What the Cat Did!

Description

This picture developed in a long-drawn-out process. The idea was first of a room with a fireplace, and I experimented with this swirly red-pink-white fabric, and with some orange and white material. The fireplace came from scraps from a shirt for my husband Curt, and the stitching around its edges seemed a natural use for this purpose.

The andirons and shovel on the side are from fabric paint. The wall paper was cloth from India; I have a summer blouse of that material. The floor – I don’t quite remember where that came from, but it seemed to fit, and the oval rug is a stretched-out circle from another one of Curt’s shirts.

The cat came next, a picture found on-line, touched up in Photoshop to be a bit more oval, since it was basically a picture looking straight down at the cat. The window was a longer time coming: what to put on that wall? Another shirt-scrap for a night sky was the answer, with wide lace for curtains, a few touches of my silver pen, which I use to sign all my work, for stars. The rocking chair, well, it just fit there, a room with a cozy fire should have a rocking chair! And what does Grandma do when sitting, rocking by the fire, but knit? So I knit a small swatch out of fine string – it’s a real cable pattern there, with knitting needles cut from a hamster wheel! And cats and yarn, what might happen there? That completed the picture.

Before taking the picture to be framed, I showed it around at work, where two women, mothers with children at home, at once said, almost in unison, “Goodnight, Moon”, and one of them brought in that little children’s book, with a picture of a fireplace with burning embers, a rocking chair, an oval rug, and knitting that the two sleeping cats had gotten to! But if I ever saw that book, it is so far back in my childhood as to be totally forgotten.