Weekend Kat Blogging: Artistic Kittens (With a Side Note About Henna)

Kat’s most favorite pastime these days, other than listening to, jamming to, dancing to, and singing to music, is drawing with crayons. She loves her colors, and the crayons are almost always scattered over the floor where she can get to them.

As you can see, she has another artistic kitten interested in crayons–Delia. Cordelia loves to help with artistic pursuits–her current favorite room in the house, other than any room where Kat is roaming, is my sewing room. There are so many things to help with in there–fabric, thread, embroidery floss, measuring tools, notepaper, transfer paper, batting–you name it, she is into it.

And, she loves crayons. She picks them up and carries them around in her mouth, sometimes running away with them. She jumps over the baby gate and carries them off for nefarious purposes, sending Zak and I dashing to rescue them, as several of them have already been lost to her ministrations. She bats them on the floor, she carries them, and she, like Kat, chews on them now and again.

And she loves to watch Kat draw, and help.

As you can see–she assists in pushing the crayon across the paper, and she also holds the wayward paper down so it cannot escape the artistic additions of Kat. Without Delia lounging across the paper, most certainly, Kat would never be able to draw.

She is getting better at making deliberate lines, now, in a fairly controlled fashion. Both Zak and I have seen her do it–she is also learning how to make circular shapes. Actually, they are ellipses, but they are drawn in imitation of the circles Zak, Morganna and I draw for her. She has also started playing two new games that involve crayons. She has an animals book that she loves (and that she can identify all the animals but the insects in it, if you ask, “Where is the rhino?” she will point to it unerringly, for example.) and Zak has taken to drawing crayon versions of the animals in that book and asking her to point to the photograph he is copying . She can pick them out perfectly, every time–this is this bunny, and that is that dog, and can go back and forth from photograph to crayon drawing.

Another game she plays, which she initiated when we were drawing together Friday night after I came home from work, is she will pick up a crayon, and hold it up against some object in the room or on her person that matches that color. The first one she did was green–she was wearing rainbow leggings and she picked up the dark green crayon and held it against the light green stripe on her leggings. She nudged me to get me to look, and I said, “Yes! Green! They are both green.” Then, she picked up the light green crayon that exactly matched the stripe and held it against the stripe along with the dark green crayon. She understood that they were both green.

Then, she picked up the brown crayon and held it against the brown cover of a book, and the wood floor, both of which were–well, brown.

Then, she picked up an orange crayon, and pointed to the back wall of our living room, which is painted a russet-orange color. I affirmed it was orange, and then she put the crayon against the picture of a golden lion tamarin, a little fuzzy monkey which has orangish fur, and then put the crayon against my freshly hennaed hair. (By the way, if you ever want red hair, and you don’t want to use chemicals in your hair–which is a good choice, I think–go for body-art quality henna. Here is the best information on the web about using henna for hair, and it is also where I get my henna–the lady who runs the site, along with The Henna Page wrote her PhD dissertation on the history and use of henna in body art, cosmetics and medicine and the culture surrounding it. Catherine Cartwright Jones, the lady in question, also does some of the best henna art I have ever seen in my life.)

It was awesome. We now play the colors game regularly while we are drawing together.

2 Comments »

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1. Oh SO awesome! I especially love the last photo - the cute factor is just through the roof:)

   Comment by Mamlambo — April 14, 2008 #

2. All of you are awesome - you, Kat, The kitty, the crayons, everything. Whenever I feel down, I know that I can find something in your blog that cheers me up. It does my heart glad to see such love and tenderness in the world and between mother and daughter. You are truly a gift.

   Comment by Nancy — April 15, 2008 #

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