This is what Annabelle has to say about living with kittens.

I wouldn’t mind plopping down and sticking out my tongue myself.

I’m back from the Buyers Market in Philadelphia; I had a good show and I have lots of leads and ideas I need to follow up on, but I am pooped and I need to sit still for a while. Maybe stick out my tongue. Possibly blow raspberries. And then go make some jewelry…

This summer is turning out weird. There was a foot of rain in June; four times the average. Crops are soggy and there are warnings about late blight. Needless to say that between the deluge and jewelry production there has been very little activity in the raised garden. But there has been some and I give you a picture of progress – soil in four beds.

I’m finding that heavy shoveling is a good balancing activity to teeny tiny beadwork.

In the last couple of days potatoes and calypso beans have started poking their heads above ground. I want to go out and pet them and do a little “I’m so happy you’re here” dance. It seems crazy-magical that I poked some dry beans and wrinkled potatoes into the dirt and now there are leaves sprouting. I can’t imagine that miracle ever gets boring.

The Buyers Market of American Craft is in Phili again this weekend and I’m getting ready. I’ve been making new designs to show, and stocking up on samples. Here’s a glimpse:

I feel positively magpie-ish when I see lots of pieces laid out like this. A good feeling of abundance. Making the new designs has given me more ideas, spiraling out in some kind of fractal pattern of inspiration, too many to chase down. But I want to try.

There are red circles everywhere. In the tomato bowl,

the painting of apples by Chris Linder,

the plums I ended up cutting up and freezing for a winter tart,

and the peaches, unbelievably good peaches, sitting on the sill.

I’ve adopted Lucy‘s surviving babies. Inevitably. I mean how could I resist?

Wolfie is being surprisingly great with them, seeing the potential for playmates once they move beyond this erratic stage of “I’m wild and crazy and everything is a toy!”

Annabelle is not a happy girl. She’s keeping guard and hissing at them, but it’s been a couple of days and the hiss frequency is getting less intense so I suspect they’re wearing her down.

Circles, still more circles…

Some new pieces and some experiments not yet sorted through to satisfaction. Pieces to have hanging around to play with in case a solution pops into my head.

I’ve never been one of those people who work x-number of hours in the studio every day. I’d like to be but I’m not. With envy I imagine those regular-studio-hours people as having impeccable exercise regimes, and eating healthy meals at the same time each day. Laundry-is-done-on-Saturday type of people.

Not me. I’m more prone to activity binges. All studio for several weeks, followed by 2 days of website updating, followed by a stretch of solid gardening is more my style; it balances out over time.

I’ve been in a phase of house projects, house guests, a trip up to Canada for a family reunion… so it feels like ages since I’ve had concentrated time in the studio.

Before leaving for Canada I reorganized the studio, moved furniture around, tidied up. Now I’m excited to get in there and to make some new pieces. I have a little pile of envelope backs with doodles of earrings and pendants and I need to make them to find out if the designs work.

I’ll let you know.

We’ve had so much rain the last two weeks that I’ve yet to get the soil (a.k.a. mud) into my raised beds. These little peas were grown in a pot on the patio and are an absolute treat; fresh and tasty of themselves, and heralds of future food production.

Plus their shape is perfect – I’m sure there’s a jewelry design in there if I could just figure out how to make that structure out of beads…

Lucy died. Not too much more to say really. I’ve been doing some sobbing and a bunch of healthy-cat-hugging.

Her remaining two kittens are looking healthy so I’m continuing to cross my fingers and hope that’s how it stays.

Ugh. It’s a tough world.

Two weeks ago a little cat showed up late at night in my driveway. I was taking out the recycling and saw green reflective eyes at the end of the path, and when I came back out with a dish of food she gobbled it up and let me pet her. I called my cat-sitter and local rescue expert and we came up with the plan to put her in the barn overnight and figure things out in the morning.

By morning I was calling the cat Lucy (where do names come from?) and planning to introduce her into the family. But it turned out that she already had a family – five kittens stashed in a shed across the street, which I followed her to when we let her out and she aimed for the road.

Over the next couple of days the kittens were trapped and four were taken with Lucy to a foster home; a temporary place for them to stay while they weaned and got used to people. It was looking like a great tale of rescue and happy endings.

Then on Monday of this week they started to get sick and by Tuesday one of the kittens had died. It was diagnosed as distemper, a horrible illness only seen in cats that haven’t been immunized.

They’re at the vet now, getting the best care possible, but we’ve lost two more kittens in two days. Lucy has a fever but is hanging in there. It’s strange to be attached to a creature I’ve barely met, but I am; she’s my cat. Please send healthy thoughts in the direction of this little mama and her sick baby.

Kitten number five seems to have avoided the virus, and is doing well. Thank goodness for small mercies.