Our vacation for this summer

http://clarissecamp2007.blogspot.com/ will take you to the summary and photo's of our vacation :) It was a perfect time, even if I got a little moody because of my inability to do the things that I love like hiking down to go swimming at the natural water slides at Candy Rock, or dancing at the outdoor music festival in downtown Arnold, or walk the arts and crafts booths at the festival. I suppose I didn't make the best first impression for the new additions to the family either, but oh well. It is what it is and as long as I had my knitting, I was a really "happy camper" :)

New Kitten and New Kitten Bed

E.J. decided since we were adding to the family, he should get to pick one out too so he called me up from a clients home and asked me to come get Cocoa Bean. Yes, he's a male, born near the end of June, and we only wanted females this time around, but he's soo cute and his color is really unusual. It's a brownish smoke grey, but he's tuxedo marked. Stimpy loves him, she has someone a little smaller than her to play with, Xena has just about disowned us. She was willing to tolerate Stimpy, but now she has no patience for either of them. Xena chases the babies out of our bedroom and she rules the back half of the house, the kittens run the living room and kitchen area. I guess a second kitten was more than she could handle, but we're attached to the new kids already so she is going to have to learn how to deal with it. Silly girl, she really wants to play with them too. She'll start to, then remember that she is jealous and smak them upside the head and run down the hall. Oh well, I hope she gets over it soon.
The final pattern for the felted kitty bed. There are so many things I will be using this technique to make. I'll put up the pattern for it in a couple of weeks, I still want to refine a few things and it's kind of tricky to put what I did into words. But it's definitely easy to do and makes the bowl shape I was after. **UPDATE** I've posted the pattern. Here's the link http://clarissepatterns.blogspot.com/

The pink and red and blue was a short row experiment that looked like it would make the bowl shape, but when I washed it to felt the yarn, it laid flat and made a felted pad. It's actually kind of fun and can be used for several different things. A hot pad, a little throw rug, a chair pad, but Stimpy likes to sleep on it, so it's hers, but it's a good thing she likes to share cuz Cocoa Bean seems to have adopted it too :)