"Este 16 de Julio sale la reina a pasear, saludando al peregrino que la viene a venerar"

Someone on ATCards.com requested a card from me that featured traditional festivities/holidays from my country. I thought it was pretty cool that someone actually cared for these things, so I decided to put all my soul on the 2 cards I'll be making for her ;)

This one, the first, is about a festival that takes place in the town of "La Tirana" in the inner part of the Tarapacá Region. This town venerates the Virgin of La Tirana, and every year on the 16th day of July the image of the virgin is taken out from the local church and "takes a walk" around town, while everyone dances around her (gypsies, natives, etc). There are even these folks dressed as demons that used to scare the hell out of me when I was little (lower left corner, my drawing doesn't make them justice!).

My father likes to make us go to La Tirana every year, to spend time with family and such, thought we (me and my sister) don't really like it now and we make sure he knows, LOL :p

Moving on, I've noticed I'm having a hard time drawing directly on the 2,5"x3,5" format so I decided to sketch in the double of that size (5"x7") the I scanned and printed in the correct size. It's a lot of work, because I still have to copy it to the ATC blank, since I want to paint this with watercolors and the ink from my printer bleeds.

I was thinking about painting the original too and maybe make some ATC-sized prints, if anyone is interested :D

The OSA group has several sub-groups for different things, like RAKs and Birthday RAKs. One of this groups is the 1-4-1 group where if you receive a card from a girl you have to send one back within 2 months.

I joined the group several months ago, because I started to feel guilty for not sending RAK Back's. It is weird, but I thought that I'd do better on this group than on the RAK one, LOL. Only recentlyI received a card to be answered, from Sharon Moore.

I was so excited about my first 1-4-1 that I started right away, LOL. I started with a 4 3/8 square card from paper of previous projects for my card base. For the rest I based on a sketch from Amy Westerman :)

I adhered a strip of Basic Grey's Lilykate paper and added some gold accent with a gel pen on the stems of the flowers. Then I punched three little flowers in peach origami paper with a locally bought paper punch (misc. brand), I added a golden border to thew flowers with te same pen.

The crane is stamped with black Staz-On, which is the only black ink I have, lol. Before I bought it on last December I only had a "office" inkpad, shame on me. Anyway, the stamp is also pretty special for me, it's the first one I bought, though it wasn't my first choice and that's why I think I haven't really used  it in many projects (I wanted a cat stamp, but the store was out of them at the time ): ).

By now I thought I was finished, but I also had the feeling that the right side of the card was really empty. So, I decided to use some thread an a dragonfly charm I received as gift in the OSA Secret Santa swap from last year (: For the little ring the dragonfly is hanging I used a tip Nichole Heady poster a two months or so ago in her blog.

And there you have it, a return 1-4-1 ready to be mailed! :)