Good morning! Today, I have the pleasure of taking part in a fantastic blog hop: Autism Awareness Blog Hop. So very many families have a loved one who has been diagnosed as being on the spectrum; I myself have two family members on the spectrum. I am so honored that Veronica Zalis asked me to be a part of this blog hop today, and it’s in honor of those family members that I created this card! In honor of this worthy cause, Taylored Expressions has created a very special stamp set called Look With Your Heart, containing beautiful encouragement sentiments. Taylored Expressions also is committed to donating 25% of the proceeds from the sales of this set during the month of April to the Autism Society.
The hope for this blog hop is to bring awareness and a bit of compassion to those families affected by this diagnosis. My cousin (who is like a sister to me) has a son six months younger than my own children, and watching her joys and struggles with her son has been such an eye-opening experience for me. The parents of children with autism are truly superheroes. It’s one of those situations that you will never truly understand unless you have walked in their shoes, and they deserve every ounce of compassion and love that we can muster.
While the sentiments in this beautiful Look With Your Heart stamp set are all incredible and so poignant, one of the sentiments particularly spoke to me: “Every child is a different kind of flower, and all together make a beautiful garden.” Each child is their own person. Each child has their own value, their own contribution to society. They all are capable of making us better people, and together we can make the world a better place for them.
I started by stamping the beautiful Floral Trimmings stamp from Studio Katia and silver heat embossing it on some watercolor paper. I then placed strips of washi tape on the embossed panel and watercolored it using the same technique that I demonstrated in this video. Stripes and florals are super chic this spring, so I wanted to bring that trend in to this card. I wanted pretty pastel blue florals, so I used Daniel Smith’s French Ultramarine.
After peeling off my washi masking tape stripes, I worked on watercoloring the florals. I used a variety of colors of Daniel Smith watercolor tubes (helping to bring home my chosen sentiment with lots of different flowers ;)), including Quinacridone Pink, New Gamboge, Alizarin Crimson, and Hooker’s Green. (I’ll link them all below!) I stamped the same floral image from Floral Trimmings on a piece of scrap watercolor paper, then watercolored just a portion of it and fussy cut it to have an extra little floral element.
Once my watercoloring was complete, I turned to the greeting. I stamped the lovely sentiment from the Taylored Expressions Look With Your Heart stamp set onto some heavyweight vellum and heat embossed it using silver embossing powder. I then scored it and folded the edge over the edge of my floral panel and hid the adhesive on the back of the card. (You have to be sneaky with vellum or else that ugly adhesive shows right through!) I used the other fussy cut floral piece to hide some more adhesive in the corner of the vellum sentiment panel. Isn’t that sentiment just stunning?
I hid some more adhesive behind some Sparkling Clear sequins, then added a thin strip of silver glitter paper on the edge of the card front for a little sparkle.
Well, that’s all for my project today! I hope you’ll check out all of the different sponsors for this hop… there are some absolutely incredible prizes from some absolutely incredible and generous sponsors (including some of my absolute favorite companies… Ellen Hutson, Hero Arts, and Honeybee Stamps). There is a wealth of inspiration and encouragement to be found along this hop, and I hope you will check out each stop!
There is also an opportunity for you to create your own Autism-themed project and link it up to the InLinkz for an additional chance to win one of these fabulous prizes!
