More recycled art stuff

This is Altoid tin #2, with bits of tatting, wrapping paper, mother-of-pearl buttons, and an odd earring. I hope it will sell on ebay like #1 did. I shipped that one off to Colorado Springs yesterday.

Getting into collage again

I'm getting ready to move house again, and with that comes the necessity of some organizing. I must be a real world class pack rat. A couple of friends tell me I have the coolest "stuff". As in collections of odd bits and pieces of great things to use in collage work.

I decided to try my hand at some altered art. First, came the Altoid tin. I had a couple of them rattling around the house, and thought it might be fun to play with some of them. Oh, yeah. This is what I can do with some odd antique buttons, bits of lace and tatting, some pewter charms and this lovely wrapping paper I've been hoarding. Uh...recycling. ; )

Now, I've begun to swap some artist's trading cards with others I've met online. This is unbelievably fun! Here is the digitally designed card I sent out in October, and I received eleven outstanding miniature works of art by return mail. ATCs are a standard size of 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches, the same as baseball cards. They fit conveniently into album pages made for collector cards. Very, very cool.

I love this photo of Harley so much I decided to scrap it again in Alma's Quick Fix layout.


I used Amy Bleser's Carefee kit, with the Artistamps font, and Anke Calligraphic.

Pirate Girl

Courtney is my cousin's granddaughter, so I suppose that makes her my third cousin? Anyway, she's a doll, and here she is all ready for Halloween, although it was at least a month before!

Grungy papers and elements by Christy Heins.







On the big night, Courtney's mom and friends all dressed up to go out for trick or treating. Hard to say if the big girls had more fun than the kids! Papers and elements by Robyn England .

They don't stay kittens very long, do they?

When I first brought Harley inside, he barely was as long as one of these six inch tiles. Now, he's a long, lean kitty machine, very opinionated, and very personable.

This scrapping kit is from Stacy Carlson, called Moroccan Holiday. I used Gary Fryn's grungy mats. The font is Whimsy.

Harley is really growing fast. He's big enough now to get up into my desk chair, and does almost every chance he finds it empty.

I used a posterizing filter on this photo, and it almost looks like one of my thread paintings. The offset ovals are a throwback to some pen and ink sketches I once did and sold at a gallery in Roanoke, Virginia.

Ringo is definitely a Morris look-alike. He's such a big bundle of loving cat, always wanting his tummy rubbed. He enjoys this cat tent I got at Ikea this spring.

Toby and Harley love to rumble around. They really entertain each other.

I had a really good time using Meryl Bartho's "As Time Goes By" kit to showcase this picture of Toby. He loves sitting in this window, so I bought a curtain that was "Toby-colored" to not worry about him getting his little cathairs all over it. Less stress for me!

The watercolor filter was used on the photo you can see in a previous post below, because it wasn't a high res photo, and I wanted to soften it a little to work with the softness of the kit.

What DO cats think about when they daydream?

Early Halloween

Harley is always a bunch of laughs, and when he gets startled, it's instant Halloween kitty...bristling tail, arched back, and sideways hop.

Elements by me.

Dust Magnet

Harley loves to sleep in the sun in the west window behind the tv. When I woke him up today, trying to take a picture of him sprawled in the sun, he had a couple of pieces of lint on him. The perils of being a black cat?

Although, he's not exactly a black cat. He's got some definite stripes that show on his legs and tummy in the right light, and has some deep brown around his eyes and mouth. He's a pretty boy.

Fitting right in

It hasn't taken long for Harley to settle in. He's an easy-going kitten, not too clingy, and he finds fun at every turn. He's already outgrown this place to curl up and nap, on top of a side table. Simple things entertain him: he delights in carrying around and tossing the white glove fingertips that I cut off the oversized gloves I wear when I handle fabric. An empty water bottle gets batted around the house, making a great noise.

This page was from a scraplift night online, and the ribbon and tag are from my "Reigning Cats and Dogs" kit.



Toby has found a new competitor in Harley. Ringo is very grateful, not having to be the subject of so many daily playfights. He gets to sit back and watch as the other two pound each other into playful submission, then race around the house at breakneck speed. Rank has its privileges.

The papers and elements (except for the tag by Lauren Bavin) are from my "Reigning Cats and Dogs" kit.

A new passion, a new love

Two things came into my life recently: learning to do digital scrapbooking with PhotoShop Elements 4.0, and a new kitten. Both are taking inordinate chunks of my time. Both are something I really needed to spice things up around here.

Here is the page I made the night the new kitten finally came inside out of the stormy weather and a life living under my car. He had come up to the porch to eat, and once I got him with his head down in the food dish, not watching me, I snatched him up. I was wearing gardening gloves, and it was a good thing. The element of surprise was terrifying to him, and he screamed and hissed and snarled all the way into the waiting bathroom where I gave him a bath and cuddled him in a soft towel. He settled down, burrowing into the folds of the towel, and here he is, before I even had a name for him. I'd been calling him BK, short for Baby Kitty, during his stay outside, because I couldn't even be positive which "brand" he was. He never let me get that close.

The page elements were all things that I had experimented with: a piece of yarn, the paw prints, and an allover patterned paper. They are part of a new kit I'm designing called "Reigning Cats and Dogs". If you like digital scrapping, email me, and I will share some elements of this kit with you.



Not to leave the other boys out, I started scrapping pages of their antics. I had bought them a small kitty condo to give them a new sense of place while the new cat in town was sequestered in the bathroom. No sooner than I walked in the door with it, Toby and Ringo were all over it, in it, and jockeying for position. The pictures on this page were taken over the course of an hour or so of "Synchronized Sleeping". The papers are from Tami Forbes' Mystery Kit, a crop challenge.

Welcome to Scrapkatz!

Hi there! Welcome to Scrapkatz, my blog to showcase my digital scrapbooking, and my three fuzzy buddies.

Let me introduce you to Ringo, aka The Big Red Cat, who came into the family after his first owner had to go into a nursing home. He's a huge red tabby, a stocky fellow who is a real soft touch. He loves having his tummy rubbed, and flops in the floor at any chance for someone to oblige him. Not sure exactly how old Ringo might be, as he was fully grown when he showed up about three years ago.

Toby was maybe six weeks old when someone tossed him out behind the car dealership downtown. We brought him home, and he immediately took up with my mother, and he would snuggle up in the crook of her elbow and try to hide. He wasn't shy for long, however, becoming quite a rambunctious fellow. Today, his favorite toy is a plush Peep (like the marshmallow variety), and he enjoys wrestling with the other two cats.



Harley is the newcomer to the family. His feral mother brought him and two littermates up onto my porch one weekend. I managed to catch two of the three, and took them to my vet to see if he could take them in and find homes, which he did. The third kitten was too fast for me, running into the backyard and under a storage building where I couldn't get him. His mother abandoned him, and he was left alone to live under my car. It took me three weeks to coax him close enough to nab him and bring him inside. Now, he wouldn't go out for anything. He's going to be a real love.