All is Quiet at Ratropolis

Things have been quiet on the rat front for us recently. Pirate has recovered from his respiratory infection and is back to his old self and off his medications. He and his three girlfriends are back to using fleece liners in the Critter Nation, as previously reported. This has cut down drastically on odor (mainly because of the thick towels beneath the fleece liners), but chewing has definitely increased. The girls, like many rats, love to burrow under the fleece and chew their way in and out. If I have to choose between chewing damage and odor - odor control wins every time. The chewing damage, I can live with, and repair to a certain point.

I have been busy cutting fabric for Halloween hammocks. I have one set cut for the Dual Critter Nation and another in the same fabric patterns for Loki's Martins R695. They are all pinned up and waiting to be sewed.

I have also been looking into embroidery again, and plan to add some embroidered items to the hammock set - maybe a haunted house variation of a cube hammock with an embroidered ghost/pumpkin/bat, for example. I restocked on colored embroidery thread for my Brother embroidery machine as I needed some oranges to be able to do many Halloween designs, and I purchased a few new designs for download from EmbroideryDesigns.com.

Some tests of the lettering software (border added by machine)

I am also playing with a free lettering program (Embroidery Fonts Plus) from that site to create more customized text/lettering/fonts than my machine can do on its own. The interface is terrible (as a software engineer, I would love to get my hands on the code, so I could redo the user interface and update the software using a more modern version of Visual Studio), but it is free and if you can get past the horrible interface quirks, it does create customized lettering designs that work on my machine. Fonts for use with the software run about $10. My only fear is that the software has not been updated, patched, or improved upon in years (and it definitely needs all three), and that eventually, it will not be compatible with future versions of Windows.

Anyway, I am looking forward to putting these together and hopefully having them ready by Halloween.