Day 40: Yarn

The prompt to work with yarn pretty quickly led me to think of cats, possibly because any project involving yarn also involves keeping it away from our own.
About the cattiest book I know of is T.S. Eliot's 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats', and my copy is illustrated by Edward Gorey. Probably more people are familiar with this one from the Broadway musical, but it's really worth sitting down and reading the original poems. That's actually why I bought this little paperback of Amazon years ago, back in High School or College. There were a few versions available, but I couldn't pass up Gorey's illustrations.

I tried to capture the style in yarn, which sounded simple enough since there's a lot of attention to line, but it turns out yarn doesn't do well for details. Not standard black yarn, anyway. I drew a quick pencil sketch, and laid down glue over the lines section by section, letting it get a little tacky before I put the yarn down. It was all pretty quick and easy, but I lost the toes on the original drawing and decided whiskers would just clutter it up.

Maybe if I'd worked bigger, I could have gotten more details in.

I have to admit that sitting down and looking through the poems does tend to leave me humming the tunes from the musical, but I think they leave a lasting impression even without that. There's so many different cat personalities described, that we sometimes end up wondering which ones best fit our own cats. Also the poem on 'the Naming of Cats' amuses me, because I don't think I've ever had a cat that didn't name herself.

They also definitely do strange dances in the night, and who knows what all else. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard some bizarre noise downstairs, a crash or something else, in the middle of the night, and gone down to find nothing amiss and one of the cats sitting innocently in the middle of the floor, giving me a 'did you want something?' kind of look. It's pretty clear from the poems that T.S. Eliot personally knew at least a few cats.

Our cat Froggy giving a gang sign?