to have a bed-in one day, purring like crazy all the while about the harmonic convergence of two of her all time favorite things, snuggly down blankets and basking in the sun:

She also got to enjoy a ton of her all time favorite thing in the world this year, the great outdoors! After years of being an apartment kitty, she was filled with wonder at all the birds and bees and flowers and trees that were to be found in our new backyard and demanded that we hang out there pretty much all of the time, which we gladly obliged:

As a firm believer in both ghost stories and cat magic, I'm still waiting (im)patiently to spot visions of her little lion face out of the corner of my eye or hear the pitterpat of tiny ghost paws on the floorboards, but in the meantime, rest in peace Miss Maybelle,
we ❤ you!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

It's Only a Paper Moon...

Monday, June 01, 2009



Gal Costa circa 1969

Monday, March 30, 2009

Cat Fancy...

One upside to the aforementioned Epic Computer Fail of 2009: finding a million projects that I had either abandoned or simply forgotten all about nested in all the wrong folders on my hard drive.

It's a little known fact that I try to sneak collages of kittens into practically every design project I'm asked to work on, which, aside from a couple of googly eyed cats that made their way into a couple of compilation books and fashion editiorials in, oh, 2004 or so, has nearly always been to no avail. Here are a few of the collection still waiting for their forever homes:



Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Perfect Rooms 101


Capote at Home by Slim Aarons

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Oh hai...

Here's Maybelle sharing my obsession with late 60s / early 70s patchwork.

I really really want a huge collection of quilts made kind of exclusively by teenage girls in the 70s but they always seem to be the hardest to track down. This one has the most amazing bits of striped velveteen, candy colored denims and printed corduroy and is pretty much my new favorite blanket ever: