Our new Annual Inspirations catalog goes live August 1, and we can’t wait to show you all the exciting things we’ve been working on for the past year. In fact, we’re SO excited that we’re going to give you a sneak peek at one of our favorite new products—another installment of our Make It from Your Heart™ pattern book series (and the crowd goes wild)!
Volume 3 of Make It from Your Heart is a real game changer. Why? Well for starters, it comes as a collection of loose, 3-ring hole-punched pages that fit inside any of our Everyday Life™ mini albums. You can rearrange or pull out pages anytime you want. Just think: you could pull out the page you need for an upcoming crop and insert it into your Everyday Life™ planner next to the day of the crop. How awesome is that? 🙂
Also, this pattern book features 36 two-page layout patterns that use standard photos sizes (no trimming down photos over here, folks!). The layouts are organized by how many photos they use, so if you are looking for a layout that uses four photos, you can simply turn to that section and look at all your options.
We also have not one, but TWO pieces of artwork inspiration for each pattern! This is a great way to show off the creative potential of a single pattern, as you can in these examples:
Pattern 14
Pattern 26
In addition to these 36 patterns, this book features artwork inspiration that demonstrates how to incorporate additional photos into your layouts using our Pocket Plus™ Memory Protectors™…
…as well as our traditional pocket scrapbooking Memory Protectors.
This exciting new pattern book will be available to order beginning August 1 (which is in 12 days, but who’s counting?). And there’s no need to camp out in a long line in anticipation of the launch date because you can order this great new book on your Consultant’s website or closetomyheart.com as soon as it is made available (along with more new products)!
So get ready to snap up your own copy of Make It from Your Heart Volume 3. Gotta love scrapbooking made easy. 🙂
Every scrapbook album needs a front cover page and a back cover page…but sometimes it’s hard to know how to summarize your album! After all, you only have two pages, one at the front and one at the back, to explain what the entire album holds!
If cover pages have you stumped, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! 😉 Here are three fail-proof ideas for creating amazing cover pages!
In Great Shape
Attach a large shape to the center of your base page. Then position your title and photos over this shape. Even if you have multiple photos (we have five here!), your page will still feel like a cover page because the large shape in the background creates a central focus. Pretty neat trick, right? 🙂
Easy As 1-2-3!
Simply attach three photos horizontally across the center of your page. Then add your title directly above or below these photos. Three is the key here! It’s a balanced number that draws the eye in.
Keep It Simple, Silly!
When all else fails, find a photo that sums up your album, and center it on your page along with a prominent title.
One fun spin on this approach is to center your photo but then place the title on the left side of your page, either vertically or horizontally!
Overall, the secret to creating a strong cover page is to draw the eye in to a central point with your pictures and title. If you keep that in mind, then you’re off to a great start!
Since we’re in the memory-keeping business and it’s National Scrapbooking Month, we thought it would be fun to gather up a bunch of feel-good stories about lost memories (in the form of photos, letters, and videos) miraculously being returned to their owners. These stories are a great reminder of just how valuable our memories are—and how important it is to preserve them and keep them safe. Grab a few tissues, and enjoy! 🙂
1. Long-lost Letter and Photo from Dying Mom Found in Used Book
A used bookstore owner finds a letter and photo from a dying woman in an old book, and returns them to her daughter. Read more.
2. Family Finds Lost Wedding Photo at Salvation Army
A woman loses a priceless family wedding photo when her car is repossessed. Four years later, her daughter finds the photo at a Salvation Army. Read more.
3. Reporter Finds Old Family Album Discarded on Street and Returns to Relatives
A reporter finds an old family album discarded on a street in Brooklyn, New York. She traces the album back to the owner’s family, and in the process, uncovers a rich history of what it was like to be African American during the mid-1900s. Read more.
4. Mom Reunited with Lost Family VHS Tape
A 23-year-old purchases a VHS player at Goodwill and finds a VHS tape inside with footage of a little girl’s first steps, Halloween, and Christmas. He finds the owner through social media. Read more.
5. Man Finds Trunks of Photos and Documents Hidden in Home and Returns to Family
A man discovers a secret room in his old Michigan home with two steamer trunks of photos and documents. He returns the priceless memories to the family’s 70-year-old daughter. Read more.
6. Stranger Re-unites Family with Photo Album 20 Years Later
A man finds a family album under the seat of his second-hand armchair. After posting about it on Facebook, he finds the owners within 24 hours. Read more.
7. Photo Reveals Adopted Son Has Twin Sister
After learning he was adopted, an 18-year-old eventually stumbles across a photo from his birth mom depicting his siblings. This photo helps reunite him with his twin. Read more.
8. Woman Returns Photos to Families After Superstorm Sandy
A woman collects photos from the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and starts a Facebook group to return the photos to their owners. She’s now uploaded over 2,000 photos and helped over 60 families reconnect with their priceless photos. Read more.
9. Article Connects Homeless Man with Family Album
After publishing an article about a homeless street comic, a journalist receives an email from a stockbroker. He says the homeless man had worked on his home, prior to being let go for drug use on the premises, and left behind a family photo album. The journalist receives the album from the stockbroker and returns it to the homeless man. Read more.
10. Social Media Connects Man with Photo Lost in 9/11 Attacks
A professor posts a picture of a photo found at Ground Zero on social media year after year, hoping to find the owner. 13 years later, she connects with the man who had the photo sitting on his desk on the 77th floor of the World Trade Center. Read more.
Which story is your favorite? Tell us in the comments below! 🙂
At the heart of scrapbooking is the idea of preserving memories and telling stories in a meaningful way that will last. Scrapbooks are a great way to preserve your family’s history and be artistic at the same time.
Our Live Beautifully paper packet, which is only available this month as part of National Scrapbooking Month, features vintage-inspired designs that are perfect for heritage scrapbooking.
The beautiful flowers on this page were trimmed right out of one of the Live Beautifully papers. To really make them pop, we curled up the edges and attached them using 3-D foam tape. They look like they’re blooming right off the page!
This page also shows how the All About the Gold Fundamentals make a great companion to your Live Beautifully papers. They are 12″ x 12″ clear overlays with gold foil designs; on this page we used the diagonal stripes design. These overlays work really well with the gold foil accents featured in the Live Beautifully paper packet.
And while we’re talking about gold, let’s not overlook gold glitter paper! We used it to mat our photos here, and we love the results! Gold glitter paper looks really elegant with sepia or black and white photos. We finished the page off with some gold foil accents from the Springtime Complements, including the title.
Which additional products do you like to use with the Live Beautifully paper packet for your heritage scrapbooking? Tell us in the comments below!
This month is National Scrapbooking Month, and we want to take a moment to explain why memory keeping matters so deeply to us. In addition to the cathartic, empowering experience of creating something with your own two hands, scrapbooking allows you to fully preserve your memories: You can combine photos, stories, and mementos all in one place while creating artwork that is a reflection of you. These are the little things that represent your unique life, a life no one else lives or will ever live.
Did you know that it only takes three generations for your story to be lost? Think about it: Your children will remember some stories about you, and your grandchildren may remember a handful, but unless you have your memories preserved, you’ll be nothing more than a name, and maybe a face, to your great grandchildren and their posterity.
We now live in a generation consumed with sharing the present moment through channels like Facebook and Instagram, and even more short-lived forms like Insta stories and Snapchat. They’re an easy and fast way to share photos, which sounds great, right? However, if you were to look back at your social media accounts 40 years from now (assuming they still exist!) do they truly capture your story? Will your great grandchildren have access to these accounts, and if so, will what they see fully capture the legacy of your life?
The art of writing down our stories, printing our photos, saving our mementos, and storing everything in albums seems to be a dying art, but this is still the best way to preserve our memories. It gives you something tangible that can literally be handed down from generation to generation, something that can be experienced in person.
Also, your story isn’t the only one that can be lost. If no one else preserves your family’s stories, they will be lost as well. These are the stories of the people who mean the world to you, who fill your life with meaning and purpose.
We’re talking about the big stories here, the stories you yourself could never forget but others may not remember. When it comes to the small, beautiful, everyday moments, like the first word your child pronounces wrong or a kind act of service your spouse performs—these moments can be forgotten within months, weeks, even days unless you write them down, which is why we need to be diligent in our memory keeping. Time makes everything fade so fast.
Here is our plea to you, our readers. Please don’t let your stories be forgotten. When it comes down to it, it really doesn’t matter how exactly you preserve your memories, so long as you do it in a way that is meaningful to your posterity, easy for them to access, and will live far beyond your years.
It’s okay if you’re not a great scrapbooker. It’s okay if the pages you create aren’t perfect. It’s okay to stick to pocket scrapbooking or pre-cut kits because that’s all you have time for. We’ve got news for you, folks: There’s no “right” way to scrapbook! What really matters is that we all remember how important it is to preserve our stories and photos, and that we each do something about it before it’s too late.
If you are willing to pledge that your memories and the memories of your family won’t be forgotten, please sign your name in the comments below and share this post on Facebook. Make a goal to spend even 10 minutes a day preserving your memories, or maybe 30 minutes a week! Do whatever you can, just don’t let your story and the stories of your family be forgotten. Together, we can help others rediscover memory keeping and the true importance of it to future generations.
May is National Scrapbooking Month, and to celebrate, we’ve created a whole new Cut Above® layout kit to help you create not one, not two, but FIVE layouts!
It’s called Live Beautifully, and it is all about living a beautiful life, dreaming big, and inspiring others.
If you’re not familiar with our Cut Above layout kits, you get everything you need to assemble scrapbook layouts in one convenient kit: base pages, pre-cut pieces and die-cuts, stickers, and photo placeholders—all you need is adhesive and a journaling pen! Each of the five layouts in the Live Beautifully kit can be assembled in 15 minutes or less—they’re that easy!
Cut Above is the perfect solution for those who enjoy the art of scrapbooking but are looking for a quicker alternative. Even if you’re a die-hard decorative scrapbooker who loves to spend hours on a layout, this kit is a great way to catch up on documenting your stories without sacrificing quality.
Let’s take a closer look at the layouts this kit creates:
Gorgeous, right? You’d never guess these come together so quickly! The gold foil accents really add a special touch, and if you want, you can pop up pieces with 3-D foam tape to add dimension.
If you want to get this kit at a discount, buy the kit in a bundle with an album, adhesive, and journaling pen—that way you save 20% and you have everything you need to make and store your pages!
It’s one thing to understand the importance of memory keeping…and it’s another thing entirely to find time to make it happen. Here are some tips to help you out. 🙂
1. Write It in Your Planner
Just writing down a reminder will increase your chances of making it happen.
2. Do It with A Friend
You know how people talk about having a workout buddy to hold yourself accountable? Why not have a scrappin’ buddy? You can keep each other accountable and have fun along the way!
3. Attend a Monthly Crop, Workshop, or Club
Or…you can have a BUNCH of scrappin’ buddies! By committing to a regular crop, workshop, or club, you hold yourself accountable to make memory keeping happen. Plus, it’s nice to get out of the house and away from any distractions. 😉
4. Divide Up Tasks
Sometimes it’s hard to work on preserving your memories because it seems like such an overwhelming task, especially if you’re new to the game. Breaking it into manageable steps will make it much more approachable: For example, organize a box of photos today, start working on some layouts tomorrow, and attach the photos to your layouts next week. Baby steps are just fine, folks!
5. Commit to a Specific Amount of Time Each Day
Committing to 10, 20, or 30 minutes of memory keeping each day might be better suited for your lifestyle, so try it out! And remember, spending time sorting photos or cutting paper totally counts if that’s what step you need to do next—you don’t have to finish anything.
6. Scrap Early in the Morning or Late at Night
If your kiddos or spouse keep interrupting you whenever you sit down to start working, try working early in the morning or late at night for maximum productivity.
7. Make It a Habit
Whatever actions you’ve taken to implement other habits into your life, apply those same actions to memory keeping. Once it’s a habit, you’ll save time and energy just by having a rhythm. You won’t even have to think about it anymore.
8. Simplify Your Schedule
Sometimes making room for something in your life simply means cutting something else out. See if there’s anything of less value you can cut from your schedule to make way for memory keeping.
9. Look Into Quicker Options
The great thing about memory keeping nowadays is that there are a million different options for how to do it. Some of our favorite time-savers include pocket scrapbooking, our Pocket Plus™ Memory Protectors™ for adding more photos between your layouts, and our Cut Above™ layout kits, which come with pre-cut pieces for easy assembly. Even if you’re a die-hard decorative scrapbooker who loves those intricate frills—maybe even just on some layouts—there are lots of great products that make getting that fancy look take less time.
10. Set Goals
Setting goals is always a good idea when you need to motivate yourself to make time for something. Maybe you want to get that Christmas album done by the end of summer vacation, or maybe you want to finish organizing your 1995 photos by the end of the month—just having a specific goal in mind will make you more likely to take steps to reach that goal.
11. Replace Social Media Time
If we were to actually keep track of how much time we spend on Facebook, Pinterest (and Farmville and Candy Crush, etc., etc.), we’d probably be very surprised. Try replacing your social media time (or at least part of it) with memory keeping…we know you won’t regret it!
12. Scrap Whenever You Watch TV
Another great way to get something done is to pair it with an activity you enjoy. Make a commitment to work on preserving your memories anytime you sit down to watch TV.
13. Dedicate a Space to Memory Keeping
Productivity can often be improved just by dedicating a space for a certain task. Dedicate a space to memory keeping (ideally a place where you can leave projects you’re in the middle of), and decorate it with things that inspire you, like a vision board.
How do you find time for memory keeping? Tell us in the comments below.
In a day and age that makes taking and printing photos so easy, you would think that more and more parents would preserve these photos in books and scrapbooks. However, it seems that most photos nowadays don’t leave our computers or social media accounts—and at times, even our cameras!
The art of printing our family photos, writing down our stories, and placing them all together in the safe arms of an album seems to be a dying art—and it’s something that our kids are going to miss someday. When they want to see what they were like as babies and toddlers, the years they will remember very least, they will have nowhere to turn.
Here are 11 reasons why your children will want to have baby books:
1. They will know where to find photos of their childhood.
You may know where your favorite pictures of your babies are on your computer or on Facebook, but in 10 years will your kids know where to look? Not so much, unless they can grab their baby album off of the bookshelf.
2. A baby book is tangible evidence of your love.
When your kids go through the emotional highs and lows of the teenage years, the baby books you made for them will remind them—and you—that, despite what it might seem like at times, you love them with all your heart. 🙂
3. Your toddlers will love to look through their baby books.
Though you may think your kids won’t value their baby books until they are older, chances are they will actually love them as toddlers. Toddlers love to see pictures of themselves as babies; it’s part of a phase where they begin to discover their own identity. Also, baby books make some of the best bedtime stories!
4. They will love to look at their baby pictures when they have their own kids someday.
When your kids start to have kids of their own, it will be so much fun for them to look through their baby books and see how their traits and mannerisms were passed down to their own kids.
5. They will want to look through their siblings’ baby books.
Nothing bonds siblings together quite like looking through each other’s baby books. They will laugh at silly pictures of each other. And even though they may not have memories of their siblings because of age differences, they will get to see those memories through your eyes.
6. They will love to show relatives who come to visit their baby books.
Your in-laws or grandparents might live far away, but you can help them feel more connected to your children by showing them the baby books you’ve been working on when they are in town visiting—and once your kids are old enough, they will love to be the ones to pull out their baby books and talk your visitors through each page. 🙂
7. Life goes by lightning fast, and baby books make it easy to stroll down memory lane anytime they want.
Childhood flies by, so your kids will want to revisit their old memories. And if you’re a young mom, just trust us. You will want to revisit those baby pictures over and over again. Especially once puberty hits. 😉
8. You will forget the stories, even if you preserve the photos.
Though you may save all your photos in one way or another, the stories that go along with those photos will be lost unless you document them in a book. And moments from those sweet baby years are moments both you and your children will want to remember forever, even the small ones.
9. They will love to see your perspective.
You may think baby books are all about your babies, but they’re also a time capsule of you as a mom. As your babies grow into parents themselves, they will love to look back on your perspective as a new mother. Even seeing your handwriting will bring back good memories.
10. They will cherish their baby books more and more with time.
A baby book is something that increases in value with age. Just imagine how much that book will mean to your kids when they have grandkids and great grandkids! It’ll be a family treasure!
11. They will turn to their baby books in difficult times.
When life gets your kids down, they will turn to their baby books for comfort, to reminisce about the good old days, and to gain some perspective (though you may not see them doing this as teenagers because that would be so embarrassing! 🙂 )
Preserving memories is my life’s work. It’s at the heart of everything I do, from my own personal scrapbooking to the vision I have for this company. The milestones, the every day routines, the light in a child’s eye as they discover the world—these are the moments, stories, and images I seek to capture. And when I do, I carefully place them in scrapbook albums for safekeeping. Though they may just look like pretty paper and photos to someone else, they are my most prized possessions. The stories they tell are my personal history and the history of my family.
It is because of my passion for memory keeping that I’m excited to launch a new series of blog posts called “Stories from the Heart.” I want you, my readers and dear friends, to look through your old scrapbooks, find a page or layout with a story you want to tell, and then share that story with the world through our blog.
Stories from the Heart is a celebration of memory keeping, a reminder of why we do what we do, an opportunity to share the beautiful stories that fill our scrapbooks.
To launch this series, I want to share the story behind one of my favorite scrapbook layouts. 🙂
We were doing a photos shoot for the 1998 September & October edition of I Love Remembering, a magazine subscription we published back in the day.
The photo shoot was in western Utah (basically in the middle of the desert!), and we were taking pictures of my daughters, Aubrey and Rachel, in an abandoned pioneer schoolhouse. They had on these adorable matching outfits, including hand-stamped sweaters and backpacks, which were back-to-school crafting projects we’d be featuring in the magazine article.
The two photos on the right page of my scrapbook layout are some additional photos taken from this photo shoot. I loved all the pictures we took that day, and I wanted to preserve some of them in my own scrapbook.
The photo of the girls hugging absolutely melts my heart. It perfectly captures the love these sisters have for each other to this day. No matter how different they may be, they always have each other’s back.
In contrast to these professionally staged photos, the big photo on the left page was completely unplanned! It was a scorching hot day, and after wearing those hand-stamped sweaters, Aubrey and Rachel were melting like popsicles! They went to find some shade in the schoolhouse, and when they came back out, they had taken off their little sweaters, and this beautiful scene appeared: The rustic blue door, the sunflowers Rachel was still holding from the shoot, the sweet, tired looks on their faces—it was such a perfect moment, so I had to take a picture.
I think part of the reason I loved this shot was because it captured their cute little personalities. Rachael is staring at the camera head-on with confidence, holding the bouquet of flowers like a professional model. My sweet Aubrey is more shy and subdued, and you can see that in this photo by the way she is holding herself, legs turned in, arms tucked behind her back. She is my gentle, darling girl.
It’s still amazing to me how grown up they look in this photo. I remember being there and thinking, “I can already picture what they will look like as young women…my goodness.”
Those are the stories behind these scrapbook photos, and I hope you enjoyed hearing them. I know I loved going down memory lane as I remembered the stories of how these photos came to be.
I want to hear your stories now. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I want to hear your thousand words! Your stories are beautiful and deserve to be shared. Help me celebrate memory keeping—and help others realize the full value of this art—by submitting your stories to us. Read the bottom of this post to find out how.
Before I sign off, I just want to take a moment to thank you all for your friendship. One of the beautiful things about memory keeping is that it brings people together, and I’m so grateful for all the wonderful stories and memories I have with you.
Wishing you my love as you tell your stories,
Jeanette
If you would like a chance to share your story on our blog, here’s what you’ll need to do:
Find one scrapbook page or layout (please just one!) that you’d like to share.
Tell us the story behind the photo. What was happening? Who is in the photo? Is there something funny that happened before or after the photo was taken? Why is this photo meaningful to you?
Take a high-resolution photo of yourself (you can even be holding the pages or your entire scrapbook!).
Take a high-resolution photo of the layout or page on a flat surface (use natural lighting to improve the quality, and take the pages out of the protectors so they don’t reflect in the flash).
Email the photos and story to us at ctmhblog@closetomyheart.com with the subject “Stories from the Heart.” If we decide to share your story on the blog, we will contact you!
We can’t wait to start reading all your stories! 🙂
…as well as our traditional pocket scrapbooking Memory Protectors.
