Hop to Stop!!

Hello dear crafty peeps and welcome to my blog.  Hope everyone is having a fabulous day!!

So, a couple of weeks ago my dear crafty friend Lizzy Hill shared a post about the Hop to Stop.  This Hop is run by Becca Cruger and is about raising awareness for Domestic Violence!  

As well as the Hop there is also the opportunity to help by making cards to donate to Becca's local shelter.  They are looking for birthday, thank you and encouragement cards and for them to be left blank inside to make them more usable.

Well, this is such a worthy cause that I decided to join in with the Hop and also to make a few cards to send on to the shelter.   Unfortunately I didn't make as many as I would have liked but I did managed to do about 5.  My biggest problem with these was that, for ease of posting, I felt they needed to be clean and simple! Well, anyone who knows my work knows that I don't really do clean and simple.  Most of my cards are reasonably loaded down with layers and embellies which make them quite heavy so, not cheap for posting.  Anyways, thank goodness for Pinterest.  Had a look around, got a few ideas and came up with these.

Now, for the Hop, you have to use purple on your card so, I hunted around for purple stuff to put on these cards, and came up with .. virtually, nothing!!  But, I managed to find just enough to be able to create these.

I had made a background ages ago that was just sitting around doing nothing, and had a touch of purple in it so, I cut it up and used part of it here.

 I also found a purple VersaColor stamp pad so have used that on almost all of these cards ..

.. along with a small amount of purple Maja papers.
(I received a very generous gift from my dear friend Heather Jacob a little while ago .. it was a pile of Maja papers which, luckily, had some purple ones among them.  Thank you so much Heather, you are such a sweet and generous person and I am so Blessed to be able to call you my friend!!)
I possess only four Gelatos, which I have never used but, luckily, one of them was purple, so the bit of colour under the stamp was created with my Gelatos!  Love them!!

Went hunting for some purple embossing powder but, no luck, so had to use black which actually balanced out the washi tape quite nicely.  I have decided that heat embossing is not one of my skills!!  (One of many I'm not good at!) Every time I try it, I mess it up one way or another.  Very frustrating that I can never get a crisp, clear image but, I guess that's what happens with hand made stuff .. adds character, I say!!  LOL!!

 Stamped the butterflies twice and fussy cut them to give the card above some dimension, and messed up the stamping on the card below but used it anyway, 'cos I quite like how it looks!

I will be sending these off tomorrow.

Now for the Hop.
As I said before, you have to use purple in your card and these are the wonderful sponsors for this Hop.

So, here is my card. 
I made this for a friend's birthday .. killed two birds with one stone and got back into my comfort zone!

The papers are from Maja (more  of that fabulous gift from Heather)
Did a bit of stenciling with transparent texture paste ..

.. and added some Scrapmatts chippies.

The flowers are from my stash and the leaves were cut with my Silhouette.

Along with a piece of netting and a twine bow, I also sprinkled around some micro beads.

My usual pockets on the inside.

Done!!

I know there's not a lot of time left but, if you can manage, it would be lovely if you could create a card for the Hop, it closes on the 30th October.

Thank you so much for visiting and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
Take care and God Bless.