Heidi & Heidilöv

Now that I'm blogging again, my goal is to compose two posts a month for the rest of the year. At least two. Given that the calendar page is about to flip and I have less than an hour left of February, I'd better get busy! (EDIT: I hit the "post" button right as the clock struck midnight. Sigh. So my 2nd post of February is actually a March post. But I will still count it as a February post...and I have still more to say to cover everything I wanted to!)

In my last post I wrote about the ATC swap that I agreed to that inspired me not only to make an ATC for my friend, but also to draw some stepouts and start writing again. I didn't want to post the ATC I had made until our exchange was complete, and the mail system was rather slow in delivering my creation to Barb, but she finally received it earlier this week, so I am ready to share! The vertical ATC is the one I created for Barb, and the horizontal one is the one she created for me.

  

As you can see, I used the tangle I shared in my last post, aloka, as well as a tangle I haven't shared yet: heidilöv, named for our sweet German Shorthaired Pointer (GSP) Heidi. I modified it ever so slightly so that the middle section features a golden heart, and since this was an easy modification, I decided that there could be a tangleation named heidilövve...the extra "ve" stands for Valentine Edition, since it is modified by turning loops into hearts. So...here are the stepouts!

But how can I share heidilöv without also sharing some pics of Heidi herself? And a tidbit of information. Heidi will be turning 4 this year, so she is still fairly young, though definitely not a puppy. We adopted her when she was 2 through a GSP rescue organization back in 2024 . . . I need to save that story for another post, but one of the joys of this past month was that Heidi and I finally got to meet Mandy, the Tennessee coordinator for Southeast GSP Rescue! Mandy lives about 5 hours away, so even though we had talked on the phone and exchanged many emails and texts, we had never seen each other in person. 

Heidi is a gentle creature with a silly side, yet she looks incredibly serious most of the time. She is a devoted cuddler. She wants to be where we are...if we are on the sofa, she is on the sofa. If we are in bed, she is in bed with us. If I am working on my laptop at the kitchen table, she jumps in the chair right next to me, I now keep a chair with a cushion right there for her, and she knows that's her chair. She loves to bask in the sun and watch though windows, and to be outdoors. She especially loves running with my husband and chasing after geese in the neighborhood. She is unusually calm for a GSP, though, as they are known for having incredibly high energy. Heidi has old soul energy. Seriously. It's as though our Pausha, who passed away in early 2024 at the age of 17 or 18, knew that we didn't need a dog who had young-Pausha energy, so she sent us one with energy similar to her senior self to help heal our hearts after her passing. We couldn't ask for a dog that suits us better right now.