Hello and thank you for joining me today for this very special blog hop to stand up and show our unity against racism. You should have come from Juliana Michaels. Your next stop is Betz Golden. What I love about paper crafting, besides getting to play with stickers and fun stamps, is the supportive and inclusive community.  When Justine Hovey asked for participants to this blog hop I did not hesitate to sign up.The goal of this hop is to come together to stand with our crafty sisters and brothers of color not just in the paper crafting community, but also to show our support in the never ending fight for equality all over the world. I hope you feel inspired today and unite with the papercrafting community to stand against racism. Please continue reading to find out how I made three encouraging cards. Affiliate links are used at no cost to you. If you choose to shop through these links, I will receive a small commission. I am pledging my affiliate sales to Black Table Arts which organizes and brings in black artists into communities and provides creative spaces for leadership. Thank you for your support today. 

Hello crafty friends. 
Thank you for joining me today on this blog hop to raise awareness for Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. EDS is a rare connective tissue disorder that can go undiagnosed and untreated. I want to thank my crafty friend, Natasha of Handmade by Tasha who organized this hop. 
If you are interested in more information about EDS, please check out:

• Ehlers-Danlos Society page
• EDS Blog post by Natasha Davies
• Why the zebra post by Natasha Davies
• Just giving blog post to donate to EDS.org

Thank you for your time and I hope this hop helps you to understand this rare condition.
To honor people to live with EDS everyday, I wanted to make some happy encouragement cards. Nothing says happy and shares hope like a rainbow. I made the rainbow paper using paper scraps. Please read along to learn how I made these cards.

That time is here...stressing over valentines for your children's classmates. I end up dreading this every year and waiting until the last minute to get something done. This year in my quest to actually organize and do things ahead of time, I decided to start my project a bit early. This also coincided with my first blog post for CutCardStock.com as an influencer. I am excited to be working with them. I purchase a lot of my basic cardstock, especially Neenah solar white papers and envelopes, from them. CutCardStock.com has a lot of variety and they can do custom cutting on site. I decided to use 12x12 sheets of their DCS white and show ways to stretch that white cardstock. Please read on to see what I made. 

Hello and thank you for visiting my blog. For this card I played around with Nuvo Embellishment Mousse, Hero Arts sand embossing powder and layering die cuts to create some texture on this scene card. This card was relatively easy to put together once each of the components was built. For the colored die cuts, I actually colored those over a year ago and pulled them out of my stash for this card. Please read on for how I built each of the card components and put them together for a fun summer thank you card. Some items used to make this card are listed at the end of the post. If you would like to build this card and purchase items through these links, I may receive a small commission. Thank you for your support.

I recently met a crafty friend on line and we met up to craft together. She introduced me to a great Birch Press Layered die, Adora. I’ve loved Birch Press dies but just hadn't ever used them so I quickly grabbed three colors of paper out of my scrap stash and die cut them. The Adora die has a repeating heart pattern and after I cut out the patterns, I was left with all these colorful hearts. I didn't want to waste them so I decided to make some cards but needed white as a neutral to go with my color palette. I grabbed the Altenew Radial Hearts cover die which has a repeating heart pattern and cut out a piece of Neenah solar white. I saved all these heart pieces and decided to use them on a card. Well I ended up making 5 cards and would like to explain how I made them using dies and leftovers. Please read on and note that affiliate links are used in this post. If you decide to purchase the items through these links, I get a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for your support.

Hero Arts has a great product that came out in November 2018 but I only recently discovered it. The Peek-a-Boo Die works with three different background stamps to cut out an A2 sized card front and score tons of doors where you can stamp or include little messages. This post is about the die and using it with the Mail Jumble background stamp to make a Thank you card. Please continue reading to find out more about this great product.

Tim Holtz and Ranger recently released new alcohol inks in a pearlized formulation. Some of these inks were included in the May Simon Says Stamp kit. Using these new inks and some inspiration from Michelle Short on the Hero Arts blog as well as Jenn Shurkus, I made some alcohol ink panels. I then used these ink panels to complete some cards I needed to celebrate the coming of babies. Please read on for how I put together these cards. 

My latest post is exploring the use of embossing powder with watercoloring flowers as well as using ink sprays as watercolor. To showcase some of the watercoloring, I’m using the Altenew Adore You stamp set because the flowers are large, open images perfect for coloring. This post was inspired by the Altenew Academy class, Creative Watercolor Media. In the class, the instructors used different ink types as watercoloring mediums. When I watercolor, I typically use my Distress Inks so I wanted to try Gansai Tambi watercolors. I also have some metallic ink sprays and wanted to see how they worked as watercolor inks. I also stamp the image in archival ink before painting but this time I wanted to see the difference in the image if I emboss the image in gold versus clear powder. Please read on for how my cards turned out.

I love birthdays ... from cake to presents to celebrating with friends and family; birthdays are just a lot of fun. Having two kids means lots of birthday parties which means lots of buying birthday gifts. For birthday gifts, I prefer to give something that is personal and can be used over and over. This cycle of birthdays, I’m making personalized tote bags. I already posted on this, here but I have another example including what I put into the whole gift. For this project, I used my Cricut Explore Air, Cricut Iron On Lite, Cricut Vinyl to make: a personalized tote bag, pencil box and bookmark. I also made two birthday cards to go with these presents. Lots of ideas here so I will break them down as I hope this post will leave you inspired to make some birthday gifts.