I have 2 gifts I am thankful for today…. First, I am thankful for my little sister, Gisella. She is celebrating her birthday today! Hip Hip Hip Hooray, Sis! Though she is so far away from me but she is always close to my heart and thoughts. And…. I heard my mom reveal to me her secret! A BIG SECRET! I won’t tell you today but maybe with her permission, next week 😀

On her special day, I made this very special card just for her…

Supplies from CTMH: Beautiful Friendship (B1400), Joyful Birthday Stamp Set (B1419), White Daisy Cardstock, Black Cardstock, Gold Embossing Powder, White Embossing Powder, VersaMark inkpad, Gypsy inkpad, Pacifica inkpad, HollyHock inkpad, Craft Heater, 3×3 Acrylic Block, 2×6 /12 Acryclic block, Adhesive. Not CTMH supplies: Xyron Max, Velum

I found one awesome YouTube Tutorial from Catherine Pooler how to create this pretty batik background using background stamp, embossing and watercolor. Check out her tutorial here.

And second is that today we are Indonesians celebrating National Batik Day. Batik is:

Batik (Javanese pronunciation: [ˈbateʔ]; Indonesian: [ˈbatɪk]) is a technique of manual wax-resist dyeing applied to whole cloth, or cloth made using this technique. Batik is made either by drawing dots and lines of the resist with a spouted tool called a canting (IPA: [ʈ͡ʂantiŋ], also spelled tjanting), or by printing the resist with a copper stamp called a cap (IPA: [ʈ͡ʂap], also spelled tjap). The applied wax resists dyes and therefore allows the artisan to color selectively by soaking the cloth in one color, removing the wax with boiling water, and repeating if multiple colors are desired. (source Wikipedia)

We had a chance to go back to Indonesia visiting my family in 2010 and took our family pictures. All of us wore Batik clothing 🙂 Hopefully one day we go visiting again and will have additional on the pictures. And now we have 2 daughters, so we need to have four of us wearing Batik.