Happy Birthday Sprout!

This week at Michelle Perkett Studios we are at Tuesday challenge 45, and our feature is Operation Write Home  ~  Operation Write Home is an organization that sends blank handmade greeting cards for all occasions to deployed US service members so they can write home! They’ve mailed approximately 500,000 cards so far!

Basic guidelines for your OWH cards are that your cards must be handmade, they need to be A2 size, Glitter is NOT allowed (it’s a safety hazard), and “Operation Write Home” needs to be marked/stamped/labelled on the bacl of all your cards. Visit the Operation Write Home blog for all the information you need on this great organisation, and how you can get your cards to the troops!

This week's challenge is to create a card - a birthday card for Operation Write Home and mail it to one of their shippers! Using a Michelle Perkett Studio image on your creation. If you don’t have any there are wonderful summer images in Michelle’s Etsy store and you never know what you might find at the Crafters Digital Art Center group!  Our challenge winner will receive a digitial image of their choice from the Michelle Perkett Studio Etsy store!

Ingredients: Cardstock - SU!, Kaisercraft; Markers - Bic; Pink Rhinestones - Kaisercraft; Mini Brads - Craft Affair; Ribbon - reused from gift wrap; pink lace - LCS.

My creation uses the MPS image of "Sprout" ... how cute is she!  I mounted the trimmed coloured image on embossed CS, added ribbon details to the corner, then adhered lace behind.  Brads added extra security for the lace, before fixing it to the cardbase.I added rhinestones to bling it a little, as I couldn't use glitter.

I kept this card as flat as possible, as it will be sent to a OWH shipper.  I've often thought of service men and women overseas (ours Aussies as well!) and have often seen on TV and thought about how the families at home miss them - and that those service men and women deployed miss many things that we may take for granted - birthdays, seeing their kids graduate school, and special birthdays.  It breaks my heart each time I hear of a soldier deployed overseas and his child is born at home, or that they are missing their a young child's birthday....and I'm so soppy I burst into tears.  So I created a card for a 'little girl' who would be missing their mum or dad who is deployed.

I'm also entering this card in the Operation Write Home Birthday Challenge at Kah Wink E Dink Designs ....  thanks for peeping!