Celebrate World Card Making Day!

Are you ready for the third annual World Card Making Day? It’s almost here – this Saturday, October 4, is the big day! It’s a day set aside for card-makers all over the world to share the fun of card-making.

You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. Retail stores all over the world are hosting card-making events like workshops, classes, contests, and sales. Craft bloggers are blogging about it. Card-making enthusiasts are having card-making parties with their friends and family.

It’s a pretty big deal in paper-crafting circles. How do I know so much about it? I’m the project manager of World Card Making Day, working for CKMedia, the publishers of magazines like Paper Crafts, Simple Scrapbooks, Creating Keepsakes, and Digital Scrapbooking. As a freelance writer, I do a lot of work for CKMedia, but managing World Card Making Day was something new for me. I didn’t even know such a holiday existed before, but now that I’ve experienced it first-hand, I love it!

As part of the World Card Making Day festivities, ordinary card-makers like you and me are invited to post of photo of a card we make on the official World Card Making Day website’s Creation Corner Gallery. Every day this week, the editors of Paper Crafts magazine will select one card from the Gallery and post it as the Featured Card on the Paper Crafts website. (Featured cards even win a prize!)

So I had a great idea for World Card Making Day – what if we took this opportunity to make a card to send to someone we know who lives with food allergies? Make the card, take a photo of it, and post it on the World Card Making Day site. You’ll spread awareness of food allergies, brighten someone’s day, and maybe even win a prize!

What kind of card could you make for food allergies? Here are some ideas:

· A “Cheer Up” card for someone who’s had a rough week with food allergies.
· A “Thinking of You” card, with an allergen-free recipe tucked inside.
· A “Thank You” card for someone who went out of the way to help your family with food allergies, such as a parent who served popsicles instead of ice cream at their kid’s birthday party because your milk-allergic child was invited, or a relative who left the almonds out of the traditional family green bean casserole at the last holiday gathering.
· A “Thank You” card for a teacher who eliminated peanuts from her classroom.
· A “Happy Birthday” card for a food-allergy parent, attached to a new allergen-free cookbook.
· A “Happy Halloween” card, with a list of things to do with unwanted Halloween candy after trick-or-treating, like addresses of dentists who buy back candy for cash.

I’m sure we can all come up with more great ideas for telling people how much we appreciate them in our ongoing battle to keep our families safe.

So get out your scissors and paper, get crafting, and brighten someone’s day! Then share your card with the rest of the world by posting it online here.

Happy World Card Making Day!