 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I bring you a charity blog hop today. This is something I've been working on for quite a while. I'm really excited to share it with you. And it was inspired by this stamp set. The whole thing was inspired by goats. And there's a long story to that, which I will give you, but the charity blog hop, you can get a link to it in the doobly-doo down below and go hop along to all of the folks who are joining in and qualify for prizes along the way. Well, the whole idea for this is that you can give a gift to someone in need who really needs it around the world and give it in the name of someone that you want to give a gift to in your local sphere. So if you want to give an Easter gift and put this in an Easter basket, you can do it as a birthday gift, a Mother's Day gift, Father's Day gift, Christmas gift, whatever. Any time of year you can do this through a lot of different organizations. And the blog hop is highlighting a lot of organizations. I've invited my friends to join in and do this by choosing whatever organization touches their heart or the heart of the person they want to give to and then make a project along with it. This particular one is goats. And the reason that I have a thing for goats is I used to work for a company called World Vision. It's a charity that helps people in need all around the world. And my project for many years was working on the gift catalog. A gift catalog is that kind of a thing where you can choose a gift. The gift itself, the goat goes to the child or family or mom somewhere in the world who needs it. And the gift card comes to you. So you get a little thing that you can give to your recipient. This is the card that I got from World Vision. And so I can put this in the mail and send it to the person. And I could just give them this, but of course I'm crafty so I'm going to give them more than that. But look how beautiful this is. Look at those smiling faces. Look how happy they are. And on the back here it has information about the gift and how it makes an impact in someone's life. And you can type in a message like I did, the birthday message. There's also room to hand write a little note in that section as well. So you don't have to personalize it if you don't want to think ahead about what you want to write in the card. But I'm going to include that along with this card. So it's giving them something a little more tangible and a little, I don't know, something to open. That's more than just a pre-made card by the organization. So I'm coloring my goats. And I'm going to take this and color it kind of twice. You'll see how that plays out as the card goes on. This goat in the front, I'm going to pop him up and then the goats in the back will also be colored. I'm going to do it on two pieces and you'll see a little bit more as we move on. But I'm going to keep chattering while I do the coloring because the charities that we're highlighting are so special. I just wanted to really encourage you to go along on the hop. There are some folks who are giving to wildlife causes. They really believe in animals. Some people are doing like humane society type things. Some are even going to give to organizations that don't have a gift program like this, like a specific thing. But they're giving in the name of that person and they might perhaps print out the receipt to say, yes, I gave this. Or just write them a note in their card that says, yes, I gave this. If I were crafty enough to sew something, I might with this gift decide to knit something out of goat hair yarn. I don't even know if there is such a thing, but you could make something that's related to the actual gift you're giving. There's also a couple different ways you can approach the whole gift giving idea. You can give something that means something to you. So for me, world poverty is something that makes my heart cry when I see how poor people live around the world. You can also give because of what the person cares about. So when my sister graduated from the university in England, I gave in her name education for girls because that means a lot to my sister. She had just completed her education and assured that someone else was going to have the chance to go to school. You could give a small loan to someone who's a business owner and help another person start their own business. And that really will touch the heart of your recipient. And that's really what we're after when we're giving gifts. We want to give things that people actually care about, things they're going to remember. And these kinds of gifts specifically really do that in spades in a different way than other gifts might. So another benefit to doing this, I'm just going to say this because there are some people that do it for this reason, is that you can do it at last minute. It can actually, if you're running late and you haven't gotten someone a gift, give them a gift to charity and then write in a card what you're giving to in their honor. And you will come across as seeming like you thought about it maybe half time. So that's, yeah, that's for the people who think that way. All right, back to the card a little bit. This is going to be the background piece. The other one I'm going to fussy cut because I colored just the goat. But I'm coloring some of the outside edges of the whole goat because when you peek underneath of something that's popped, sometimes you see a little bit of what's under there. And I want to make sure you see color under there. It'll be less distracting. There's also some of those streamers and things that I don't feel like fussy cutting. So I'm going to just lock them off and make the fussy cutting a lot simpler. So I'm not even going to cut out the antlers. They call them antlers, the horns. Yes, goat horns. I should know that. I'm the goat woman, right? Anyway, so I made the fussy cutting simpler for myself by doing that. So I stamped the thing twice, masking these out so that I would be able to kind of get this whole thing rolling and all the coloring done. I also Googled goats. You'll notice that I'm doing different kinds of markings on the goats. I'm making all of them a little different. There's some that are gray and some that are brown and some that have really interesting markings like the big goat in front that I had done. And I just Googled goats and looked for pictures of goats with interesting spots, interesting markings, especially their faces and their heads. Because when you add some contrast like on that particular goat, they just look really fun. And I just found they look a little more realistic. So that's the way that I came up with the different kinds of facial features and things. So, you know, this one is going to have a stripe of the light brown and then the dark brown in the center, that sort of thing. So you can play around with a lot of different ways to color them. You could also color them as like rainbow goats. These would be kind of fun in all sorts of crazy rainbow colors since they are being silly and eating cake anyway, right? Because goats and cake are not usually a thing. The colors that I'm using here are actually the same markers that I used in the first goat, which is why I didn't put them on the screen because there's so many colors here. I don't know if you understand the process of putting the colors on the screen, but it is rather a challenge. I know that it's helpful to a lot of my viewers, so that's why I generally do it. But on this particular one, just get the markers out that you had for the first goat and finish off the rest of this using a lot of those colors. So goats have dark inside their ears. Some don't. Some have just a little spot of dark. It really depends on the kind of goat, and if you are a goat person, a goat aficionado, you know, for-eature or something, you probably know a lot more about all these goats and goat parts than I do. I'm also not sure if all goats have a little chinny-chin-chin thing, a little beard, but these goats all have it, and I think it makes them adorable. An account, by the way, on Instagram, and I think they must have a website too. I just follow them on Instagram, and it's called The Goats of Anarchy. And if you look for them, The Goats of Anarchy, they post a lot of videos of goats, if you like goats, but it's a heartbreaking account in some ways, so be ready for that because they rescue goats, goats who can't walk and they have to give them prosthetics or that sort of thing. So it's goats who have been mistreated for little goats, and sometimes it's uplifting and sometimes it just makes my little heart break. But there was one they posted recently that just made me smile. It was one male goat who was like Besties with a girl goat who didn't have feet, and she was kind of learning how to walk on her new prosthetic feet, and he helped her. He chased away the other boys that were trying to come and sniff at her, and I thought it was a very sweet thing for the goats to do. Even goats have little goat friends who they love and protect. Isn't that a nice thing? Pretty awesome. There's one more little goat thing that I wanted to share with you because it was so sweet. It just came in the mail the other day, and it's a picture of one of my sponsored kids. I sponsor a couple of them, and this is little Kurt Lee in Zimbabwe with her goat that I bought her. Isn't that cute? Oh my goodness. They sent me a whole packet full of receipts for all of the different things that they bought for her with the donation that I sent. I sent a Christmas gift, and it was very sweet to see. There were several pictures in there of her with the backpack, her with all the, I mean, a small amount of money in a country like that goes so far. And it was really fun to see my little girl with a goat that I bought her. So there's a goat out there somewhere because of me. And there can be one because of you out there too. On my blog, I do have a little form, and the information in it I promise will remain anonymous. I'm not going to go after anybody or email anybody or anything. But if you are inspired by any of the stops on this blog hop to give a donation to a charity because of it, if you could estimate what you think that will be, whether it's telling me what the charity is and what the gift is or what the amount might be, you don't have to give it right now. But I'd like to keep track because last year my followers, when we did several fundraisers, raised over $6,000 for charities. And I want to see if we can beat that this year. So I have a couple ideas for fun ways that we can give together and try to help change our world and make it a little bit better. So please do that over on my blog. And I know you may not feel comfortable doing that and you don't have to. Okay, here's the final assembly. Adding my little popped goat to the card, you can see just part of it is popped and not all of it. But it still looks really fun even though I didn't have to fussy cut all that stuff. So for the final thing on the card, I just added a sentiment for which I did some Copic coloring in the background. Just use two of the colors on the card. And I also couldn't get away with not doing the inside because there was one more goat stamp in the set that I had not yet used. And it was required that I do that because I color all the stamps and look at this little guy. He's running. I drew in a little bit of a plate and empty plate. So he could be saying, yeah, I ate your cake. Okay, please do join in on the charity blog hop today. I would love to see you join in and give as well. Take care guys. Bye bye and have an awesome day.