Altenew Celebrating Parents Card Drive Blog Hop + Giveaway

If you’re looking for the Day 2 reveal with The Greetery, click here!

Hello friends, I’m joining the Altenew Blog Hop today to further the cause of the Celebrating Parents Card Drive! The purpose of this blog hop is to honor parents and the people who are like parents to us, and to collect cards to be distributed to the elderly around us, and to raise some money for The Food Bank of New York (more about that below). The goal is to send cards for the elderly that live in nursing homes or shelters to let them know they’re not forgotten. Please check out the Celebrating Parents Card Drive and join this great cause by sending in cards.

You should be arriving here from Laura’s blog, but if not, you can click back to the start at the Altenew Card Blog and go from there.

I made a couple of cards for this hop, using the Charmed stamp set and the Watercolor 24 pan set.

I’ll tell you how this came about. I had an idea in my head. Sadly it didn’t transfer to reality very well so I had to adjust. I wanted to stamp the outline image onto vellum paper with embossing ink and heat emboss with black embossing powder. Then using the hand cut vellum design as a color guide, I wanted to paint the color onto watercolor paper in a way that would transfer (loosely) through the vellum paper and look soft, yet vibrant.

The problem is, it just didn’t work as well as I pictured it in my head. So, for this card, I ended up just stamping the whole image onto the painted card panel and embracing the loose, messy colors.

I used some of the word stamps from the Charmed stamp set for this card, and because I didn’t have any stamp sets from Altenew with the word “mom” on it, I improvised by cutting the word “moments” from The Journal Card Builder stamp set into “mom”. And no worries! When I need to stamp the word “moments” again, I’ll simply mount the two halves of the stamp together and you’ll never know it was ever in two!

I added some black paint splatters and some clear raindrop dots to complete the card and matted it with a coordinating color of textured cardstock.

The lavender colored card ended up a little closer to my original idea. I stamped the image on vellum paper, black heat embossed and cut out the image and used it for a color guide for painting the card front with watercolor paints.

Again the vellum obscured the vibrance of the paint color more than I liked, so this time I tried something different. I colored on the backside of the stamped image with alcohol based Artist Markers, adding 2 shades of deeper colors and tones near to the flower centers. The paler edges of the petals are the painted background that you can see through the vellum.

For the sentiment on this card, I left it a little more wide open for the range of card-giving occasions that it might suit. The word “wonderful” comes from the Faceted Stars stamp set and “you” comes from the Build-A-Flower: Begonia stamp set.

Once more, I added paint splatters and clear enamel dots to complete the card, then matted it with a weird, but perfect shade of lime green textured cardstock.

Now lets talk about another benefit of this card drive! 20% of the profits from these products (Thanks, Dad Stamp Set, World’s Best Dad Stamp Set, Best Mom Stamp Set, Extra Special Stamp Set, Beautiful Lady Stamp Set, Painted Butterflies Stamp Set, Sweet Bow Enamel Pin, Stay Awesome Enamel Pin) until Father’s Day, June 21st, 2020, will be donated to the Food Bank of Central New York to support seniors in need.

And, there are prizes! Altenew is giving away a $30 gift certificate to 6 lucky winners! Please leave a comment on the Altenew Card Blog for a chance to win. They will also draw a winner to receive a $15 gift certificate from the comments left on each designer’s blog on the blog hop list below. All winners will be announced on the Altenew Card Blog on April 5, 2020.

Your next stop on the blog hop is Arjita’s blog! Below you will find the complete blog hop list should you encounter any broken links!