As we look forward to all the summer fun this year has in store, we’re keeping our crafting spirit strong with a brand-new selection of cardmaking and scrapbooking kits, available through our Craft with Heart™ subscription program!
With so much going on in our busy, busy lives, it can sometimes be tough to find time for cardmaking and memory keeping. Well, with Craft with Heart™, it’s a breeze to create stunning artwork in just a few minutes! When you subscribe to the Craft with Heart program, you get crafting kits delivered directly to your door.
Each scrapbooking kit includes a selection of base pages—many of which come pre-printed to help crafters get a head-start on their projects—along with die-cuts and stickers for beautifully polished pages! Subscriptions are available in 4- and 12-month options, with kits arriving every 4 months. Every delivery comes with the materials for a total of 8 two-page layouts (that’s 2 per month)! All that’s needed to complete these layouts is your adhesive of choice and a journaling pen!
Along with our scrapbooking kits, we also have brand-new designs for our cardmaking kits! Like our scrapbooking kits, Craft with Heart™ cardmaking kits also come with pre-printed bases, die-cuts, and stickers. In addition to these materials, each cardmaking subscription box also comes with an exclusive My Acrylix® stamp set, a mini stamping block, and mini ink pads. Just grab some of your favorite adhesive, a journaling pen, and you’re good to go!
Our Craft with Heart™ cardmaking kits include both standard size and slimline cards, offering some additional variety to our cardmaking enthusiasts. With materials to create 24 cards—2 each of 12 exclusive designs—Craft with Heart cardmaking kits are a treat for cardmakers everywhere!
With so much to love about the Craft with Heart™ subscription program, it’s no wonder that crafters of all types and experience levels look forward to the arrival of their kits every 4 months! These subscriptions make excellent gifts for any avid crafter in your life, or even for yourself.
As an added bonus, crafters who purchase a 12-month scrapbooking or cardmaking subscription prior to August 31, 2022, are eligible to receive a FREE My Acrylix® stamp set! (Click here for more information.) Talk to your Close To My Heart Maker about starting your own Craft with Heart™ subscription today!
Happy National Scrapbooking Month, friends! We kicked off our celebration last weekend with an incredible virtual crafting event! If you missed out on any of these awesome projects, and would still like to participate, the instructional videos are available under the past Events tab on the Close To My Heart (Official) Facebook page.
For the rest of the month, we’re keeping the party going with the gorgeous Hope & Kindness collection! This beautiful suite is designed with concepts of inspiration, self-affirmation, beauty, and growth at its core, and encourages you to find the best qualities in yourself and the people closest to you. We can’t wait to show it off, and today, we’re going to take you on a behind the scenes tour of all this wonderful collection has to offer!
At the heart of the suite is the exclusive paper packet, which features three full sheets of cut-apart sentiments, pattern sections, and icons. Not only do these patterned papers make crafting a joy, but the inspirational quotes included in the papers help to remind us to look for the best and have patience with ourselves as we continue to grow.
These papers are accompanied by a selection of coordinating stickers and kraft paper die-cuts that complement the paper packet perfectly and make the ideal finishing touches to treasured scrapbook pages and heartfelt cards.
Another stand-out feature of this collection is the coordinating cardstock pack. This cardstock pack includes 12 sheets with printed texture patterns on one side of each page, allowing for variation not only in the colors used but in textures as well!
Rounding out the Hope & Kindness product suite is the Hope & Kindness stamp set, Thin Cuts metal dies, and the Fancy Doilies Thin Cuts dies. These elements are coordinated perfectly with the papers, stickers, and die-cuts, but can also be used in other projects for years to come!
Along with the amazing new products available through the Hope & Kindness special, we’ve also designed three incredible workshop kits so crafters of all types can enjoy working with Hope & Kindness!
For our memory keepers, we’ve got a beautiful scrapbooking workshop kit, which includes all the exclusive papers you’ll need to create six coordinating 12″ x 12″ two-page layouts! Just imagine how spectacular your favorite photos will look incorporated into these pages!
Cardmakers can look forward to loads of crafting fun with the Hope & Kindness Cardmaking Workshop Kit! This kit includes materials to create 16 standard size cards (2 each of 8 designs).
With so many fun designs to choose from, you can easily create cards that are great for all types of occasions—birthdays, sympathy, expressions of thanks, or just because!
Last but not least, we’re thrilled to show off our Hope & Kindness Album Workshop Kit, which allows crafters to create an entire 6″ x 8″ mini album in one sitting! Many of the pages in this album incorporate Flip Flaps™ to accommodate even more photos and adds a fun, interactive element!
With so much fun in store with Hope & Kindness, it’s going to be an unforgettable National Scrapbooking Month! We can’t wait to celebrate all month long with this amazing collection and we’re looking forward to seeing all the awesome artwork you’ll create! What are you most excited to make with Hope & Kindness? Tell us about it in the comments below!
As you can imagine, so much goes into putting together these catalogs, especially the artwork that is designed and created from the featured products. Nearly every page displays a beautiful scrapbook layout or set of cards offering more than meets the eye at a quick glance.
Today we’re taking a deep dive into the scrapbook page on the cover of the May–June catalog and closely examining some of the elements and techniques that were used to bring it all together.
One of the first things you will notice on this page is the background. We’ve talked about repeating shapes to create a background before, in Creating an Intricate Scrapbook Page Is Easier than You Think! In that previous post, we mentioned that replicating one shape is not only a quick way to create a background but it’s also a great way to incorporate many different patterns and colors, so you can use as many of your favorite pattern paper designs without having to choose! (There are just so many pretty papers!)
In this case, a background made up of squares is a little extra special. Because the base page is also a square (12″ x 12″), we are repeating the shape again by filling it with the smaller 1⅞” squares. Even though it is the same shape, this approach is not only visually satisfying but visually exciting, as well, because the recurrence is with a variety of patterned papers and colors.
Can you find any other ways that we’ve used squares on this page?
If you said stitching, then you are right! When creating your art, consider lines, patterns, and shapes, as well as mixing media. A few stitched lines can quickly elevate a scrapbook page or card. If you’re not good with a sewing machine, you can easily draw “stitch” lines with a pen! (The number of rows and columns of background squares is also squared, 5 by 5!)
To create additional interest in our repetitive background, we also distressed our papers. Paper distressing happens when you alter the color or texture of the paper to produce a similar effect to it having been weathered by exposure to the elements over time. This real, authentic distressing (versus faux) is very popular and trendy, especially paired with the gorgeous patterns and colors from our Hope & Kindness collection. An easy way to distress the edges of your papers is running one blade of your scissors along the edges until the desired effect is achieved.
Now that we’ve got our background covered, let’s jump up to the next layer, and that’s the cluster of stickers and die-cuts we created for our photo. We know that the star of a good scrapbook layout is the story that it tells, whether it’s through photos, journaling, or a combination of both. For our already busy page, we needed to create a space that would draw and center our focus. This space is where we eventually want the photo and story.
Not wanting to cover up too much of the gorgeous background we created, we knew that we had to place our photo somewhere off-center, so we chose the bottom right. (We’ve been trained for things to resolve in the bottom and to the right, so if you’re ever in doubt, go for the bottom right!)
To begin creating the visual pull, we clustered several stickers and die-cuts just to the left of that space. Even though it may not look intentional, the way we placed and chose the pieces were very much so. For example, notice that we used three chipboard die-cut leaf stems. If you remember this simple rule when it comes to embellishments, you’re already ahead of the game: using an odd number of elements creates more dynamic art. This is known as the rule of odds.
Also, as you create a cluster of embellishments, keep it interesting by incorporating different sizes, shapes, and materials. Add even more interest to the grouping by popping a few of these elements off the page with some foam tape. If you look closely, you can see that in our cluster we only used foam tape on the left side of the stickers, creating another visual arrow towards where the photo will be with a downward slope.
Lastly, let’s quickly discuss the photo. Our cluster was ready, but our photo needed something more before it could be attached to the page. That “something more” was a photo mat. The purpose of the photo mat on a layout like this is to provide your eyes with a place to rest once they’ve arrived to where we’ve been pointing towards all along. That is why the mat on this photo is a solid-colored cardstock rather than patterned paper. It provides your eyes with a visual break from all of the excitement happening on the rest of the page.
You may have noticed that we also layered an additional White Daisy cardstock mat between the photo and the Papaya cardstock. This extra layer created the small white border that highlights our destination even more. White was a good choice because it’s a neutral bright color that is in the photo and in several of the patterns of the papers and stickers.
When you’re looking through any of our catalogs, we hope that you will discover lots of new concepts and ideas illustrated in the featured art. Taking a good look at the provided artwork examples is bound to reveal creative techniques or unique approaches to using a product. When you see a piece that stands out to you, flag it to return to later when you are ready to try it out for yourself. Our catalogs are so much more than product brochures, and we hope that you’ll use them as the full resource that they are and can be!
It’s that time of year to show some extra love to the art of memory keeping! There’s nothing quite like seeing all your favorite memories come together in a one-of-a-kind scrapbook display! By creating scrapbook pages and crafts to help us remember these precious stories, we’re not just memory keepers—we’re memory makers, too!
With National Scrapbooking Day right around the corner, we’re excited to make some new crafting memories this year! While National Scrapbooking Day is primarily about celebrating our love of memory keeping, festivities don’t have to be restricted only to scrapbooking; today, we’re going to give you an insider’s look at two 12″ x 12″ scrapbookingworkshops, a mini album workshop, and two cardmakingworkshops that we’re offering to help you celebrate this crafting holiday! In conjunction with these workshops, we’ll also be hosting a special 2-day virtual crafting event; keep reading for more details!
All of the workshops we’ll be showing you today are available through our National Scrapbooking Day Celebration special, but the designs featured in each kit can easily be adapted into other projects and most of them include an exclusive stamp set, enabling you to craft with them for years to come! (Click here to view each of these workshop kits.) Let’s dive in!
First on our list is the Circles and Patterns Scrapbooking Workshop Kit! This fun and fresh workshop incorporates paper cutting and piecing techniques into its design and provides a gorgeous backdrop for all kinds of photos and memories.
Delicate floral designs from the In Full Bloom collection add to the beauty of this workshop, making for some truly unforgettable memory keeping.
Next up, we have an adorable food-themed cardmaking kit, A Toast to You! With food puns for days, this card kit is sure to bring joy to both the crafter and the card recipients!
In addition to the exclusive My Acrylix® A Toast to You stamp set, this kit includes a selection of patterned papers from the Smarty Pants collection in our 2021–2022 Core Products catalog. (To view this gorgeous catalog in its entirety, click here!)
The Smarty Pants collection provides some additional whimsy to accompany the stamp set and turns the A Toast to You Cardmaking Workshop into an all-around smorgasbord of crafting delights!
Keeping things going on our cardmaking kick, we continue our National Scrapbooking Day celebration with the Many Wishes Cardmaking Workshop! This elegant workshop incorporates the use of stencils and includes two exclusive floral patterns.
These beautiful stencils allow you to create gorgeous flower patterns on your cards in whatever colors you choose. The workshop also features some innovative inking techniques that will have you finding new ways to add color to your artwork.
With this option to customize your cards with various flower colors, you can create your very own card garden! (For more fun ideas about how to use stencils in your artwork, check out this blog post from a few months ago!)
Moving right along with our workshop wonders, we’ve got the Good Vibes Scrapbooking Workshop. This kit includes the option to create additional 6″ x 12″ Flip Flaps™ to accompany the two 12″ x 12″ scrapbooking layouts! Incorporating Flip Flaps™ into your scrapbooking layouts is an excellent way to maximize your storytelling capabilities by creating space for more photos and journaling.
With these coordinating 6″ x 12″ Flip Flaps™, which practically constitute an entire extra page, the Good Vibes Scrapbooking Workshop Kit is perfect for crafters looking to perpetuate the memories of good times with family and friends!
Rounding out our National Scrapbooking Day celebrations is the adorable Little Penguins Album Workshop! This 6″ x 6″ album features its own stamp set with a too-cute waddle of penguins! Designed to capture everyday memories made with loved ones, this album kit features our May–June Mix-in Paper Packet and is full of fun patterns and colors.
From the sweet penguins to these eye-catching pattern and color elements, the Little Penguins Album kit is a delight to make and a treat to look through time and again!
With so much to love about this year’s National Scrapbooking Day, it’s sure to be an unforgettable celebration and we can’t wait to craft with you! One of the best things about crafting is being able to do it with friends and people you love. In the spirit of crafting and connection, we will be hosting a 2-day virtual crafting event on May 6–7 on the Close To My Heart Facebook page! Along with this opportunity to come and craft together, we’ll also be offering some exciting giveaways for attendees. Ask your Close To My Heart Maker for more details about how you can join us for this celebratory event! We can’t wait to see you there!
Which workshop kit are you most excited to craft with? Let us know in the comments below!
Did you know that all of our cardmaking workshops include at least one papercrafting technique? Before committing to purchasing any of our workshop kits, you can see what the featured technique in the workshop is right on our website, in the product’s description:
All of our workshop guides are also downloadable, from that very same product page, no purchase necessary!
At the top of each cardmaking workshop guide, you will find the technique featured in the workshop’s artwork. For example, the In Full Bloom cardmaking workshop features second- and third-generation stamping.
As you dive into the guides a bit further, you will find that the featured techniques are spelled out in clear and simple terms to make the crafting experience as user friendly as possible, for even the newest of crafters!
So, what is “generational stamping?” For starters, it is a simple technique to master, and one that can easily elevate your artwork when you use it creatively. (Yay! 😄)
A first-generation image is achieved with basic stamping. You ink the stamp and then stamp it on your project. A second-generation image is what you get when you stamp that same image again, using the same stamp but without re-inking it in between uses. A third-generation image, as you have probably figured out, is the resulting image of when you stamp a third time with that same stamp, without re-inking. Every generational image is a lighter version of the previous version because you are stamping with less ink each time.
If you want to use a second or third generation image on a project but not a first, then simply stamp the first image on a scratch piece of paper and then stamp on your project.
The butterfly in the card above was stamped using this generational stamping technique and then colored in with a marker, using a little less color with every later generation.
If you want to recreate this card and others like it, make sure to check out our In Full Bloom cardmaking workshop kit that includes the beautiful exclusive stamp set shown above and a coordinating set of Thin Cuts (not shown). This kit has sold out before and will likely do so again, so do not hesitate to get it while supplies last!
Note: If the In Full Bloom cardmaking workshop kit does sell out before you get a chance to recreate this card, you have other options! Visit our website to see other beautiful butterfly stamp sets in our collection, as well as additional cardmaking workshopsthat we have available, along with their featured techniques!
With Easter right around the corner, it’s time for some of our favorite springtime traditions! From egg decoration and hunts to leaving out a basket for the bunny and spending treasured time with family and friends, it’s a perfect time to get crafting and preserve those delightful memories when they come along.
Today, we’ve got some fantastic Easter-themed cards and a two-page 8½” x 11″ scrapbook layout to help you get your creative wheels turning as you think of ways to spread your Easter joy and commemorate your sweet experiences during this beautiful time of year. Let’s dive in!
For all our card makers out there, it’s a prime time to make gorgeous cards for the dear ones in your life. Our selection of adorable stamp + Thin Cuts designed specifically for your Easter crafting needs ranges from celebratory religious sentiments to fun bunnies, eggs, flowers, and birds.
The Easter season can also be an ideal time to express your love for those around you with a heartfelt scrapbook layout. To maximize both your time and stories, consider creating 8½” x 11″ pages to record your special Easter memories. Creating a smaller layout like this one can be a great way to ensure that your stories are told without cutting into time spent with loved ones.
As you can see here, a layout doesn’t have to be intricate or over the top to provide a memorable backdrop for your favorite photos and stories. layout requires relatively few steps when it comes to cutting, stamping, and embellishing.
For instance, the border and background pattern seen here can be created in minutes with just a few pen strokes and some quick tone-on-tone stamping. These elements come together to create a finished look while saving you time and effort.
Looking for something a bit more challenging to stretch your creative abilities? Consider creating a fun title accent like this one, using a sponge dauber and a few of your favorite ink pads to selectively apply color to your stamp, resulting in a multi–hued single stamp image! You can then add more color and shading as desired using watercolor pencils.
With a wealth of creative possibilities available for Easter crafts, we hope you’ll find these tips and techniques helpful as you celebrate this wonderful time of year!
What Easter traditions do you celebrate, and how would you scrapbook them? Leave a comment below to let us know!
Have you met our color of the year, Wild Berry? We are celebrating this beautiful, pink hue even further this month with a special collection of exclusive products and having a Wild Berry Blast!
Join us in this celebration of color with a free downloadable scrapbook pattern, complete with cutting diagrams and all!
Making its original debut with the Zoe Workshops On the Go®, we have here paired this timeless 12″ x 12″ pattern with the gorgeous Wild Berry Blast collection!
Every year, we introduce one special color to our exclusive color palette that is especially trendy and make it available in a variety of products, but only for one year. We have been enjoying crafting with Wild Berry so much that we decided to make even more specialty products!
From the Wild Berry Blast paper packet, featuring six sheets of patterned paper in a variety of fun designs, to the coordinating cardstock, which includes six standard two-toned cardstock sheets in this delicious shade and six additional sheets with single-sided foil or UV-coated designs, there are so many fun new ways to include Wild Berry in your projects!
Also part of this Wild Berry Blast celebration are an exclusive set of die-cuts—all in Wild Berry of course!—and a stamp set full of borders and sunburst-like designs.
Along with providing products that you will consume and not just collect (it’s hard cutting into the pretty paper sometimes, we get it!), we also pride ourselves in being the “let me show you how®” memory-keeping company, and in providing the most comprehensive scrapbooking and cardmaking patterns. When you download the Zoe scrapbooking pattern, you will find that it also comes with cutting diagrams, making it even easier to create these pages from any of your favorite papers and embellishments, not just what we are showing you here. All of our patterns lend themselves to preserving your special memories your way.
We’re also offering limited time discounts on existing Wild Berry items, such as cardstock, glitter paper, ribbon, shimmer trim, and more! These exclusive items and special savings are only available through April 30, so you’ll want to be sure to snap up these deals before they are gone!
For even more scrapbooking patterns, check out our Make it from Your Heart™pattern book series. If you love the free patterns on this blog, you’re sure to be blown away by all the patterns and beautiful examples offered in our how-to books!
Whenever you’re celebrating something special, there are always a multitude of stories and memories to capture. Today, we’ll be showing off a quick and easy approach to birthday memory keeping that shows a unique way to include more memories into just a couple of pages using pocket scrapbooking!
If you’re not familiar with pocket scrapbooking, it’s a memory keeping technique that focuses on bringing a variety of small elements together into a cohesive collage. With a traditional scrapbooking page, it can be difficult to find a way to include all the photos and journaling sections that belong to the story you’re telling without the page becoming busy or overcrowded. With pocket scrapbooking, however, this problem can be eliminated as the collage effect allows for a large quantity of photos, journaling, and artistic elements.
One of our favorite things to include in pocket scrapbooking layouts are Picture My Life™ Cards. These 3″ x 4″ and 4″ x 6″ cards are created along with the exclusive paper collections available in our catalogs. (Check out our current paper collections in the March–April catalog here!) Because the cards are designed in conjunction with these collections using colors from our exclusive color palette, it’s a breeze to mix them with other products from the collection to create coordinated and polished artwork.
When crafting with Picture My Life™ Cards, you can save time, paper, and fuss, all while creating something truly unique to you. To demonstrate how easy it can be to create a pocket scrapbooking layout of your own, we’ve put together an instructional video featuring one of our Home Office employees and veteran crafter, Kristina Livingstone. In this video, you can learn and craft along with Kristina as she creates a fun 2-page pocket scrapbooking layout! Enjoy!
As memory keepers, we adore any chance we get to explore new techniques and methods to preserve our best-loved stories, and the pocket scrapbooking technique is one of our favorites! What stories would you tell using this method? Let us know in the comments below!
We’re at it again! In just a few weeks we’ll be hosting our next virtual Album Retreat!
At Album Retreat, members of our Home Office team go through the step-by-step process of creating the layouts for an entire scrapbook album! That’s 11 two-page 12″ x 12″ layouts, a total of 22 pages, over the course of three days!
To give you a small preview of what you can expect, we’ve asked our Creative Arts Manager, Karen Pedersen, to share one of the retreat’s techniques and show us how to create the colorful background of this layouts that we will be making.
As you can see, we’re painting with ink, and so much more!
To participate in this event, simply purchase the April 2022 Album Retreat Bundle—there is no separate registration fee! As we get closer to the event, we will email everyone who purchased the bundle with an invitation to join a private Facebook group where the event will be hosted. We anticipate the event will run from 2:00 pm–8:30 pm (MDT), all three days (April 20–22). The last day to order the retreat bundle is April 2; we will begin shipping ordered bundles shortly after that date.
Get a closer look at April’s Album Retreat artwork by clicking on the individual thumbnails below. Treat yourself and join us for a few days of creativity you surely won’t want to miss! We look forward to creating with you!
