PP633 PAPER PLAYERS SKETCH CHALLENGE

It's the fourth Sunday of the month and Anne Marie has a great sketch challenge for us this week! 

 

The Paper Players: PP633 - A Sketch Challenge from Anne Marie

 

The two vertical elements reminded me of tags, so I took out my Stampin' Up "Framelits - Chalk Talk" tags and chose the one that was closest in shape and proportion to the sketch. I thought to play a bit with some layering of small patterns in a neutral color scheme and started by die-cutting the first tag from a panel of white cardstock that I had already die-cut with a stitched rectangle. I attached the front panel to a card base with some dimensional foam, inserting a neutral warm gray stripe behind. Then I had a complete brain cramp and didn't know how to finish. 

I messed with different scraps for what seemed like hours and am not really happy with the final outcome. I think the overlapping tag looks unfinished, but decided to just settle with what happened with the final result. I really didn't have time for a do-over. The die-cut blossom is an Alexander Renke favorite of mine, and the sentiment is from PTI's "Songbirds". 

I'm sure that the gallery will be filled with beautiful and inspirational examples that are up to the quality of Anne Marie's sketch. In fact, the other designers have made some excellent examples! I'm looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.

On a personal note: I've been distracted this week by all of the cat dramas, and cardmaking hasn't been upwards in my thoughts. I think I've already spoken about the additional 6 cats we have acquired since last summer. We fed a friendly little calico cat on our patio during the summer, not knowing she was a lactating mother. After a couple of weeks she moved her 5 kittens to our patio, and we took over stewardship of this mom and her feral kittens. I'll try to make this a shortened version - suffice it to say that we were in contact with CATS (Cat Alliance to Strays) and they will not take kittens unless they've been socialized and living inside. We thought we could socialize them and turn them over, but here we are approaching a year with these cats. The mom was obviously a stray and very friendly. When she had weaned all of the babes, we took her to our vet and had her spayed - she was already carrying 1–2-week-old embryos. We decided to introduce her to our two older inside cats, thus beginning a long process of socialization with the kittens. A couple of them were friendlier by nature. We found a home in the neighborhood for one of the females and she's doing well with her new family. The next one that we were able to handle was so cute we decided to keep him, bringing the permanent inside cats count to 4. We've owned 4 cats before so thought it would be okay. 

Now Chloe (the mama of the kittens, named after the bottle of wine we were drinking when she arrived in our patio) was residing inside with our other 2 cats and 4 of the babes were still living in the patio, but following me everywhere, and pretty much tearing up the flower beds. But they were so cute! The one we decided to keep (Tiger) was brought into the house ahead of the remaining three that we trapped and had spayed and neutered. CATS will only take inside kitties, so at the beginning of October, after their surgeries, we brought the three final kitties into the house and the fun began. Well, let's just say that 7 cats inside the house is way more than we could handle. One of the females is now at CATS, but she's so shy that they're having problems getting her socialized.

So, the point of this whole "shaggy cat" story is that on Wednesday was the day that we were to bring Tux to CATS for adoption and I captured him, put him into the carrier, and he was so alarmed that he was thrashing around in the carrier while I was trying to get him to my car to cover up the carrier to calm him down. He sprung out of the carrier and that was the last time we saw him. We were sure he would come around by the next day because he would be getting hungry, but we haven't seen him since. We thought we would give him a couple of days before calling CATS to let them know how badly I had bungled this. We're just sick about the whole thing. 

Update: The above was written Friday evening and right after dinner Tux showed back up, but we haven't been able to coax him back into the house yet. He's obviously terrified. We'll see how this all shakes out! Here's a photo of him taken a couple of months ago. You can see he's a very handsome guy who is always dressed for dinner: