Friday, April 24, 2015

Cats and Rabbits

Remember the black cat quilt I made for Dave and Dana two Christmases ago?

Well, I secretly set out to make a pair, one for them and one for us. But it was quite a sprint to get just theirs finished by Christmas time and 94 is a lot of cats, David. (Don't make me explain that joke again.) Eventually our quilt got put away after the holidays and other quilt projects just kept cutting in front of it in the queue. By the time I finally got back to working on our black cat quilt I had a new idea.

My new plan involved cats and rabbits! Ring a bell?

It's one of my favorite songs from the Disney Alice in Wonderland.

As if there weren't enough cats in this quilt...

I also wanted to give a little nod to the Queen of Hearts.

Finally I got everything together and started quilting.

You know, the hallmark of a good quilting buddy is that she doesn't care when the quilt spills off of the quilting table and onto her face.

I quilted in two colors for this project.

Here's what the cats and rabbits look like all finished up (after only 2.5 years!)

I'm actually really happy to have finished this quilt so I can stop singing that damned song every time I work on it!

Outdoor College

Renovation, San Jose House No comments

We bought a futon. Both of us having lived through college (and grad school!) without ever having owned a futon, I never thought I would be able to say that we have actually purchased a futon.

Let me back up. We have a terrible back yard. It's great for the dogs to run around it, but as such, it no longer contains any grass, only dust. Lots and lots of dust.

Even the non-dust areas were looking pretty dismal.

It's a real shame since the weather is so gorgeous here, so we decided it was time to spruce the back yard a bit. In true Team Sunshine Fuzzy Bunny fashion, that idea ballooned into a pretty ambitious plan.

It started small with a chandelier.

But then it grew into loading up the car with a ton of wood and metal roofing.

Then we spent a whole day being really dumb about how to build an outdoor structure.

Like, a whole day.

So dumb.

So the next day we realized that we were real dumb and we deconstructed the entire roof that we built on the ground because it turns out there is not a good way to get an entirely constructed roof 10 feet off of the ground. Then we rented tools and we started building again the real way.

There's that super nice futon that we bought because we are basically grown up college kids.

Finally we got this beast mostly assembled and I started painting.

Next, we extended the existing patio.

We also wired that chandelier for outdoor use. Remember that chandelier?

We bought our first ever patio set.

That's kind of an adult thing to do! And you've got to admit after all that the college-type futon that we bought ended up looking not too shabby in the end. We call this space "Outdoor College."

When we go to Outdoor College, we do college things like keep up with our course readings,

indulge in boozy beverages on school nights,

and of course nap.

Welcome to Outdoor College!

Easter Traditions

holiday, kitteez, Molly, Norman, Pet Shenanigans, Pitties No comments

One of our favorite Easter traditions is dying easter eggs (because, you know, we're adults and stuff.)

We came up with some pretty good ones this year thanks to the fact that Eddy gave me a big box of Crayola in my Christmas stocking this past year. Good like the "Starship Egg-derprise" by Eddy.

Here's my very bad tribute to "Our Hero: J.B. Fletcher."

Eddy made this international oeuf.

This is my cheeseburger egg. (I'll spare you my meta egg about eggs.)

This is some spiral-eyed carrot that Eddy always draws.

And here's my portrait of Eddy,

complete with a portrait of me on the back!

Another of our favorite Easter traditions is to do a whole big Polish meal from scratch. I made up a big batch of pierogi.

And I made a karpatka. We were both pretty excited about the puff pastry dough.

We even peeked in the oven while it was cooling.

Here's the super tall karpatka once I filled it with custard.

We also made golabki,

and borowiki (mushroom) soup.

We also had a yummy vegetable salad complete with deconstructed Easter eggs.

The new tradition we started was making bunny ears (it's only right for everyone on Team Sunshine Fuzzy Bunny to have bunny ears just one day a year). Rupert clearly hated it.