"Round and Round the Garden"

You know that rhyme for babies? The one that goes "Round and round the garden like a teddy bear, one step, two steps, tickle you under there!?" I've been round and round the garden today, THREE TIMES. I was chasing puppies who had made off with my knitting, or yarn. I've got another scarf on the needles, this one out of Bernat Boa, a slippery (but sturdy) polyester eyelash yarn. Boa makes a distinctive and peculiar sound as it's being pulled full-tilt through the cat flap/dog door, I've come to recognize it. You can say all sorts of nasty things about synthetic novelty yarns, but bark chips and bits of blackberry bush shook out of it just beautifully.

Debi, my recipient for the "Art and a Cup of Java" swap has probably received her package by now, so I'm going to show the contents:

Debi is an animal person, so I chose to do a picture of cat for her. You can't really see the pearlescent ink I used on top of the watercolor, so it loses a bit in the photo. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it wasn't too bad for my first try at any sort of art in a very long time. I hope Debi likes it. I confess, though, I coveted that tea cup. Debi had lost her collection of tea cups, so I wanted to find her a nice one. There's a thrift store downtown which I go to almost every Wednesday, and I looked for one there for weeks before this one showed up during their moving sale. It's old Noritake, I wish I knew what the pattern is, but everything except "Noritake" was in Japanese.