The Cheezits: Colby and Cheddar: cat stationery

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Artsy Catsy

When Mom started blogging on the Cat Blogosphere, it was really an act of love. She wanted to tell the world about us wonderful kittehs (naturally), and help rescue other shelter kitties like us.

But Mom says that one of the most wonderful and surprising things about writing The Cheezits for us is all the great people she has met. There are just so many caring beans out there!

And she wanted to tell you all about one of them today: Sharolyn, the resident artist and human over at Artsy Catsy.

Artsy Catsy, if you haven't been there, is the purrfect place to buy any cards and stationery, because so many of the products are inspired by kittehs!

The kitteh cards are our favorites. Besides being really beautiful (how could they be anything else, with kittehs for inspurration?), the cards are full of fun puns and funny captions.

For example, Sharolyn has cute graphics with kittehs climbing up walls and leaving pawprints behind (the inside caption reads, "My prints has come"), and a kitteh hanging desperately onto sumfin' (we know that feeling!) with, "Hang onto your pawsitive cattitude!" inside. Which is a furry good message for all of us kittehs and our beans when we have problems like feeling icky from eating too many bugs or sneezing and sniffling or not wanting to eat at all, like poor Felix right now!

One of the biggest greeting card companies in the US, Recycled Paper Greetings, even offered to buy Artsy Catsy's designs, but Sharolyn wanted to market them herself.

And you should be furry glad she does, because every time an Artsy Catsy design sells, Sharolyn donates 20% of the proceeds to places like The Rescue Farm and Cat Friends Helping Friends, in addition the first copy of each new design to CFHF for raffles and auctions to raise funds, with one per month every month for the rest of this year!

So please go get your bean and whap at them or give them the cute kitten face until they check out Artsy Catsy! Once they do, we know they'll want some of Sharolyn's cards to give to all their bean friends.

And thanks, Sharolyn, for helping kittehs with your purrfect designs!

Who Are Dese Orangey Kittehs, Anyway?

Once, we were just two scared little kittens, clinging to our mother. We must have been very poor, because we weren't very clean or healthy and we had (this is so embarrassing) worms and stuff. We lived day-to-day, and we both remember being very hungry, all the time.

It seemed like we were barely old enough to walk when we were taken away from our mother and brought to a strange place, with lots of other cats (and big scary dogs!). We didn't know why, or what we had done. This place became known to us only as the Shelter.

So, there we were: at the Shelter, in a cage, cuddled together, keeping our spirits up and waiting for a chance to escape, not knowing what else to do, when a surprising new face came to see us.

She smiled at us, and looked us over without poking her fingers in our faces. She made sure our itchy ears were cleaned and those embarrassing worms were taken care of. And she didn't put us back into the cage.

Instead, she took us to a new, totally different place. A place where we have lots of food to eat and fresh water to drink. A place where there's always clean litter. Where there are toys to chase and soft places to sleep.

And we learned a new word.

That word is, "Home."

We are Colby and Cheddar. And this is our story.