The Joyful Soul Creates

Living on the seventh floor of a block of flats means that we can’t have a garden. We have a balcony, which we – and the cats! – like, but no garden. If we did have a garden though I can imagine it would be full of cats! Though I’m not sure how our current cats would feel about it – when we’ve tried to take them out for walks (two homes ago) none of them were very keen on the idea. Sampson even had access to the outdoors back when he lived in England, but he wasn’t keen on it. Still, the cats in this card seem to quite like the outdoors!

I started this card by creating the background. Following an idea I’d seen in a YouTube video I stamped out the clouds from the Simon Says Stamp Sea You Soon stamp set onto a piece of note paper and fussy cut around the curved edges. I then used those as a mask/stencil to create a cloud background directly onto my white card base, sponging across them with blue pigment ink.

Setting the ink blended card base aside I started to create my shaker clouds. I used the middle-sized cloud from Lawn Fawn’s Simple Puffy Clouds and cut two clouds from the same white card that the card base was made of, as well as two from acetate. I then used the coordinating Puffy Cloud Frames to cut out four frames per cloud. For each cloud I adhered one frame onto the top of the acetate, then glued the other three together and adhered them to the top of the solid white cloud. I put some sequins from a Kennedy Grace sequin mix into each cloud and attached the acetate layer over the top. I then set the cloud shaker aside.

Next I created my hills. I used Lawn Fawn’s Flower Border to cut two hills from pearlescent green card. I also ran it through my Big Shot again with pearlescent blue and pearlescent pink card. I then cut a third hill using one of the non-scalloped dies from Pink and Main’s Scallop Wave Dies.

As I didn’t want my flowers to be green I carefully trimmed the flower heads from the pink and blue borders I had cut, and adhered them into place over the green flower heads. I made sure to also add the centres back in to the pink flowers, using the blue circles for contrast.

After fiddling around with the layout of the hills on my card I started to adhere them into place. I used my tape runner to adhere the back hill flush with the card base. I then used a layers of foam tape to adhere the plain hill over the top, and more foam tape to attach the third hill. I used my tape runner to attach the cloud shaker onto the card base, and the background for my scene was complete.

Next I needed to create the cats to go in my garden scene. I recently got the Kitty Stacks stamps from The Greeting Farm and thought that they would be perfect for this card. I stamped out all five of the stamps in the set onto my largest remaining snippet of the white card (I need to order some more!) using MFT Black Licorice Hybrid Ink. I then used my watercolour pencils to colour them all in, giving each one a different look. I blended out the colour using a waterbrush I made from an old Wink of Stella pen (which still has a little shimmer left!) then fussy cut all the cats.

Next I played around with how I wanted the cats laid out on the card. Once I was happy with it I decided I wanted to add a little sentiment banner. I used a snippet of the white card and cut it out with a banner die (which I believe is retired) from Clearly Besotted. I stamped my sentiment, from The Greeting Farm’s Purfect Cats, onto the banner with the same MFT ink. I then adhered the white banner onto a piece of the pearlised blue card and trimmed around it leaving a small border.

I used my tape runner to adhere the banner into place in the lower right corner of my card, then added more tape runner to the back of each cat and, with the help of my tweezers, slid each cat into position in my scene.

I’m very happy with this card! I love how it came together and I had a lot of fun making it, though it did take quite a while! The Kitty Stacks stamps are really sweet and I’m looking forward to playing with them more in future. I also think it would be fun to make a scene card combining these and the Purfect Cats, either with the Kitty Stacks cats appearing to be further in the distance, or having them as kittens in comparison to the larger Purfect cats. Or maybe I’ll do both!

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Addicted to Stamps and More – Make Your Mark

City Crafter – Something Beginning With S (I chose shaker!)

Farm Fresh – Shaker

HLS Anything Goes With Dies – Anything Goes

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday – Anything Goes

Simon Says Work It Wednesday – Add Sparkle

The Cat’s Pajamas – How Does Your Garden Grow?

Uniko Challenge – Flowers