OUTING TO THE CAT CAFE
Birthday treat
Yesterday was my birthday, and for my birthday treat, my hubby took me to the Cat Cafe. We’ve been before, and it’s a whole lot of fun. They have lots of comfy chairs for people and cats to sit on, and there is always convivial company with other cat people there, happy to talk about their cats and share the fun. They also serve nice tea and cakes but warn us not to let the cats help themselves!
Kittens
This time we weren’t treated to kittens to cuddle. They did have some kittens and before we left, I was able to have a quick look at them. They were in a separate room, and were hiding. They were feral kittens that had been rescued, and they were extremely shy and nervous, and it will take some time for them to become used to people. They are being cared for by the staff and kept away from the other cats for now. They weren’t the cute little bundles of fluff we saw on our last visit – very sad to see them like this but at least they are in the right place now, with a chance for a decent life and a good home when the time comes.
Cat cushions
The whole place is filled with pictures and items which are cat-related. This time I was quite impressed with several machine-embroidered cat cushions so I photographed them.
Here’s a detail shot showing the stitching. The pictures are incredibly realistic.
A couple more.
A fun wall clock took my fancy.
The cats
This is Apricot.
Felix.
Glee.
Whizzy waiting to come in.
Mango.
Whizzy again.
Glee again, awake this time.
Cat names
It was a funny thing about the names. They have a tradition of naming any new intake of cats according to a theme – apricot and mango were part of the intake named after fruits. The young lady worker there said they were under pressure from their visitors to stop using silly names!! She brought out a box full of slips of paper that visitors had added – suggestions for names. Some of them were so ridiculous and I said that I was sure that if they had to adopt any cat they had just named, they would immediately change the name – for instance “Combine Harvester”??! They had a vaccuum cleaner theme once, and had cats named Hoover, Shark and Dyson! Chocolate bars was another theme, resulting in Bounty, Yorkie and Crunchie! We all agreed that some names could qualify as cat abuse! I was reminded of this cartoon:
Quick sketches
This time I took my sketch book with me, and some limited drawing materials.
I’ve had this sketchbook for a while. There are a lot of pages with a stitched binding, which is good, but the paper quality isn’t that great. It’s fine for graphite and coloured pencil, but introduce more than a light touch of ink, or any wet medium, and it bleeds through. Before going out today, I glued some of the pages together in pairs with a glue stick, and this has really helped. There’s no bleed-through now, and the pages feel a lot more substantial.
For the following sketches I used the 2.5 mm Elegant Writer pen and a water brush.
Quite rough and ready but they were fun to do, and everyone seemed to like what I was doing! Most of the cats were asleep when I drew them – they move around too much when awake! I might make up some better drawings from the photos. Anyway I’ve got the email address of the Cat Cafe and promised to send them photos of my drawings!
It was a fun afternoon out, as expected. Always good fun spending time with fellow cat people and looking at each other’s photos, chatting and relaxing over a cup of tea while stroking the various cats.
