Tuesday, October 5, 2010

A Hero Cat Sitting in our Window

Meet our new pet...the Hero Cat.
And she has kittens.
The cat in the book as 5 kittens...and we made five kittens.  The cat in our window has four kittens looking out the window with her since she kindly offered up her 5th kitten to Sweet Pea to carry around the house and love...literally...to pieces.  It's been taped back together twice.



We've been reading some books about colors and fall for Little Brother's preschool time.  I went looking for this book recommended by Christianne at Little Page Turners in our library system.  They didn't have it, but I stumbled upon some other really wonderful books by the same author, Eileen Spinelli.  Hero Cat is one of them. 
It really has nothing to do with colors or fall, but it's a heartwarming story about a mother cat who saves her kittens from a burning building.  Little Brother has always liked cats and I wanted to try making a cat with glowing eyes as a window decoration using some of the scraps from the fall leaves project

And doing this project, we've discovered that Sweet Pea has a thing for cats too.

I used the same cat pattern as the shirt I made for Little Brother a while ago and added some eyes.  My goal was to have a cat that looked like it sort of belonged with Halloween, but was not too scary...since I don't really want to celebrate the scary/creepy side of Halloween with my kids.  And of course I want my kids to sleep at night. :)

The big cat I made first out of black cardstock.  I just cut out one layer and taped scraps of wax paper with melted crayon behind the eyes.  Then I thought the black cat maybe looked too scary...and the cat in Hero Cat is calico and her kittens are all different, so we decided to make a few more cats.


For the smaller cats, we made an art project out of it.  I cut out 10 cats, so I could make them two sided and sandwich the melted crayon colored wax paper in between the layers.  I varied their tails a little bit for more interest.  I sat all three kids down for a painting session on a Saturday when Firecracker was home from school.  I gave them sponges instead of brushes for some variety.  Little Brother still used the sponges like a brush...but oh, well.  I gave them black, gray, white, and orange to work with since that covered the colors of the cats in the book.  They were able to paint them fast, so it was all I could do to keep up with them finishing one and taking it outside to dry and getting them set up with the next...so there are no picks of the painting.

After the cats had dried, I assembled them when the kids were in bed.  They started out a little curled up, so it wasn't as easy to put them together as I'd anticipated. 

I ended up painting the undersides with Mod Podge and stuck two cats together with the wax paper scraps between for the eyes. 
Then I painted the whole thing with Mod Podge to make them evenly shiny.

In all honesty...if you want to make these, I'd suggest sticking to the one layer, unpainted version because it's so much faster!  But the kids had a blast painting their cats too, and there's a lot to be said for that.

Here's the pattern if you're interested in making your own.  This is for the bigger cat.  You can reduce the size for a smaller cat and you'll have to add your own tail.

Click here for the Printable Hero Cat Pattern.

3 comments:

  1. Gorgeous, will have to make a cat family for my Little Man. Purrrrfect for Halloween!

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  2. What a great project...and so fun to discover Sweet Pea's affinity for kitties in the process!

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  3. What a fun project! Thanks for sharing this with us!

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