PAPER PLAYERS SKETCH

We woke this morning to a beautifully clear sky and frost - it got down to 24 degrees last night. It's Sunday and seemed appropriate to do a frosty blue and white Christmas card for this week's The Paper Players. This week is a sketch challenge hosted by the beautiful and talented Ann!

The Paper Players: PP668 - A Sketch Challenge from Ann

I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach this design, but decided to use a rectangular die array of  stars from Tim Holtz "Snowy Stars" #663117. I had to die cut it from both ends diagonally to get it to reach from one corner to the next.

Once I had the stars cut out of a piece of blue iridescent card stock, I die cut the panel into a stitched rectangle, matted it with silver card stock, and mounted both panels to a white card base. Next I heat embossed the Impression Obsession sentiment onto a piece of white card stock and heat embossed it with silver powder. After trimming that out with a small stitched rectangular die, I mounted it to the blue panel and popped on a silver PTI snowflake with some dimensional foam.  It seemed to need some additional embellishment, so I glued on a thin white and silver knotted scrap of ribbon.

The shiny silver and blue iridescence of this card don't really come out particularly well in the above photo, but this shot gives a bit more of a sense of what it looks like in person:

 As usual, our design team has come up with some great ideas to spark your imagination! Head over to each of their blogs and see for yourselves. Hopefully now that Thanksgiving is over you'll feel like getting into your holiday card stashes and taking Ann's sketch for a ride. 

News from Stately Wing Manor: Thought I would use this intro instead of "On a personal note". We joke about our very modest 1956 ranch-style house and refer to it often as "Stately Wing Manor" (for those of you who are not Batman fans, Bruce Wayne's castle was always referred to as "Stately Wayne Manor").  

I've been concerned about our poor little ferals making it through these cold nights. We have a covered patio area attached to the house where we have been feeding the kitties. We are feeding 10 and, as some of you would already know, we have been trapping and spaying and neutering cats for a year. Six of the ten are now spayed and neutered and I have appointments mid-December to catch the final four. I got four smallish cardboard boxes, cut 6" diameter holes in the sides and lined the bottom with thick foam core to hold back some of the cold from the concrete floor of the patio. I made up sleeping mats with two layers of heavy shaggy fleece, inner-lined with heat-reflective lining, and put them into the boxes. Well, those little farts pulled all of the pads out of the boxes and spread them around the patio and side yard. I put them back in the boxes and they kept taking them out. I finally gave up and put the pads on some of the seating cushions in the patio and they're happy with this arrangement. I also threw a soft fleece over the sofa and a couple of the siblings share that area to sleep on. We'll see how they do as the temps drop more. They're all growing their winter coats so I think they'll be fine. As it gets colder they may change their minds about going into the boxes - maybe I'll sprinkle some catnip to encourage them. But for the time being they're happy sleeping on the chairs and sofa.