Pretty Paws
Tiger was a polydactyl cat. It means that he had thumbs! He had the prettiest, sweetest little paws. I definitely needed a whole page dedicated to them.
I had printed all the photos for the album when I started this project, so I had to work with the size/cropping that I already had. I used Studio to take a basic paw shape and make it all wonky so that it would show the whole picture. I used the PixScan mat to know exactly what size and shape to make all the paws (yeah, I know I could just use the scanner, but unfortunately, my scanner doesn’t work with Studio).
I had printed out 10 one inch close ups of his paws and one big one of him sitting with his paws crossed all pretty.
I HAD to journal about this. I made sure it would fit to the shape by doing the journaling in Studio. After I cut the paw frame out of brown cardstock, I traced the paws on the pictures lightly in pencil and cut them slightly bigger. I propped the frame up of lots of little bits of double sided foam tape. If I had thought to do it before adding the foam tape, I would have done a little bit of stitching on the cardstock around the edges for a bit of texture, but I didn’t think of it until it was too late.
I cut the “pretty” out of gold foil, and a couple of extra gold paws for accents. I did them as a compound shape in the circle so that I wouldn’t have to worry about losing or gluing down all those little bitty toes. The “paws” I cut out of recycled chipboard. I made sure to use the knife tool on the letters so that I wouldn’t lose the insides of the letters.
For the shiny paw strip, I used a piece of double sided tape to pick up the paws that were left when I cut out the background. I then poured loose gold glitter on the tape and then removed the backing and stuck it down. I brushed on a layer of mod podge to keep the glitter in place (and to make the paws shiny and make the whole thing stand out.
I used orange paw patterned paper recycled from an Iams cat food bag for a bit of paw-ception, as I had one last paw to fill.
Please enjoy my freebie pretty paw cut file with the wonky paws and words, which you may download from below, or from the freebie page of this blog :)
xoxo
-A
