I’ve been playing with my pattern, experimenting with the size, making them just a little taller. This one is up in my Etsy toy shop.

Bertie’s cold is still bad. She looks weepy and sounds snuffly. I hope she feels better soon.

Yesterday, I came across another kitten, orange and white, from the same general location where I picked up our tabby girls. Then today, I found another, the tabby pictured below, in the same spot. She has a serious tail injury. She was circling me, within close range, and meowing at me. She looked like she wanted me to help her, but I couldn’t get my hands on her. I’m hoping she can be trapped, and taken to the vet, but I don’t want to try to catch her myself. I have no safe place to hold her, and I could end up with any number of random cats there, since there are so many, with no clinic appointments for them. The tabby kitten may have to be quarantined if it looks like the injury is the result of a bite wound, as a precaution against rabies. I hope both kittens can be helped.

I feel so terrible every time I visit that location, because there are always more cats or kittens there, living under crummy conditions. Some were TNR’d (trapped, neutered, vaccinated, and returned), last spring, summer, and early fall, but the clinics are infrequent, and there are so many cats everywhere. Please have your pets spayed and neutered, and please spay/neuter/vaccinate any community cats were you live, or ask a rescue to step in to do it. Pet overpopulation and abandonment are really human problems, which is sad and unfair for the animals and the people who care about them.

It’s hard too, seeing cats and kittens out there who all bear a family resemblance to your own pets, in our case, Bertie and Phoebe. This kitten has Phoebe’s face. I still feel so unhappy when I think about their siblings and other relatives that had to stay. I feel sad I couldn’t take their sister, and I worry about how she is doing. I think about that a lot, wondering how many more litters of kittens there have been, and I hope they are okay, especially with the cold, wet weather.

I just put them in my Etsy toy shop. As with the other Alley Cat Angel Sock Kittens, ten dollars from the adoption of these will go to Alley Cats and Angels of North Carolina to help cats and kittens. I have some fundraiser Hug Me Slugs available too. You can find my fundraiser toys here.

I always have to wait for winter to find these tweed socks! I grabbed the few pair I found so I can make some more kittens like these. I also have a kind of ridiculously large collection of all kinds of socks, enough for plenty of variety.

I’m enjoying the idea of making whatever I feel like making right now. I cut off my custom listings to relax a bit. I think last year, on my birthday weekend, I had a big migraine and was exhausted. I’m feeling very happy to just have hang tags to make, and boxes to pack.

My art toys come with hang tags that can be personalized with a name, or “For + a recipient’s name”. I’ll still be shipping this week, via Priority Mail, as usual. Priority Mail usually takes about two to three days to arrive.

Phoebe and the rest of the kitty crew around here aren’t working too hard. I hope we can find another blanket like this one, in a color my mom likes, for my parents. It really is as soft as Phoebe makes it look.

As I mentioned yesterday, I also photographed Siren’s brother, Sasquatch, this past weekend. Here he is in all his adorableness.

I added some more photos of him to an album on the Alley Cats and Angels Facebook page, along with some more of Siren. I had so many to choose from, that I had to narrow them down, which was hard.

Sasquatch is so named due to his great big feet. He has extra toes on his front feet and his back feet!