Welcome to my crafty blog. I’d intended to share this card yesterday evening but life got in the way once again so here it is now! I’ve been playing with the linocut texture background stamps from Claritystamp thanks to the recent online session with Barbara Gray – I’m very taken with the effect they give you and I teamed it with their square backdrop stamp for this card. I’ve paired up two challenges on this one – the middle column on TicTacToe‘s grid gave me the moon, orange and the cat, which co-ordinated perfectly with three elements from Festive Friday‘s list of cat, orange and texture.

I started by stamping the linocut texture background in ‘watering can’ Archival ink onto a piece of Clarity’s stencil card and then popped a small circle mask onto the card. I blended Distress Oxides in ‘pumice stone’ and ‘ripe pumpkin’ onto the square backdrop stamp using a sponge, spritzed it with a little water and then stamped it over the linocut background. I left the mask in palce and dragged a little of the ‘ripe pumpkin’ on the sponge across it, and then added a little more onto the moon afterwards.

I masked off the side of the background with a large sticky note, stamped Clarity’s ‘butterfly tree’ along the edge, again in the ‘watering can’, and then added the little cat from the ‘birdhouse garden’ set. I used a torn piece of copy paper and a sponge to add a little black ink under the tree and the cat to ground them.

The final step was to trim the stencil card down to fit on a 6×6 card blank – I ran a black Sharpie around the edge before attaching it to the card front. All it then needed was one of Clarity’s word stickers.

Thanks for dropping in. I do love this little cat stamp – he has such a sense of intent about him! Perfect for festive Friday’s overall theme of ‘national Cat Day’, which is marked in the US on October 29 every year. It was started to highlight the number of cats that have to be rescued each year, and that’s not an issue confined to the US. We’ve got two lovely cats that consent to live with us (they are very independent!) and they’re fab to have around. If you want to know more about homing rescue cats in the UK, a good place to start is Battersea dogs & cats home