Grown with Love

Happy Friday!  I hope everyone had a great "short" week.  I love holiday weeks - they seem to fly by.  Today I used the Gardening Cat from the new Gardening release, the Stitched Squares dies and a sketch from Splitcoaststampers to create my card.

The sketch this week reminded me of a garden trellis.  When I lived in Oklahoma we had one with clematis on it that bloomed a beautiful purple.

I chose paper that had a leafy feel without being an actual leaf pattern and cut 10 squares using the fourth smallest die from the Stitched Squares set.  On a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inch white panel I vey lightly drew a line down the center.

I placed the panel on grid paper aligning the center line, then laid out the squares set an angle.  I left 1/4 inch between the points.  After these were glued down it was very simple to add the extra squares, aligning them by eye.  I used scissors to clip off the extra and could use those points to fill in the small sections.

I went to work on the kitty next and cut all the pieces from various colors of cardstock.

Although hard to tell in the photo the watering can is a "galvanized metal" foil cardstock.  In person it contrasts nicely with the cat.

I assembled the basket.  All pieces were edged with just a little bit of gray ink to give some shading.

I wanted my sentiment to be a stitched strip.  I originally planned to fishtail each side so I used the largest of the Stitched Squares and heat embossed my sentiment near the bottom, centering it.

Then I used the same square to cut the top.  Because I was planning on cutting off the sides I  did not worry about that stitching.  Had I wanted the stitching on the sides all I needed to do was use a larger die (a Stitched Rectangle) and that would leave the side stitching intact.

As it turned out, on one side the stitching lined up perfectly so I left it and trimmed off the other end.  I was covering that end with flowers so it wouldn't show.

I glued the sentiment directly to the panel on the upper part of the card.  Using alot of foam tape I popped the cat up off the card.  I probably use more foam tape than most but I like it when the die cut has a solid feel underneath.

Finally I added a few extra flowers to the sentiment and near the cat's gardening boots.

Dies used:

Thanks for visiting today!  I hope you have a fun and creative weekend!