Operation Julie's Smile!

Hello!! And welcome to the Operation Julie's Smile blog hop!! You should have arrived here by way of Fiona's wonderful blog. If you didn't, you really should consider going back to the very beginning at the Sweet Stamp Shop blog. There are about 120 designers participating in this blog hop! Yowza!! TONS of fabby inspiration!! And... tons of fabby prizes!!

As many of you know, I've had the honor & pleasure of being a member of Julie Ranae's Play Date Cafe team. I'm thankful our creative paths crossed and I'm happy to call her a friend. So when I heard about the struggles she is facing, of course I wanted to participate!! I'll tell you more about it in a moment, but first, here's the card I'm sharing today!


I stamped a couple Hero Arts Jewel Daisies, colored them with Copics, cut them out, and then loaded the centers with beads. Oh how I love beaded flower centers!!


The background paper says "strength courage determination" - it's from a wonderful pad of breast cancer awareness paper I picked up at Michael's. I was inspired by this HYCCT challenge on Splitcoast - but I thought those words also describe Julie. Here is her story:


The creative blogging community is coming together this weekend to help one of our friends, Julie Ranae. You may know her as the Design Team Coordinator for many wonderful companies from bakers twine, die cuts, rubber stamps and more. What many people don’t know about Julie Ranae is that she has had some pretty major dental surgeries in her lifetime due to medication she had to take as a child. It was in her plans to think about having all of her teeth replaced at some point in the next 5 years, a decision that was pretty easy to plan out. But then it happened…she chipped her front teeth on a weekend a month ago. The dentist told her there was no way to save them & that it was his recommendation that she give in and have them all her teeth removed soon, but for that day, they needed to get her front teeth done so her gums could begin to heal. He said he would 'work out payments with her to have ALL this work done...but when she called to make her appt for the first step of impressions, they told her the amount of money that was needed and that the 'payments' applied only to the two teeth that were extracted that day. Her husband Paul was with her & that too, was his understanding as well. So this is how she has found herself in this situation…Needing at least $4000 to get started and another $3000 to finish the process…a total of $7000.

Nicole Rixon, owner of Sweet Stamp Shop put together this benefit after finding out about this situation and before Julie Ranae knew it, it took flight! Because she is an event organizer by trade, she has taken on the job of organizing all of the blogs in this hop as her way of ‘working overtime’ for what she needs, the same as if she were able to work overtime at an outside job to pay for the work to be done. It is the goal of all of these generous friends & sponsors to help make this situation more do-able for our friend so that she can share a brand new smile with all of us soon. If there is anything you can do to help with a financial donation, there is a donation button ready for you to click. Any amount is appreciated and ALL DONATIONS will be eligible for prizes from our sponsor pool of over $2500.

And speaking of all those amazing sponsors, Hero Arts has generously donated several goodies to the pot. You don't want to miss out on a chance to win!! So please be sure to click on the "donate" button up there on my sidebar to the right, and do what you can to help Julie out. Prize winners will be drawn from blog hop comments, the Paypal donation list and from blop hop hosts.

And now it's time to hop on to the next blog along the line, Tami Mayberry!! And just a reminder, there are ~120 hoppers or so in this massive blog hop, so there is a chance there may be a broken link or two. Just head on back to the Sweet Stamp Shop blog if you get stuck, there will be a master list there. And by the way, you have all weekend, until Sunday October 9 at 11:59 EST, to make your way through the hop!!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and for supporting Julie!