Stampin! with Jaydee

Hi Everyone.  Welcome to Jaydee's SU stampin space.  Today Lou and I discussed that we are both missing our furry friends.  Consequently, I decided it was time to show you my C is for Cat card.  This stamp set premiered in the 2009/2010 Stampin' Up! catalog - and I absolutely love it.

I used a sketch that our talented friends at stamping411 challenged us with a couple of weeks ago.  I absolutely loved this layout and decided that it was prefect for the central cat image.  As I have a house full of felines with very strong personalities..... although most of them are a bunch of big girls blouses when push comes to shove... especially Mr Bailey.  He who is so big and tough and protects the house from all of those scary sparrows outside the window... yep... he ignores anything bigger than a sparrow!  But boy does he HATE the chipmunk!  Anyway, Mr Bailey was wandering around the house the other day protecting his borders when I suddenly heard him purring - REALLY loudly.... I snuck around the corner and found him stretched out on the soft blanket padding and purring up a storm with his eyes closed - in an ecstasy of softness and comfort from the blanket!  So much for defending his borders!

Anyway, as I was saying :-) I decided to use strong colors for the card - to match the strong personalities of the furrythings.  Also, I think this layout looks as fabulous with the strong colors as it does with the more muted ones.

Card recipe:

• I used Real Red, Crushed Curry, Basic Black and Whisper White card stock
• I picked up all of those colors with the cat.
• I embossed the cat in black embossing powder and then colored his collar area with Real Red marker and his medallion on his collar in Crushed Curry marker.
• I stamped the sentiment on Whisper White and mounted it on Basic Black.
• I mounted Crushed Curry on Basic Black, Real Red on Basic Black and Whisper White on Basic Black.  Each of the mounted layers are mounted on each other with stampin dimensionals

I was really pleased with the strong feeling of the card and the fact that the black cat never gets lost against the strong colors. 

So, I'm dedicating this card to Blackie. Blackie was the cat we had when I was growing up.  We found her one afternoon, all skinny and scrawny and my father made a bit of a fuss of her.  She followed us all the way home and he agreed we could keep her.  Yep....I was the one who came up with the unoriginal name for her.  Blackie lived out the rest of her life with us and even though I had left home many years earlier, every afternoon at around 4.00 pm, she would sit on the kitchen window waiting for me to come home from school! Blackie was an adult cat when we found her - and we were never sure how old she really was - the vet had thought that she was possibly about 2 when we found her.  One morning - 23 years later Mom found her curled up on "her" chair.  Sometime in the night she had gone to Rainbow Bridge in her sleep...... on the chair where she had spent almost every night of those 23 years.   It was a phenomenal age for a truly phenomenal cat and a perfect way for her to go.

I hope you all have a fabulous day and get to spend time doing the things you love - with those you love the most.  Me... I'm spending the rest of the day in Rome with my hubby and today our ship sets sail for our transatlantic sailing to Fort Lauderdale.  After we have been apart so much this year, we are really looking forward to spending the next two weeks together and for us, cruising is such a great way to relax.

Thank you for visiting my little area of the stamping blogosphere - you know I always appreciate it.

Peace and blessings

Jaydee