How To Make a Black Cat Silhouette

It's no secret that black cats are considered unlucky.  Personally, I think they're rather beautiful; they're silhouette in particular is graceful and striking.  So how do you make one?  There's plenty of silhouette vinyl-art stickers you can buy, black cats included; but they can be quite an expensive investment, especially if you only need the cat for a day or two rather than as a constant companion.  You could also download a clip art graphic, blow it up to A4 and print it out; but that's a lot of toner gone.  
There's one other way I came up with, and here's how to do it.

1. Find an A4 sized colouring-in page of a cat; it will have bold black outlines, no color or shading, and minimal detail.  I used my own graphic from the free Halloween dice printable, but anything large will do, regardless of whether it's cartoony or sophisticated.
2. Print it out or photocopy it on to scrap white paper.
3. Cut around the outside of the shape; cutting wide around skinny details like whiskers.  This is now your 'template'.
4. Lay the template on top of an A4 piece of black cardboard and either hold it steady or use a few dots of temporary tac to keep it in place.
5. With a white pencil (hooray - finally a use for these things!) trace around the template.
6. Now cut around the white line you drew; again, being careful with things like whiskers.

The project is simple and relatively quick, but is admittedly fiddly with two lots of fussy cutting to make one shape.  The upside is that you can use the template multiple times to make more silhouettes (to decorate Halloween goody-bag or create a spooky procession down your corridor).  Keep young kids away from this craft project, but older children will enjoy experimenting with different colouring-pages for different silhouettes to make a menagerie in no time.
Now.  Yesterday I promised both a black cat project and some exciting silhouette news.  I've done the black cat, here's the news; on the 15th of February, straight after Valentines Day, I'm going to launch a new set of printpapers for sale; personalised silhouettes; they're perfect for parties, scrapbooking, or framing.  To celebrate, I'm going to get my two daughters to pick out a picture from the followers pages of this blog and facebook.  So for your chance to win one of 2 sets of personalised silhouette printpapers, with you or your family's silhouettes; simply join the Partycraft Secrets blogspot and facebook page.  Good luck!