Fourth of July

After being married to the Air Force for twenty years, I have quite a fondness for emotional patriotic displays of the red, white, and blue. It's been many years since I spent much time around 5:00 pm on a military base, but recently, I was leaving the hospital at Wright Patterson AFB after an appointment for my son. We had just climbed in the car when the loudspeakers started broadcasting the National Anthem. Seeing all the uniformed people on the sidewalks stop, turn to the nearest flag, and salute brought a tear to my eye. I rolled down the windows of the car and had my son cover his heart while we sat respectfully with all the others in their cars across the whole base.

When we lived on Wurtsmith AFB in the early 1990s, this happened to me all the time.

And every time, it makes me proud to be an American.

We're coming up on July 4th, that fateful anniversary of the founding of our nation, and I wanted to make a couple of cards to celebrate the date.

I made this card using the Headline Numbers set from StampinUp, the th from another SU alphabet, and the July from the Hero Arts clear set called July. The little row of four rhinestones completes the visual triangle of blue and reinforces the giant red number.

The stamp here is from the Hero Arts July set and is all one stamp. I masked each part and stamped the colors separately.  Here, I used just three rhinestones to echo the three stars.

Last year, I read a book called Signing Their Lives Away, a fascinating and casually readable book written my friends of my sister. Each chapter dishes up the sometimes sordid, controversial, or tragic story of a signer of the Declaration of Independence (which wasn't signed by anyone but John Hancock and Charles Thomson on July 4th). I highly recommend it if you're looking for some riveting and decidedly unstodgy history on our founding fathers. I plan on reading it again with my elder son this year!