This handmade card was made for celebrating and honoring the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. This is a big occasion for the whole country and especially here in Houston at NASA where Mission Control was located. It still seems like such an unbelievable accomplishment and back when it happened it was like science fiction coming true!
Some of you reading this might not have even been born yet when the first men landed on the moon. While I might wish I could claim to be in that group, the US Space Program was part of my growing up. I remember going outside and watching a satellite go over in the night sky (still fun and amazing to see the Space Station go over!). I remember watching one black and white TV on a stand in the cafeteria at elementary school to see the early space shots. We all knew the names of the first seven astronauts. My mother would always say she felt sorry for Alan Shepard, the first man in space because he just went “up” and came back down, while John Glenn was the first one to orbit the earth and got more attention for that, my mother thought! What we take for granted now, no one knew what would happen to men going into space, let alone landing on the moon!
I remember our whole family being very interested and excited about the Apollo 11 mission. Back then we had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and mostly used it to make tapes to send back and forth to out-of-town relatives for a fun way to keep in touch. So when it was time for Apollo 11, I recorded a lot of the television coverage on the tape recorder! I’m going to send in these three big tapes I have to get them digitized and see what is really on them! This is audio only, no video!
Fifty years ago today my family went to my grandmother’s apartment for dinner and we watched the moon landing, live, on TV in the afternoon. I particularly remember my parents and grandmother just being in awe of the whole event saying this was something they had only read about in comic strips with characters named Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. To see it actually happening right then on TV was beyond amazing.
The moonwalk came hours later after the landing. I think we drove home to see the first moonwalk, although I think I remember worrying on both trips that we would miss something on TV. Anyone who is old enough to remember any of this will tell you that it was all quite the moment and everyone was glued to their TV’s!
I wanted to make a card for the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary, of course, how do you make the lunar landing vehicle out of paper?? Well, I just made “something” that represents it out of silver foil paper! I just looked at some pictures of various drawings and pictures online and came up with this! Of course, it is not accurate, but it’s just paper!
The moon is made with watercolor paper and just colored with several colors of gray inks and Aqua Painter. When it was dry I kind of painted in some “craters” on the moon! No die was large enough for cutting the moon so I just used a bowl turned over and traced the edge.
The little astronaut, representing Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, I drew while following this video! And of course, I had to have the flag that they planted on the moon! Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon, just nineteen minutes after Armstrong. While they were on the moon, Michael Collins was flying the orbiter that got them up there and which would get them back to earth assuming everything went as planned. No one knew for sure. I added a few stars that I had from the last catalog in the Night of Navy sky.
Sometimes you just have to use your imagination and artistic license to create what you want. That’s certainly what I did making this card! I didn’t even know what it would turn out to be. But I wanted something to post to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and the first men landing on the moon!
