Worlds Entwined

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

Learning a little music theory or even just how to listen to music and pay attention analytically does so much. Music is a delicious lasagna instead of nice lyrics and a catchy melody. Plants all looked boring to me until I worked at a greenhouse and had to identify them by their leaves, and now I can look at wildflowers and weeds and forest undergrowth without getting bored, even if there are no interesting berries or flowers. Learning Japanese opened up a whole people group to understand, where before they may as well have been speaking nonsense (to me, anyway).

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

I made a panjo. A pandolin? It has 4 strings instead of 5, tuned GDAE like an Irish tenor banjo or octave mandolin. I just got it strung up and tuned last night and I keep playing around on it, completely baffled by the fact that I not only made a musical instrument, but it actually sounds good.

As promised, here are the final completed photos of my pizza quilt. The whole thing only took me 1 week of planning/designing and fabric shopping, and 2 weekends to sew by hand*

*while sick and lacking the energy to do anything else

Close enough?

My cat was a little shy about using the quilt at first. (He's like that sometimes. I made him a doily last year, and he spent like 3 days gingerly walking around it on the coffee table to avoid stepping on it before realizing it was for him to chill on.)

I first tried giving it anchovies on top but he didn't seem interested:

So then I put the quilt on the dining table (which he is usually allowed on because I eat on the kitchen island and use the dining table as a crafting desk) and plopped the cat on top of it.

That seemed to get the message across, maybe a little too well. He instantly got comfortable and wouldn't let me pick him up off the quilt when I wanted to move it off the table.

Cody also seems to think the olives are like a smaller version of my hair scrunchies, which I'm constantly losing because he thinks they're his toys. He keeps pawing at them and trying to pull them off the quilt even though they're firmly stitched down.

Eventually he wandered off and I claimed the quilt back. The whole point of this was to make something for the cat to knead on instead of me, so I put the quilt on my bed and then made like I was getting ready to call it a night.

And sure enough, he jumped up and started roaming around like "hey, something's different about this place...?"

I'm not sure if he ended up kneading on the quilt because I fell asleep, but this is what I woke up to this morning:

Alright, let's switch things up!