2014 Day 1: Katy's Memorial

Happy January 1!  If you missed my blog post yesterday, I am running a survey to know what kinds of things you'd like to read about.  So far only my mother has responded, so even though I'm happy to get feedback from her, I need a little more input.  If you'd like to participate, you can access the survey here.  Thanks!

Today is the first day of my "resolution" to create something new every day.  Not only am I going to experiment with new techniques and (hopefully) create new jewelry designs, but I am also going to work on my backlog of projects.  At the end of the year, I hope I will have made a serious dent in the pile!

One of the projects I have been putting off is a memorial frame for Katy, our cat who passed away in August.  You can read more about her at the end of this blog post.  I decided that should be the first project of the new year.  Yes, it's sad, but I like to think that it sets a good tone of love and remembrance for 2014. 

When my first two cats, Perin and Simoon, passed away, they gave me clay casts of their paw prints.  I have them both in my studio.  However, when it was Katy's time, the vet said they didn't do clay casts but could make ink prints on nice cardstock.

We were grateful for anything, of course.  When it arrived, her name and paw prints were underneath the Rainbow Bridge poem.  We could have just framed the whole sheet, but I wanted to include pictures of Katy and to cut off the poem.  It's a very sweet poem, but I really didn't want to have it hanging in my hallway.  It makes me cry.  :)
 
The other thing with the paw print paper (say that ten times fast!) is that it didn't have the date she passed away.  We wanted to include that, so I looked through my rub-ons and stickers but couldn't find anything suitable.  After running a few tests on plain paper, I printed the date right under her name.  Fortunately the printer didn't jam!  Whew!

I picked a cute paw print scrapbook paper out of the many, many cat papers I have.  I also found a loving but cute cat quote out of the many, many cat embellishments I have.  I put all that together with two pictures of Katy, and here it is:

Yes, that's Katy eating a marshmallow.  It was quite amusing to watch!

In case you can't read it, the quote says: "No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat, and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch.  - Leo Dwarken"  Considering Katy was a very good cat who shed on everything, I thought this was perfect.

The main reason I had been putting this project off is that I wanted something that Steve would think was special.  Katy was his cat, and I didn't want to mess it up.  Fortunately, when I showed the frame to Steve, he really liked it.