Tag Archives: Pets

Before and After: Cat Dishes

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Cat Bowls Before and After

Problem: Mismatched dishes, undersized placemat and spilled food that would migrate across the slick surfaces out of the food area.  (Our dog Mojo knows not to eat from the cat food dishes, but he feels that cleaning up stray pieces of food is OK, and sometimes if they’ve spilled a lot he gets on a roll and cleans out all the dishes, too.)

Solution: A set of vintage melmac bowls found on Etsy and quilted placemat that helps keep dropped food from spreading away from the dishes.  The placemat was a piece of patchwork I’d sewn for another project and abandoned, just cut to the size I wanted.  (That’s why the squares are strangely sized, but the cats haven’t seemed to notice.)  We also just gave up on having a water dish by the cat bowls.  They never used it and it just got yucky.  They all share dog water.

New Bowls and a Quilted Placemat for the Cats

Since the change, Mojo has eaten the cat food once, but that is an improvement.  The quilted placemat can just be thrown in the wash, which is nice.  I’ll probably end up making them another placemat or two and they probably deserve another set of dishes, too.  Not that they’re spoiled at all.

sarahsigres

Mending

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Last Friday, our cat Aslan lost his battle with pancreatitis.  I think he would have died that day on his own, but we took him to the vet and had him put down.  I think we saved him hours of pain, and I’m glad if we were able to make it more bearable for him.  We loved him, and we held him and kissed him at the end.  Even the vet cried.

It’s hard to lose a pet.  Even with our remaining two cats and two dogs, there was an empty spot in our house.  Aslan took so much of my time, with his medications and my efforts to get him to eat well and give him extra attention.  It’s hard, missing who he was and how he needed me.  That empty spot he left behind was too much for me.  We didn’t plan to take in another pet, but …

Well, like I told my husband, sometimes kittens just happen and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.  So there.

Meet Diego.

Danni and Diego

The weird thing is, we picked out the name Diego before we went to the shelter.  I told my Mom we were getting a kitten and we’d picked a name, and she confused “Diego” with “Diablo” (devil), which made me wonder what Diego might really mean.

Diego Sleepy Quilt 2

Diego means “supplanter”, or “he that replaces”.

Aslan was one of a kind, so I can’t really think that he’s been replaced.

But that empty spot is much easier to take, and we smile a lot more.

Diego Sleepy Quilt 3

Thank you, Diego.

My Mojo Shirt

It's so hard to take pictures of yourself sometimes ...
I made my Mojo shirt last night!  Man, it’s hard for me to take pictures of myself sometimes.  This was taken in the bathroom mirror, but hopefully it’s good enough to at least give you an idea how the shirt turned out.  (It’s actually centered well on the shirt, in spite of how it appears here.)

This shirt was made with a phone picture altered to crop right around Mojo, then made black and white.  This was done partially because you could still see the green grass around his toes, but I preferred how it looked anyway.  I bought T-shirt transfer paper and just printed the picture reversed on a full-page.  It was easy to iron on to an old tank top I already had, and within minutes I had my very own Mojo shirt.  The transfer is a little “slicky”, but the instructions promise it will feel softer after it’s washed.

Mojo was very excited about the entire process, but he’s excited about everything, as puppies are.  The real test was when my husband saw it, smiled and asked me to make one for him, too!