Crazy Cat Lady Strikes Again

Hello to you and thanks for stopping by, its been a bit manic here as I rewrite and prepare for a course on robots that I'm teaching along with my husband to a group of children starting next month, so I haven't had much crafting time but this last few days I've put paid to that and I've been making lots of cards thanks to a challenge that was set up on a lovely, friendly card making group "Victoria's Crafty Friends" I belong to on Facebook headed up by the lovely Victoria Dalziel, one of the designers for Tonic Studios. I've made some lovely crafting friends via the group who are amazingly talented, supportive and beautiful souls. You can share your latest project, have a moan and be inspired all in one place, if you're not a member then I'd recommend that you join.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I'm a crazy cat lady in training and that I like to support my local Cats Protection by making cards that I can then give to them to make some money to help care for the cats. I make all different kinds of cards for them, but this year I thought I'd focus on cat themed cards. During a recent tidy and organise of my craft room and stash, I managed to fill an entire box with cat dies, stamps, stencils and embossing folders. Seeing how many cat craft products I have (and some unused!) has made me determined to use them all during the course of the year for cards for the CP. There's an added incentive this year as well I've been told that I can sell my cards at Maker Faire Derby in October, so if I get my skates on I could make some extra crafting pennies to boot!

 This batch of cards in the above photo turned out nothing like my initial idea, initially I was going to arrange 4 of the toppers on a 6" x 6" card blank each with a cat in the centre. I tried lots of combinations, paper backgrounds, embossing folders etc, but nothing gelled, then I decided to stamp a suitable kitty sentiment in the middle of each "stamp". I already knew that I wanted to include my little cats die cuts by Impression Obsession on the project and I'd already cut them in scraps of black card stock.  No matter what I did I couldn't get the idea for the card background to gel, so I started going through my cat stencils and embossing folders and found my Hunkydory Perfect Paw Print Mask that I'd bought from Craft Stash during their December 2017 Advent deal.

It didn't take much to connect the dots once I had the mask in my hand, and I picked out a selection of Distress Inks that co-ordinated with the papers in the centre of the stamps, and I set to taping down the mask and inking the cards with my chosen Distress Ink colours and several hours later I had 7 sets of 6 4" x 4" cards, each set contains 1 of each of the sentiments with a cat silhouette.
When I make more soon I'm going to use lighter colours of paper for the 'stamp' centres as in hindsight the black sentiment seems to get lost on the darker coloured papers. But I do like the way these cards turned out, it was rather relaxing inking and watching the latest videos from 2018 Creativation in the background. So many new goodies to come, I've already ordered the 3 batch of Distress Oxides, which I'm very excited about and the Distress Resist Spray.

There's also a whole bevy of beauties in the form of craft tools and mediums by Tonic Studios in their Nuvo range to come, including shimmer sprays, new colours in aqua pens and ink pads as well as shimmer powders and brushes. My craft stash is starting to have a decidedly Nuvo look to it, glitters, glues, embellishment mousse, colouring pens and so much more. Tonic excel at tools like guillotines and of course the Tim Holtz Stamping Platform which has been a game changer for me since I acquired mine last year, no more stamping errors or ruined projects when I mess up, because with the stamping platform I never do! I'm looking forward to using more of the Nuvo range in 2018, it will be interesting to compare the Nuvo products with some of their competitors like Cosmic Shimmer.

That's all from me for now, I'll be back with some more kitty cards very soon, I now seem to be on a roll and have lots of ideas as well as products I want to try out so watch this space. Thanks again for stopping by, I really appreciate it and your comments and support, much love to you all and happy crafting :)