One week in the life of my strawberry

Plush piggies

I've been busy making my plush pigs today. I've done a more in-depth post about them on my guinea pig blog, but I thought I'd share this photo with you guys. How lovely do the real and plush pigs look together!?

What a lot of fun!

A little custom guinea pig

Check out this little lady! She was made especially for her new mumma, and has been named Dot. She is a 4" custom baby guinea pig in scruffy mohair.




I'm working on some more guinea pigs in faux fur from my newer more realistic guinea pig pattern at the moment too. These guys will go up for sale with a percentage of the adoption cost being donated to The Cavy Cottage guinea pig shelter where I adopted two of my girls. I've got two shelties, a bright pink curly pig, a jett black smoothie and many others in the works!

Oliver's First Birthday

Oliver is 1 year old today! Seems like we've had him for a lot longer than that! :P



He got a big juicy bone as a treat for his special day. I think he was pretty pleased.

He's a pretty good dog, he has his moments and I have mine (where I think it would be easier and cleaner not to have a dog!), but we're preserving. He still jumps up to greet people though. Usually putting dirty paw marks all over our visitors pants. And it's not just one jump, it's continual jumping that gets a bit annoying. He knows not to do it to us but obviously we missed the whole 'don't jump on guests' bit of his training!



He's not allowed inside as he can't be trusted with food/toys/furniture/bins/anything-we-want-to-keep-nice etc, so he lives on the patio. We gave him an old couch of ours that used to live in my studio before I got my shelves. He loves it! This is where he sleeps, all rugged up with a fleecy blanket and his winter jacket.



We tried putting a kids jumper on under the jacket to give him a bit of extra warmth, but the little bugger can wriggle out of it, even when the jacket is over the top! I don't know how, but he does it every time now. So we don't worry so much about the jumper! :P

Hopefully this year will be a bit smoother with him as we slowly get out of the puppy phase. I would say he destroyed at least one toy a week over the last year. Maybe some days more like one toy a day. So we'll see how the stats work out next birthday!

Rylee and Ryo

I was sorting out my rather extensive mohair and faux fur collection earlier in the week, when I pulled out a remnant of mohair from making Oreo and Blizzard. It was the last of the long, wiggly white mohair from Oreo. I had to make something with it right then, so the fur sorting got abandoned and I drew out these two little bears!

I only had enough to do one full bear in the white, so I decided to pair some hand dyed pink mohair with the last tiny bit to squeeze another bear out of it. I just love pink and white together! And if I'm honest, the pink and white bear is my favourite of the two!

I've called her Rylee, and her brother all in white Ryo (I'm pronouncing this as 'rio', but I could be wrong!).






I thought I'd try out something new with the paw pads too. I didn't plan to get quite as involved as I did though, and they both ended up quite detailed. I like the look, I just wasn't convinced the bears needed such detailed feet! But at the end of the day it doesn't at all subtract from the look of the bear, so alls well that ends well!

Baby and Toddler update

We got another awesome package from our USA guardian angel Julie this week. And in it were three super cute plushies! This baby blue elephant was for Byron. He's almost 5 months old now. Where did that time go!?

I checked his stats after his 4 month immunisations, and he was only 5cm shorter and 1.5kg lighter than Chelsea was at 12months! He is a BIG Bubba!




He was quite partial to his elephant too! Thank you Julie!




Chelsea got two teddies! She's almost 2 (just a few more weeks), so is a little harder to capture on camera. But here I have a series of blurry photos showing her trying to position her teddies on my new bear shelf. Very cute! I suppose with all of my collection on the upper shelves, she must just think that's what we do with teddies!

My Pug

I did it!

{Happy dance around the room}

I made a pug that actually looks like a pug!



This is the photo that inspired my current pug/puppy obsession. This is Muppet, a friend's pug who recently passed away after living a long and happy life. She posted this photo to facebook and I just couldn't stop looking at it. I'd never really noticed how cute pugs are.




My version isn't as rounded at Muppet in the photo above, I would have loved to have replicate the ball-head thing she has going on, but I'm still pretty damn proud of myself! If you had asked me a year or two ago if I thought I could ever design and made a semi-realistic looking pug, I would have said no way!






Meet 'Miss Muppet'. She is now on bearpile as well. I wasn't sure how much interest I'll get for her but I have a feeling she won't last long. (I am a little torn as to whether or not I should keep her, but we have a vet bill today - see my guinea pig blog for details, if you dare! - so it's probably smarter to allow her to go travel the world!)