I am beyond excited to be featured on the Hero Arts blog today as a guest for the CommUNITY monthly series, hosted by Dana Joy and Pocono Pam. You can find the featured blog post here.
For those new to my blog, I'll take a moment to share my crafting journey with you all. I’ve enjoyed all paper crafts since I was in elementary school, but honed into scrapbooking in 2006 and transitioned to card-making in 2008. Over the following 10 years, I dabbled in dessert toppers, party decor, custom clothing, glass etching, paper quilling and anything else I could get my hands on. You can check out some of my other work on Instagram @hcbc_handcrafted.
March 2020 was when I started looking at my cards as little art canvases and discovered the amazing and diverse paper crafting community on Instagram. Following the events and protests of summer 2020, I made the decision that every card-making Instagram post (on @hcbc2_handcrafted) thereafter would be used to help raise awareness for the social injustices happening all around us. Inspired by the first #PaperCraftersUniteAgainstRacism hop, and the PassTheBrush campaign, it became apparent that a recurring hop was necessary within our paper crafting community to keep the ally-movement going, to bring new people into important conversations, and continue to raise awareness. The PaperCraftersUniteAgainstRacism (PCUAR) hop occurs 4x each year, January, April, July, October. If you're interested in joining the movement as a project participant or supporter, you can register for one of the future hops at bit.ly/PCUAR. Since Jan 2021, many of the projects created by 200+ crafters worldwide feature products from the HeroArts Unity Collection. These products have inspired countless crafters, and have started many necessary conversations about how we can Change the World together. If you're interested to checkout many of the past projects visit @pcuar_ main profile and story highlights on Instagram. I am using my cards and art to help inspire change, to create a better world for my family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and for humanity as a whole. Representation in all areas of life is so important, including in our craft products, and this Unity Collection is a trailblazer and sets the bar high for other companies to increase the diversity of their products.
I’ve seen so many beautifully colored projects with this American Women stamped image and it inspired me to think of a different way to feature it. I decided to create an abstract background using alcohol markers, featuring a variety of skin tone colors, with 91% alcohol and a heat tool on vellum. Gold accents pair with the skin tones wonderfully, so I used gold heat embossing powder and versamark ink to stamp the image and the sentiment. I used partial stamping to turn the vertical Empowerment sentiment into a horizontal one. After embossing, I created a few additional alcohol ink roses to add more interest. I love that this abstract background unintentionally resulted in a resemblance of Vitiligo.
If you'd like to learn more about my Alcohol Ink Marker Art on Vellum technique check out this video on YouTube.
And remember if you're interested in joining the Paper Crafters Unite Against Racism, you can sign up HERE! All craft-levels welcome to join, no prior hop experience necessary.
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