Kitty Love

Last spring, literally in the middle of preparing to move to a new home, we found out our cat Thunder had severe diabetes.  The vet allowed us to take him home for the weekend to say our good-byes before we had to bring him back and put him to sleep.  My husband gave me this kitty as a present for our one year anniversary when we were dating.  I loved my kitty dearly and didn't want to let him go.

I decided to make a layout to remember our dear kitty, Thunder.

On my last contracted day of school we had no students and I had already packed up everything.  Because we were making up a snow day we had to be in the building, but there was NOTHING for me to do.  So I used the time to sketch out some layouts for pics I new I wanted to scrap.  I think there are lots of found moments like that where you can make progress on your scrapping even if you aren't at home.  Things like, waiting for an oil change, or in the doctor's office, etc.

I got my layout inspiration from this layout by Elisha Snow over at Write.Click.Scrapbook.  I loved the colors and the simplicity of the layout.  So I based my sketch off of this.

I found this large photo of Thunder that I cut into a square.  I matted it onto a much larger square and then offset it with a square of word paper.  I loved the images of love and laughter when thinking of my kitty.  So that paper seemed very fitting.

I wanted to create a strip of lace paper to lay underneath the photo block.  I intended to pop out the cuts and use the strip of negative.  As often happens to me when I try to do this, once the pieces came out the strip of paper was boring with a bunch of big holes and no interesting detail.  So I decided to lay the cut outs in a pattern down the length of the paper.  To define the edge I cut a strip off the side of the negative paper.  I love the effect I was able to create by using my mistake creatively.  As I tell people all the time, and try really hard to remember myself, a mistake is just an opportunity to embellish!

I knew I wanted to use a strip of photos showing Thunder with the family.  Since my husband was overseas at the time I was unable to capture him with Thunder, but it was easy to snap shots of the boys snuggling with him.  I'm not in love with the swirls I placed under the strip of photos.  It seems a little busy to me now.  But what's done is done, and I don't believe in redoing a layout.  :)

To accentuate the journaling block I also used strips of the negative paper from my lace attempt.  I really like the border this created.

Here's a photo of my first two babies.  Thunder was such a snuggler and a wonderful pet for children.  He'd let the boys pull on him and he'd just lay there.

We miss our friend and family member, Thunder!