Crafty As L

  A couple of months ago, Mr. L and I volunteered to foster some kittens for a local charity,  The Cat Welfare Group .  The charity was inundated after collecting 28 kittens from one location and were asking for fosterers, so we decided to give it a try.  Six weeks ago, these we picked up these little bundles, who were about 5 weeks old.  The little fluff balls are Scooby, Scrappy, Fred, Daphne and Dill.  Dill’s an interloper.  He was the only survivor from his litter so he was put in with the Scooby Gang for company. Kittens are major time wasters!  Aside from feeding them 3 times a day, we played with them loads, cuddled them when they were tired and also became a cat bed when required! It’s been a great privilege watching them grow up, learning new skills and seeing their personalities develop.  I’d made them each a blanket to take with them so that they had something with a familiar scent to help them transition into t...

W e share our home with two rescue cats, one is very playful, the other is quite lazy.  Monty likes to sit in a shady spot and watch the world go by, occasionally coming over for a quick head rub.  Leia, on the other hand, goes everywhere at break-neck speed and is a prolific hunter.  During one of her recent outings, she came back with her eye closed and we could see what looked like a thick hair protruding from her eye but couldn’t get it out, so off we went to the out-of-hours emergency vet.  Now, Leia does not travel well! During the 25-minute journey in her crate, she had a wee, a poo, was sick and then had copious amounts of drool hanging down each side of her face.   We presented her, in the socially distanced handover in the vet’s car park, with a description of the emergency and an embarrassed apology for the state of the cat/crate!  I’m sure they’ve seen it all before…. Anyway, 45 mins later, a rather quiet Leia was given back to us together...

Aside from the actual enjoyment of doing hand lettering, part of my reason for attending the course on modern calligraphy earlier this year was to be able to create sentiments that aren’t available with stamp sets.  Never was this more applicable than when my friend asked me to create some simple but rude cards!  She didn’t want fancy writing as that was too nice(!) so I went for block lettering with a mix of lower case and capital letters. Another friend has just set up a cat rescue charity and is having a launch party and fund raiser at the end of the month so she asked me if I could create some cat-themed things for them to sell to raise money.  I started by sketching out the letters on graph paper and then traced over them onto tracing paper using a marker pen. The next stage was to put the card base and lettering template onto a light box and effectively trace the letters onto the card base.  I don’t concern myself if the letters aren’t perfectly traced – th...