Thinking of Charlotte

Hi again everyone! This time I'm back with a card that I made *deep breath* just because I wanted to. 😂Something I'm working on is the unreasonable expectations I put on myself. Every craft project I make has to have a "reason" besides just doing it for the dang fun of it, or my Type A side is like "WHY. ARE. YOU. WASTING. TIME." 😂 So I spent a few slow days just putting a card together that I made just because I felt like it, and for no particular reason! I know, novel concept, right? 😜

I call this card "Thinking of Charlotte" because of the sentiment, and because I painted the amazingly adorable cat to look like my baby kitten Charlotte. Well... I guess she's not a kitten anymore. 😢She just recently turned 1 year old. 😭

My cats are both not the easiest to color (the other being a calico), so I like to try to paint pretty much only their coat colors when I color cats, and to get more and more accurate with their coloring every time. [It was at this point she thought to herself, "what was wrong with the simple orange tabby kitten she could have picked out? One color. Some wiggly lines. That's it."] 😂BIG jokes though; Amelia (the calico, not pictured) chose me. She's one of my best friends and my sweet baby!

Here's little Charlotte, the superstar of this post. Of course I had to include her! You can compare the coloring on the card to her coloring. On the left is the first day we got her, at 8 weeks old. On the right is her sassy face at right around her first birthday, a few days ago! Same little gremlin face almost a year later!

 

And so, on to the card! I just picked up this Waffle Flower stamp and die set, "Smiling" at the beginning of this month. I had been wanting a few more WF sets after loving their "Color Swatches" set, so I got this and another I have yet to debut. 😜

I didn't really know where I wanted to go with the card at all, so I started by stamping the large cat-and-flowers image in VersaFine Onyx Black ink on watercolor card stock, because I did know I wanted to watercolor it. 

I started with Charlotte first. I'm so experimental when I watercolor. (That's my way of calling myself "inconsistent" nicely. 😂) I used my Mijello Mission Gold watercolors, and I did very little mixing. I like to try to use up leftover paints from my mixing palette, so that mostly determined the colors for this card. I had some purple leftover, and I knew I wanted Charlotte to have a pink ribbon, of course. She is her mother's baby, after all. 😁💖

After stamping all the additional flowers in the set, I watercolored those as well. At this point I had the idea that I wanted the flowers to be "exploding" from behind the main cat image. I just felt the card needed a little something more. I had mixed a lot of pinks and purples for coloring the flowers, and I wanted to use more of them to tie the colors all together.

I used one of my Sizzix Scalloped Circle dies to cut a piece of watercolor card stock. Then I completely saturated the watercolor paper and went to town! I just dripped in puddles of pink and purple with a large-ish (want to say maybe an 8?) fairly saturated round brush. I kind of moved it around, let it do its thing, and then let it dry in the sun. I think it came out pretty cute!

I used a piece of watercolor paper I had previously washed with a sort of mint color as the base, to bring everything together. I wanted some sparkle, so I gave it a wash with my Gansai Tambi White Gold watercolor. It gave it a really subtle, silver shimmer. I then cut the face down with my Kat-Scrappiness wavy stitched border die and adhered it to a pre-cut card base that I'm almost positive came from a Simon Says Stamp monthly kit, because I never pre-make card bases in colored paper. 😂I don't know why the mint and purple just sang to me, but it did!

Then it was time to get things poppin'... up with foam tape. 😜I put two pieces of really wide foam tape behind the purple scalloped piece, and I made sure to leave room along the edges. I adhered the cat die cut to somewhere around the bottom of the circle, in order to leave room for the sentiment. After placing the cat and circle piece on the card face, I arranged some of the flowers around the top, to look like they were bursting out. 

Lastly, I embossed "thinking of you" from the Smiling set, and went into a my Hero Arts stash for a sentiment from "Everyday Sayings." In the picture above you can see a bit of that subtle shimmer! I had so much fun making this card. I really took my time and just did what I wanted!

Thank you so much for reading, and if you'd like to be notified when there's a new post on my blog, use the subscribe feature on the right. Happy crafting!