Well here we are at Friday again and already over halfway through January already! I broke out a new set of stamps today that only dropped through my letterbox yesterday! I was delighted to win one of the prizes at CAS Colours & Sketches‘ 500th blog challenge – a stamp set of my choice from Uniko. I’ve not had any of their products before, but had a good browse through their website and chose the ‘mid-century modern purrfect day’ set, having fallen in love with these cats.

Well it only seemed right to use them for the current CAS Colours & Sketches challenge, which is a great sketch. I pulled in the colours from Color Throwdown, together with the ‘favourite’ theme from Just Add Ink (I’m definitely a cat lady, plus I also use a lot of masking on my cards)

I started with a piece of card trimmed to fit a 5×7 card blank and stamped the cat outline three times using ‘watering can’ Archival ink. I stamped the centre one first so I could get him in the right place, then added the two either side.

I added colour wiht the infill stamp, using ‘shadow grey’ Archival. You may notice that the central cat is darker than the other two – well I picked up the wrong inkpad to stamp him in, but I actually like it as it just breaks the design up a little. Lucky or what? I then stamped their little faces with black Versafine Clair ink.

I cut a mask for each cat from all-over sticky notes, then used one of Clarity’s landscape masks to add the ground for them to sit on with a blending brush and ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxide. I switched to the clouds mask to add in the sky behind the cats. The final step was to add the sentiment in Versafine black.

Thanks for dropping in. It’s funny that I did these cats in grey, as none of ours are! I thought you might like a pic of our lovely Tom, who’s disabled thanks to a brain disorder. He doesn’t let it stop him doing what he wants though – a very determined little chap! Benji, our other tabby, wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to catch his photo!