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!
Can you believe that we are already halfway through March? That means that there’s still another half left, and we plan on wrapping it up in Close To My Heart style with a celebratory giveaway!
What are we celebrating? (Do we have to have a reason? 😉) One of our most dear relations has a birthday coming up in the next couple of weeks, and this simply cannot go without notice! We are talking of none other than the heart of Close To My Heart, Founder and CEO Jeanette Lynton!
Please join us in celebrating this inspiring pillar of our creative community by leaving her a birthday message in our comments, below. Jeanette loves this company and all of us who comprise it with all of her heart! If you’re one of our readers who’s been fortunate enough to meet her, you know that this is true. ❤️
To get the party started, we are giving away the Cake Day stamp and Thin Cuts sets! Not only are these two sets ideal for a variety of artwork projects celebrating birthdays and other occasions, but they both feature a variety of fun, stacking images that are easy to achieve and customize thanks to the versatility of stamping!
CAKE DAY—CARDMAKING STAMP + THIN CUTS
(The highlighted shapes are what the included coordinating Thin Cuts are designed to cut with your favorite die-cutting machine.)
CAKE DAY—SCRAPBOOKING STAMP + THIN CUTS
Let’s take a closer look at how some of the different layers of this stamp set build on each other. For the presents, you have three different shapes to choose from, and you can add details to each of them with bows, wrapping paper designs, or both!
This little triangle is especially versatile because you can mix and match the different stripe patterns with each other, or stamp either stripe pattern on a solid stamped triangle to create a variety of colorful pennants for a banner.
Turn a pennant upside down and stamp one of the two included accents on top and you have a party hat!
We are giving away a total of five stamp + Thin Cuts sets, winners’ choice! If you’re one of our winners, let us know which set you prefer, the Cake Day—Cardmaking or Cake Day—Scrapbooking stamp + Thin Cuts!
To qualify for the drawing, it’s the easy two-step entry it always is. First, make sure you are subscribed! (So many leave comments and are not subscribed—we look!) If you are not subscribed, simply click on the blue “Subscribe to list” button found on the sidebar, if you’re on a computer, or at the very bottom of this post, if you’re on a phone or tablet. Second, and this is a must and just as important, if not more so, leave a birthday message for Jeanette in our comments section below. That’s it! All entries must be submitted by 5 pm, March 28, MDT (that’s 10:00 am 29 March, AEDT for our Aussie friends.) Winners will be notified via the e-mail address connected to their subscriptions.
Be sure to also check out Facebook and Instagram feeds for even MORE Cake Day giveaway opportunities that we will be running there in honor of Jeanette’s birthday month!
All of you that are part of our crafting community, you mean so much to us and especially to Jeanette. We are grateful for the years of friendship we’ve all shared and the many years of friendship to come. We love celebrating our relationship every opportunity we get! Today, please join us in celebrating Jeanette and leave her a birthday message below! Happy birthday Jeanette!!
When March rolls around, it’s party time at Close To My Heart! Not only is it our Founder and CEO Jeanette Lynton’s birthday month, it’s also a time to celebrate all the things you love about crafting! Today, we’ll be taking you on a step-by-step journey through the process of creating an adorable celebratory card and a handful of festive badge decorations to help you get into party mode!
If the artwork we’re showing off today looks familiar, that’s because it is featured on the cover of our new March–April catalog, which we just released! This artwork is geared toward a birthday celebration, but you can easily switch out sentiments and embellishments to suit a variety of occasions. We’ll be looking at two party crafting essentials: cards and décor!
When creating a birthday card, a standout design is key for creating a fun and memorable card! For this Happy Birthday Cake card, we used papers and coordinating colors from the new Cake Day collection.
A prominent feature of this design is the diagonal slit through the center of the card. This slit is only 1/8″ wide, but it makes a big impression! To achieve this look, you’ll want to first apply any detailing to the top piece of paper, like we’ve done with the stamped details and colorful splatters shown here. Then, you cut the piece diagonally from the top-left to the bottom-right corner.
Once the cut has been made, take each piece of paper, and along the cut line you just made, slice off half the width of the slit. Because we created this card with a 1/8″ slit, we cut off 1/16″ from each individual piece after the initial diagonal cut has been made. If the thought of cutting a 1/16″ strip makes you break into a sweat, consider recreating this look using a wider slit in the middle.
The thing that makes the slit work is choosing a fun paper to peek through it! For our card, we used Wild Berry Glitter paper and cut it to not only peep through the slit but also to provide a nice border around the top piece.
After selecting our papers, we created an embellishment cluster to place at the center of the card, comprised of a Cricut®-cut circle, a few stickers from the Cake Day sticker selection, some Gold Embellishing Thread, and a “Happy Birthday” sentiment and balloon die-cuts from the Cake Day—Cardmaking Stamp + Thin Cuts set.
Finishing up with a few Primary Sprinkles and Bitty Sparkles, this vibrant birthday card is sure to be an unforgettable part of any birthday celebration!
For the décor part of our art feature today, we’ll be going through the creation process for a selection of party badges that are sure to be a hit anywhere! For these badges, we’ve provided a downloadable Cricut Design Space™ file, which uses some basic element shapes to construct a few of these badges.
These badges feature patterned papers from the Cake Day paper collection as well as some of the coordinating cardstock colors. You can easily customize these badges by choosing a paper collection or cardstock colors that fit the theme of whatever you are celebrating. Cardstock is a great option for this kind of project because of how versatile it makes the final piece—and now is a great time to stock up on cardstock because our exclusive cardstock is on sale all month long during our Cardstock Carnival! Talk about reasons to celebrate!
You’ll need to attach a scoring tool to your machine to achieve the final, pleated look for the badge bases. Once you’ve cut all the pieces, gently remove them from your Cricut® mat to avoid tearing, and fold accordion-style along the scored lines. Create the badge shape by compressing the piece, holding the center section, and gathering the accordion fold into a circle shape. Secure the center of the circle and both ends with adhesive.
Once you’ve secured the ends and center of your badge base, you can attach any other embellishment pieces, like the dovetailed ribbon pieces on the “Party” and “Cake Time”, sentiments or stickers. You can even stack smaller pleated badge pieces on larger ones, like you see on the “Cake Time” and Wild Berry bow badges. Because these badges require relatively few process steps, it’s easy to cut and construct several at once, making them a project that not only is fun and simple to create, but is sure to wow wherever it’s used!
Don’t have a Cricut® machine? No problem! These badges can also be made by hand by using a hand-held scoring tool. (In fact, four of the seven badges shown below were created using this method!)
To create badges by hand, cut a piece of paper with a width of half the desired diameter of your finished badges (e.g. For a 2″ finished badge, trim paper to a width of 1″). Once you’ve cut your paper to the desired width, you can either use a scoring attachment with a paper cutter, or you can use a papercrafting tool and a ruler to create your own score lines by hand. We’ve created our score lines 1/4″ apart, but you can use different measurements for larger or smaller pleats.
From there, you simply fold your paper accordion-style along the scored lines, compress the piece, holding the center section, gather the accordion fold into a circle shape, and secure the center of the circle and both ends with adhesive. Once you’ve constructed your badge, add a few embellishments, and you’re left with a beautiful, handmade decor piece!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this artwork showcase featuring some of our newest items from the new March–April catalog. Click here to view the catalog and all the exciting new products available through March and April. Happy March, and happy crafting!
