Paperplay Stamp Challenges with Totally Gorjuss Stamptacular Friday Sketchers Cardvaarks' Cupcake

Tragically I lost my father in 2004. I miss him every day.

So when I make a Father's Day card for my FIL I always heap twice the amount of love into it and hope that my own father is somehow aware that much of that love is for him. Tom's Dad's history is, however, very much in evidence within the design of this year's card. John will be 90 on his next birthday and although his life has been good in the last 60 years or so, his formative years were blighted by war.

Born in Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia, his parents and young sister were taken by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp. John was a very young man in the British army at the time. Later, his home and the business he would have inherited from his father was siezed by the Russians in the communist occupation. The drawing of the building on this card is the premises in which John grew up and the shop on the ground floor was owned by his father. I chose the image of the man (a stamp by Beryl Peters for Personal Impressions) specifically because he is clearly from an older era and layered my card with DCWV papers from the Rustic and the Linen Closet collections. The Happy Father's Day stamp is by Inkadinkadoo. It is enormous so I scanned it after I had stamped it and then produced a much smaller electronic version.  I stamped some plain cream card with Versamark using a Fiskers Heritage background stamp, embossed it with clear embossing powder and attempted to distress the whole card with a variety of brown Ranger inks, smudging a few small partial swirls to some of the edges to further age it. Finally, I added a warm gold coloured organza ribbon over the man and added a bow. This card is about as "artsy" as I am ever going to get and I really like it.  John's heritage is so important to him and he has instilled his love of the Czech Republic in his son and his grandchildren. He regained his home and the shop premises after the Velvet Revolution and visits his home regularly.

The "sketch" is challenge 106 from Friday Sketchers and was a peach to use. I am also entering the card into the following challenges:
Cupcake Craft "#95 one for the boys";
Cardvaarks "wet/dry embossing";
Stamptacular "#63 a tribute to all fathers" has to have a man on it (we get two entries if it's for Father's Day)
Totally Gorjus "#34for the boys"
Paperplay "#23 home" (the building was John's home)
Stamp Challenges "happy somethings" (in this case - Happy Father's Day)