Christmas cat!

Hello, I'm back from holidays and thought I'd share a project I did just before I went away. This started life as a tin containing ground coffee and I've altered it to make a Christmas gift.




Thanks to Tanda Stamps DT member Anna for the inspiration to combine the stamps! The stamps are both from Tanda - they're called Festive Cat and Three Gifts and they're fab!

I stamped the cat on a strip of thin card cut to fit around the tin. Then I stamped it again onto thin notepaper and cut it out to use as a mask before stamping the group of gifts. That way, I get to keep the cut out to use for masking future projects and I didn't have to do anything precise round the whiskers as that part of the stamping doesn't overlap! I repeated the gifts image along the length of the card strip so the design goes all the way around the tin.

The gifts are coloured using brush markers and a green highlighter pen to keep things on the bright side! A gold gel pen adds a bit of festive metallic effect. As the cat's hat is solid on the stamp, I coloured over the black bit with a white gel pen and then used a Gellyroll pen to colour it red. I inked the edges of the card strip with Ice Blue chalk ink and stuck it round the tin before tying on a bit of stitched grosgrain ribbon.

For the lid, I cut a circle to fit and inked the edge with the Ice Blue pad. I cut a smaller circle from scrap paper and used the 'frame' as a border mask so I could stamp the cat's face without going all the way out to the edge. Then I used the Gellyroll pen to write Christmas Cookies round the border and finished by stamping a few snowflakes at the base of the circle in the Ice Blue chalk ink.

I'll bake the cookies to put inside nearer to Christmas!

I reckon you could adapt this for all sorts of things... get the snowman stamps out and make a 'Build your own snowman' kit for the kids (either marshmallows and Matchmakers or pom-poms, pipecleaners and felt)... decorate one to put Santa's snack inside to keep it fresh overnight on Christmas Eve...

Thanks for looking - if you've enjoyed the project, it'd be lovely to see your comments, it's always great to know who's visiting!