SEI Kitty's Place

As those who know me well will tell you, I am a total ‘Cat’ person. I have three little fluff monsters called Bert, Ernie and Elmo who frequently help me to scrap by lying on my piles of patterned papers and running off with my pens/glue sticks/anything else which catches their fancy! And of course, like most scrapping pet owners, I have an album dedicated to recording their lives and all the little things they do which make me smile. So when I was asked to try out the SEI Kitty’s Place papers I jumped at the chance, and quickly got to work on a couple of pages I had been planning about Ernie and Elmo.

What struck me first about the papers when they arrived was how versatile they are. They are all double sided, with a bold pattern on one side juxtaposed with a plainer pattern or solid colour on the other side. This not only makes coordinating your papers far easier, but also saves you money as you can get several different designs from just a couple of sheets of paper. The papers are very bright, with colours ranging from orange and pink to purple and white – a nice change from the usual cat themed papers which tend to be a mixture of browns and beiges and far more muted.

My first layout was about my cat Ernie, who has a habit of jumping into any box which comes into the house. Of course, with ours being a scrapping household, he gets a lot of opportunity to practice this trick! The Kitty’s whiskers paper worked perfectly with the bright fuchsia blanket in the photos, so I decided to create a simple but bold and funky layout, doodling a wavy scalloped edge and hand-cutting the papers and then using stamps to create a title and add interest with a few hearts and stars. If you find the papers are too bright for your photos, consider changing your shots to black and white in a photo-editing program – the strong pinks in this particular paper would make a black and white print really ‘pop’.

For my second layout I decided to scrap some photos of Elmo in the garden which I had taken in the summer – she loves to play out in the sunshine and the photos bring back memories of a lovely peaceful morning spent together outside. The pattern of flowers and butterflies on this Kitty’s playground paper were ideal for a summery layout, and the bright orange created an excellent backdrop for the photos. I added some stamped doodles and a title and then journalled inside the large bookplate – some fabric flowers with button centres finished off the layout perfectly.

These SEI papers are bold and bright and are versatile enough to be used on all kinds of layouts – although they are designed with pet owners in mind, don’t feel restricted to just using them for your cat pages as very few of the papers are specifically ‘cat’ themed.