Black and White Birthday Cat

This was a pretty simple card to put together, which was especially nice after the amount of time yesterday’s card took. I even managed to get this made in the time before I left for work this morning! Although admittedly I did have a later than normal start, which meant I had more time for morning crafting.

I started by taking a white panel the same size as my card front. I used two forms of embossing to make my “scene” (in a manner of speaking!) First I put the panel into a woodgrain embossing folder at an angle so that it would emboss the top portion with a diagonal portion at the bottom being left flat. (Hard to explain, but you can see in the picture!)

I then masked off the dry embossed part with a strip of post-it tape, and taped a hexagon/honeycomb stencil over the top. I pressed my embossing ink pad directly onto the stencil and through it to the paper beneath. I then removed the stencil, added black embossing ink, and heated it.

With my background panel created I worked on my cat. The cat comes from The Greeting Farm’s Purfect Cats set. I coloured it with a black watercolour pencil, concentrating the colour on the outer edges of the cat to give some dimension. I used my Wink of Stella to blend out the colour, which gave a touch of sparkle. As the whole cat is black I wanted to make sure the eyes still stood out, so I added a tiny dot of white to each eye,

The large “Happy” for my sentiment came from my die cut snippets box. It was cut from black card using the Friendship Expressions Thinlits. I then created a banner from the Carta Bella Forever dies and stamped “birthday” from Altenew’s Super Script.

I used my tape runner to adhere the twice embossed panel onto my black card base. I also used the tape runner to attach the cat. For the “Happy” I used my glue pen, and then I added some dimension to the banner with a little foam tape.

I’m very happy with how this came together. Monochrome can be tricky because it sometimes seems a bit overly simplistic. I think the added texture from the two types of embossing helps to counted that. My heat embossing did get a little messy along the border area but luckily I was able to cover most of that with the cat. Also I went over the lines colouring my cat – initially I was planning on fussy cutting so it wouldn’t have shown, but then I was ‘lazy’ and used the die to cut it out instead!