Cool for cats

Cats are everywhere you look these days.... cat stamps, cat papers, cat buttons and trinkets and of course cat dies. if you are a cat lover or just a lover of beautiful dies then do yourself a favour and pop the words 'Debi Potter' into the search bar on the Sizzix.co.uk website and check out her latest collection.

One die in particular has filled me with inspiration, and that is the Bigz Kitten which I am going to share with you today. I was going to make one card and ended up making two but I'm now left with ideas for a dozen more which will have to wait for another day and that, my friends is the definition of a good die.

For the first card I used a paper pack from Lily of the Valley and a right old mish-mash of stamps from my ever growing stash.

I began by cutting two heads from contrasting papers. I used scissors to trim away part of the blue stripped paper and inked the edges with Weathered Wood Distress Ink before attaching to the pink face after which I inked around the edges and added detail with a black fine line marker pen

 Next, I die-cut two bodies and repeated the stages above before die-cutting the rest of the elements together with the eyes and nose.

I applied the stamps to the right of a 15 x 15 cm white base card using grey and black ink and mounted all of the elements together before attaching to the card. Told you it was a great die!

 I attached watercolour paper to mount board to prevent warping and die-cut all the elements to create my cat before applying two shades of Distress ink to the cat's head. To help the colours blend and give the appearance of watercolour I applied water with a mister.

I used a stamp with a typewriter letter pattern but feel free to use any suitable text design stamp. I applied the ink to one corner as shown in the first photograph before stamping onto the head with the orange Distress Ink.

I die-cut the eyes, nose and collar and coloured with Weathered Wood Distress Ink before die-cutting the heart charm and colouring with two shades of red. I coloured the tail and body in the same way as I did with the head. Next, I cut a rectangle of pink spotty paper and distressed the edges using a sanding block.

I scrunched around the perimeter of the pink paper and mounted it onto a white base card before adding the stamped detail (if only it said Feline Groovy!!!). I attached the cat using PVA and adhesive foam pads. 

Hope you love this die as much as I do... can't wait to use it with textiles!