Looking Good

Our girl is so funny sometimes.  The other day M and I were playing with an empty bath tissue roll… batting it around the office and stuff… the girl grabs it right out of our paws and starts babbling about how it would be perfect for some silly thing or the other.  Normally, we’d have been pretty annoyed, but it was about time for our afternoon naps anyway, so we figured we’d let her play with it for a while.

When we woke up she was clicking around on Pinterest ….and hacking our toy to pieces!  Apparently she’d decided to make a new mirror for the ladies litter-box-room.  We have our own private litter-box, but the girl tries to keep the public litter-box room all pretty and stuff….  We’re not allowed in there after the incident with the sink…. Who knew the girl would have such a hissy fit about a little water on the floor!?  M & I had a “tiny” water fight… geeze!

Anyway, M & I climbed up on the desk to see what the girl had done to our toy…. apparently she’d been busy while we were napping!

• First, she squashed the roll in half.
• Next she took the bath-tissue roll and cut it into four 1 inch pieces (she’d collected a few other rolls and a paper towel roll or two as well)
• Then she glued five of the pieces together near their points….

OMP it was a flower!

The next day the girl came to the office with a can of spray paint, a mirror and a hot glue gun….

• She spray painted all the “flowers” blue (we made her do this outside, because our noses are sensitive and that stuff stinks)

After our nap the “flowers” had dried and the girl brought them inside.

• She arranged them into a circle around the mirror and then started hot gluing them together.
• Once they were glued into a circle she placed the mirror face down on the flowers and started gluing the mirror to the flowers.
• Two Command Strips later the “Flower Mirror” was attached to the litter-box room wall!

Pawesome!

While we did not approve of the destruction of our super fun toy… we do have to agree that the mirror looked pretty good…. and it made the girl awfully happy… and when she is happy she shares her coffee with us (with extra cream!) so it was a win-win after all.

– M &M

Whatever the Weather

I gotta tell you, we’re not laughing anymore.  It wasn’t funny the first time, but it did kind of make us scratch our ears.

“Hot enough to fry a cat on the sidewalk.”

Yeah, its hot.  Not THAT hot!  And we’re not allowed outside anyway, so we don’t know why every third human who walks through the door tells us that!  Aaarrrggg!  One little record-breaking heat wave and our humans go all goofy.

We’ve been learning about weather in our Private Pilot Ground School Class.  One of our human friends, Terrible (don’t ask me, I didn’t name him), teaches the weather chapter of our class.  We learned that even airplanes don’t like these temperatures.  When it is hot the air is less dense and doesn’t allow an aircraft to generate enough “lift.”  M and I totally get that… when it is hot it is hard to generate enough lift to drag our tails off the chair.

Since it’s been so nasty out we decided we should make something nice for our class mates, but we didn’t want to make anything that took a lot of effort.  And we certainly didn’t want to make anything that required turning on the oven, so cookies were out…..

So we checked out our Pinterest board of ‘Crafty Ideas‘ and found these super cute notebooks that we’d pinned a while back.  We are always writing notes in class (since the Board turned us down for our own iPads) and we thought these would be fun to share!

Since it’s ‘back to school’ time the girl was able to find these little bitty note books… perfect sized for us and perfect for the humans to tuck into their pockets!

We liked THIS idea, but pretty soon we had strips of paper all over the office (it was kind of distracting…. M kept running off and chasing them!) and the girl was mad that we’d dumped the Mod Podge in one of her desk drawers….  oops!

So we decided to scale it back a bit….

You will need:

• Mod Podge (or you could use glue)
• Paint Brush
• Sectional Chart (or other pretty paper, but really… charts are awfully pretty)
• Notebook
• Paper Cutter

Get your supplies together

We cut our so that it fit exactaly at the top and bottom edges, but overlapped into the front and back covers…. like a book jacket.  ‘Paint’ the front cover with the ModPodge. Go slow with the ModPodge.. make sure you have everything lined up before you glue down the back cover.

Glue down the front and back inside flaps last.

Ta-dah!

Meow-out to our Instructor Terrible! I read the chapter…. M didn’t… she took a nap!  I’m ready for the next class, ask me anything!

M&M

Gifts from the Monkey Queen

We are totally excited!  Our human, the girl, has received a gift from the Monkey Queen!  Eeep!  How cool is that?

So we did some Googling (the source of all knowledge) and discovered that she’s not really a monkey (though she is a human…. so that’s kinda the same thing, but without a tail…. sad 😦  no tail) Anyway, 100th Monkey Media is pretty cool even if it isn’t what we were expecting.  Mich (we’re gonna keep calling her the Monkey Queen ’cause we like the way it sounds) is a super social media guru.  She teaches businesses  how to use things like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, e-mail and other social media platforms to better reach their customers.  We’ve been watching her YouTube channel all day… she’s such a funny human! We’ve learned all sorts of great things we’re going to have the girl do for our Airport.  If you aren’t as tech-savvy as me & M, you can have Mich do it all for you!  She teaches classes too, so be sure to like her on Facebook or Twitter (we do!) so you know what she’s up to.

We thought the girl was just goofing off when she was on Facebook, but apparently she was out learning things!  Since she likes and comments on 100th Monkey Media’s page so often she was named the Fan of the Week!  (We’re so proud!)  As the Fan of the Week the Monkey Queen sent her a mystery gift…… It’s a Crystal Growing Kit!!!

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Thanks Mich!  We had a ball helping the girl put together the crystal growing kit!  We tried to get her to follow all the directions, but she insisted on putting the crystals in a jar instead of the display pan that came with it…. perhaps that was a good idea after all…. sometimes we get over excited and eat our craft projects!

If you aren’t already a fan of 100th Monkey Media, you totally should be!

– M&M

ModPodge in our Whiskers

Apparently humans can’t drink from water bowls like we do… something about their tongues not being scratchy like our…. poor humans!  We’ve noticed they like to drag around cups with liquid in them…. and straws!  We have been trying to learn to drink from a straw like our humans, but we haven’t quite gotten the hang of it just yet.  When our humans leave their cups unattended we take their straw and add it to our collection so we can practice in our water bowl (we don’t like to drink soda… coffee, yes… soda, no.)  Even though we haven’t made much progress on learning to drink from them yet, we do have great fun playing with the chewed up straws.  Also, it gives our humans lots of fun chasing us around pretending that they didn’t want us to have their straw…. silly humans…. we know that if you didn’t want us to have it, you wouldn’t have left it unattended!  Duh!

The humans’ cups tend to leave little rings of water on our table.  We don’t like the little water rings… it gets on our paws and we have to shake it off and then water gets everywhere! Yuck!  We figured it would be too hard to teach them to drink from a water bowl, so we decided to make them coasters.

You will need:

• 4×4 tiles (we used some old bathroom tiles)
• Sectional charts (cut about 4.25 x 4.25 in)
• Mod Podge
• Foam brush
• Clear spray paint
• Felt (for the bottoms)
• Hot glue

We had the girl cut the charts into 4.25 x 4.25 squares.

Next she covered the tiles with Mod Podge and and applied the charts to the tiles…. take your time here, smooth all the wrinkles and bubbles out now, because it dries fast!

We tried doing the corners two different ways… When you fold the paper down over the sides you get a little flap that sticks out… first we tried just cutting te flap off, but it left an edge that we worried would eventually peel.  Finally we decided that we liked to just fold the flap over like wrapping a present.  It looks a bit neater, but takes a bit more effort to get to glue down.

Coat the top of the coaster with a coat or two of Mod Podge to seal it.

Once everything dried we applied a coat of clear spray paint to make it shiny.

We cut a piece of felt (slightly less than 4×4) for the bottom so it wouldn’t scratch the table…. Use hot glue to attach the felt.

FYI: do not get the mod podge in your whiskers… it is a nightmare to get out!

M&M

Stop to Eat the Roses

Our humans don’t like to fly on rainy, windy, snowy or hot-hot days…..good thing they were not born birds!  M & I get lonely and board when no one comes to visit, so too keep the girl from rotting her brain on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/FestusAirport – tell her hi!) or trying to give us pedicures (we like our nails sharp, thank you very much) we like to do arts & crafts.  Since we hate to waste kibble-money on anything but kibble and catnip we try to find old things and upcycle them.

Knowing how much we love to craft, some of our humans have started bringing us their old aeronautical charts to use…. we call this Sectional Chart Art!

We saw these roses on Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/pin/211880357439410598/) and just had to make them!

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The tutorial on Pinterest said to use hot glue, so we got the girl to glue them together for us, because hot glue is a nightmare to get off our paws!  Later we made some out of newspapers and we just used Elmer’s glue and it worked fine for that.  For anything thicker like scrapbook paper or sectional charts, we’d say you should use the hot glue.

We had a great time batting the little pieces of paper around the office while the girl turned them into roses!

She used bamboo (shish-ka-bob) skewers for the stems and added a bit of blig to the roses by first hot gluing a shiny bead or pearl (those are great to bat around too!) to the non-pointy end of the skewer and then shoving the skewer through the center of the rose.  Next she used floral tape (do NOT grab the roll and run around the office with it, no matter how much fun it looks… it is very hard to reuse once it has fur in it) to wrap the skewer.  Secure the end with a bit of hot glue.  Ta Dah!

– M&M

 

Idle Paws

You know what they say, “idle paws are the devil’s workshop.”  M and I like to keep the girl busy …. otherwise she starts coming up with ridiculous ideas… like vacuuming!

Checking out Pinterest, we’ve come across a number of ideas for painting ugly furniture and mod-podging all manner of things…. and we got to thinking… we could use another place to nap!  So we showed the girl our idea and sent her to Home Depot (we are not allowed outside, so we have to make lists for her) and then we set her to work on fixing up this ugly old end table we found.

She used one can of RustOleum primer spray paint to cover it first….. then a whole can of RustOleum Ultra Cover 2x in a nice turquoise that we think coordinates nicely with the grey in our fur.

Once that dried she took a St Louis Sectional Chart (expired… we like to up-cycle old charts) and a Kansas City Chart (because the table was just a bit too big for one chart) and lined it up so our airport was on the table.  She cut the edges off so it fit perfectly and then used mod-podge to glue it to the table.  After the first layer of mod-podge dried she painted over the top of it too.  We noticed it seemed to bubble up…. not sure if she wasn’t paying attention or if that is just something that happens… when it was all dry the bubbles went away.

Lastly we had her coat the top with a clear spray paint sealer, just to make sure it would hold up to wear and tear.

We’re pretty happy with the way it turned out… the fluffy pillow inside is just the best ever!

Follow us on Pinterest to keep up with all our cool crafting!

– M&M