A Love Note and Our Sweet Kitties

All the artists and crafters I visited last night through One World-One Heart 2009 got me thinking about some of my favorite projects. These are both a few years old and are some of the first efforts I made as I began creating on a regular basis. They're also two of my favorites.

The first one is the Valentine's Day card I sent out in 2006. It was inspired by an article from Stampington Inspirations Winter 2006, back issues are still available online. I don't think Stampington publishes this particular magazine anymore, but they do have several other magazines. I like Take Ten in particular because it has a wide range of stamping projects that can be finished in ten minutes or less.
For my project I used the folded heart template from the article From the Heart. I was immediately attracted to it because of the interactive elements, the fun tags that I used to include my holiday greeting. I stamped and embossed one tag. For the other I formated text boxes in Word, typed out my message, and then used a template to cut out the tag shape around the sentiment.

The next project from the vault, so to speak, still sits out in my crafting room. I love the bright colors and the picture of my kitty Mabel is so sweet. She's a kitten still in the picture. It was also my first decoupage project as I began branching out from scrapbooking. I remember when I was done, I was so proud of myself for thinking to paint the frame's back and sides; how clever I thought adding the letter beads to spell out her name was. Sure I've made more elaborate ones since then, and I'd probably design it differently now. But when I look at it I can still remember how deeply satisfied I was, a grown up, "I made it," moment!

Since I've got Mabel in the frame above, this seems like a good time to introduce our other cat Beaver. No we didn't name him. He was named by one of the animal shelter's volunteers after a Zuni animal totem, which are small carved animals often out of stone. We lived in Santa Fe at the time, a lot of people there collect animal totems, and believe that the properties of the animal reside in them. We adopted Mabel and Beaver on the same day and they are the first pets Brad and I had together. Brad jokes they were our trial run at parenthood, as any pet owners knows, like kids they both have their own little personality quirks. I've got quite a collection of Mabel getting into trouble, I'll have to post those together sometime.