World Card Making Day

October 2, 2010 marks the fifth annual World Card Making Day! The World Card Making Day is the first Saturday of every October that kicks off the holiday card-making season. This is a special holiday for card makers to celebrate the creativity of handmade cards and the personal connection that they create between friends and family.

This unique holiday started out as National Card Making Day in 2006. People all over the world embraced this day of celebrating the craft of making handmade cards therefore the name has since been changed to World Card Making Day.

The founders of this holiday, Paper Crafts Magazine, are holding a card-making contest. You can submit your never before seen handmade cards to the magazine and 20 lucky winners will receive a prize package worth over $600 in card-making products. Winners also have a chance to be published in a 2011 issue of the magazine. There are five categories that you can enter: Thank you, Love, Hello/Thinking of you, Christmas/Season's Greetings and Birthday. For additional information on entering the contest, rules and a list of sponsors for the contest, visit their website Paper Craft Magazine.

Many retailers are also embracing this unique holiday and offering special events and sales online and in their traditional brick and mortar stores. Nationwide retailers are hosting special events such as card-making contests, card swaps, card-making classes and online card-making parties.

Many creative people out there have blogs and like to give away Blog Candy on this special holiday. Blog Candy is a little package of goodies you can win by visiting someone's blog and entering the Blog Candy Contests. Many card makers and scrap bookers who maintain a personal blog like to give some Blog Candy and will put together a little package of card making/scrapbooking supplies, tools, etc. This helps draw more traffic to their blog and gives their readers or at least one lucky reader a special "Thank You" for visiting their site. Blog Candy is usually offered a week or two before the World Card Making Day.

If you're a card maker and would like to celebrate this special day with some friends and family you can host a card making pampered pajama party, strength in numbers party, charitable card making party or gather friends to learn some new techniques. A pampered pajama party is where you and your guests can have a spa treatment while making cards in your pj's. A strength in numbers party is where you set up an assembly line and make a large number of cards. And one of my favorites is the charitable card making party were everyone can make cards for children and elderly in hospitals or troops abroad.