Thirty cats

I set the bar high for making cards for my other half’s niece when I made the kitty Christmas card, so I was having problems coming up with a good enough idea for her birthday card. Then I realised it was her thirtieth and I had to do something different. I had found some cute cat files and my first thought was to do a cat equivalent of the fifty bunnies card, but she definitely didn’t want a fuss about the age so something more subtle was called for.

I was also concerned about the time it would take to design and colour, and her birthday was only a week or so away. Instead, after a suggestion of making something shiny and glittery from my other half, I thought I would use my Cricut Maker to cut thirty kitties from glitter paper and cover a card with them. Because that was obviously going to be quicker.

I worked out the rough size the cats would need to be to cover a 5″×7″ card, did a quick layout on my Mac, exported the file to use on the Maker and then realised that I really needed to do the cats in two layers. If I just did a single layer then you would be able to see bits of other cats through the eyes where they overlapped and about half of them have eyeballs that aren’t attached to the rest of the shape so…

So I duplicated my file and edited all the eyes out of the cats to create a solid background. That version I cut out of plain white card.

On to the coloured glitter layer. I do have several colours of glitter card that I could use, but rather than work out which cat shapes needed to be cut out of which colour to ensure an even spread, I cut them all out of white glitter card.

And then coloured them with alcohol ink.

And then assembled them with the plain card layer, colouring the pupils with a black Copic marker and adding them in position.

Then all I had to do was to arrange them on the card and glue them down. It sounds like such a simple thing when I type it out like that but it took ages. I had to keep adjusting the layout as the reality of gluing them in place didn’t quite line up with the layout I’d created on the computer and I had to work out which ones went underneath the others and…

I could have easily created at least three different digi stamp versions with these kitties and coloured them in the time it took to make this card. Not that I regret doing it this way; it may not have turned out quite how I envisaged it (everything should have been a tiny bit larger so there would be less of the card base showing through), but I definitely learned a lot in the process.

I won’t be in a hurry to repeat it though.