How To Make A Shaped Card ...

Poor neglected blog, it's been quite a while since I last updated it. I just never seem to have enough time to do everything I want to, need a few extra hours :)

Anyway, I have been making a few more shaped cards and when I was away with my lovely and talented friend Jane last weekend I showed her how I make them and I thought I would share on here too. I have used another cat from NitWit Collections, this time from the Me-Wow collection to make this cat shaped card.

Start by deciding how big you want your card and creating a new document at that size and 300 dpi in photoshop and placing the cat element. Don't worry that his tail doesn't fit as we are going to be creative with this part and do a spot of plastic surgery to resize it later on. When you are happy with the sizing print the document

Carefully cut around the cat and chop off his tail, yup - chop it clean off, it shouldn't hurt and we want it to be smaller!

Use a glue stick to reattach the tail at the back making it smaller

Next cover the whole of the back with glue (I use a Tombow gluestick), use some scrap paper under the cat so that you can glue right to the very edge then stick it to a sheet of white cardstock

Using a sharp craft knife carefully cut around the cat leaving a narrow border of a couple of millimetres

Next we are going to attach the cat to a folded cardblank. Position the cat over the folded cardblank, see how his tail and bottom stick up over the fold? The next step is to add strips of adhesive to the back of the cat to attach him to the cardblank but don't put any on his tail or bottom (the bits that stick up off the top)

After adhering the cat to the cardblank use your craft knife again to carefully cut all around the cat, use the edge of the cat as a guide for the knife and there is no need to leave a border this time. When you've cut all around you should have a cat shaped card and you'll have cut through both pieces of the cardblank

After you've cut the cat card out it's time to add an embellishment and sentiment if you'd like. I added a paper flower to my cat using one of the flower elements from the Me-Wow Collection. I just curled the edges of the petals between my thumb and finger, adhered to the cat and added a button tied with twine