We sure love our CEO and founder, Jeanette Lynton! As a pioneer in the stamping and papercrafting industry, she has put so much time and heart into helping others discover their creativity and preserve their memories. She truly is one-of-a-kind.
As many of you know, Jeanette’s birthday is in March. This year, we’d like your help in giving her a birthday surprise to remember! Handmade cards are a thoughtful way to show someone just how much they mean to you, so let’s show Jeanette some love with beautiful uniquely crafted cards! Here’s what to do:
1. Create a birthday card for Jeanette and snap a photo of it
2. Post it to Facebook and Instagram using the hashtags #closetomyheart and #happybirthdayjeanette
3. Tag us on Facebook (@closetomyheart) and on Instagram (@ctmhoffical). Please feel free to leave a message for Jeanette with the picture, if you’d like!
We will randomly select five people who have posted a card and give them a Let’s Eat Cake Stamp + Thin Cuts (shown below), as a prize for helping us out and celebrating with us! (Winners will be notified directly in the first week of April.)
At the end of the month, we’ll show Jeanette all the cards you’ve made by searching these tags and hashtags on social media. Beautiful artwork made by people she cares about so dearly will be sure to touch her heart!
We’ve gathered a few cards made with some of our current favorite stamps and dies for inspiration!
Then there’s these two sweet characters with their birthday celebration from the Let’s Eat Cake Stamp + Thin Cuts. (How cute are the bear and llama!) What’s especially fun about this stamp set is that the cake comes in separate pieces, so you can decide just how tall to make it! The full height of the cake is just the right size for a slimline card, while shorter cakes fit perfectly on a standard card.
Make sure to post your handmade cards by March 31, as outlined above! Thank you in advance for helping us celebrate the extraordinary life of one of the best people we know!
We are so excited to share this shaker birthday card with you! Not only does it use the new Round Balloon Thin Cuts, but, if you look closely, you can see that we shook things up with how we created the window!
Unlike the shaker cards we’ve shown you on this blog, so far, all of the shaker cards pictured in our new Core Products Catalog have the window mechanism built from behind a large framing project piece, rather than on top of it!
Let us show you what we mean!
If you recall, in May we shared how to recreate the shaker window on the Tutti Frutti: Here’s the Scoop scrapbook page. On that page, and up until then, we built a shaker window on top of a base and then attached it to the project.
On this birthday card, we are still building the shaker element separately and then attaching it to the art. However, the top “frame” that attaches to the acetate window is a larger piece of the final project, which helps to seamlessly integrate the shaker element into the artwork.
Another thing that we did differently with this card was to create the window’s shape using a die that is not specifically designed as a “shaker window” Thin Cuts. The round balloon, as you can see in this very same card, is part of a standalone Thin Cuts set that can be used to create paper balloon shaped accents and does not have to be used for creating windows. (How fun that it can be, though!!)
Let’s take a closer look at this card and assemble the front shaker part of it, together!
1. From the Seabrook cardstock, die cut the balloon and keep the resulting negative space portion to use on your card. (Keep the balloon, too, for another project!😉)
Tip: When you are cutting the balloon, remember which side of the cardstock you want facing up, toward the front. One side of the cardstock is the true Seabrook color, and the other side is a lighter tone of the color. On our card, we wanted to use the lighter side as the front and kept that in mind as we positioned our die.
Tip: We also wanted to use the lighter side of the Ballerina cardstock. Because a circle is a symmetrical shape no matter how you turn it, it didn’t really matter which way we cut it.
3. Flip the prepared Seabrook cardstock over and attach the circle acetate. Only use adhesive along the edges of the cut-out balloon shape on the cardstock.
4. Carefully pull the circle foam tape off the backing sheet it comes on and attach it to the perimeter of the acetate.
5. Add gems and hearts, or your choice of filling, to the center of the frame. Do not add too much, so there is enough room for movement once the shaker is complete.
6. Expose the adhesive on the top of the circle foam tape and attach the cardstock circle.
7. Attach the shaker window to your project!
As you can see on this project, the back of our window is light Ballerina and the cardstock that it was attached to is light Flamingo. We did this intentionally to make the window more visually interesting, especially since a few of the mini heart colors are on the darker side. With the lighter center, you can see all the pieces and nothing gets lost in the background.
If you do want your shaker window’s background to match the piece you are attaching it to on your project, you can simply skip the step of cutting out the backing circle and attach another part of your project to the shaker instead. This may be a little bit trickier, depending on what your project is. If it gets too complicated, just cut out a circle in the same patterned paper or cardstock color as the piece your shaker will be attached to on your project and use that to back your window before attaching it. No one will know!
This cute card is just one of the many shaker window cards pictured in our Core Products Catalog using this new approach for the window! We’ve collected them all for you below, along with their recipes, so you can continue to get inspired and shake things up!
