This month’s Close to my Heart Special is our  My Crush Books. I am excited about this promotion because I am going to get one for each of my grandchildren that are old enough to write. I think it is a great way for them to “document” their summer vacation. I might even offer a bi-weekly class for kids to help them do it. Hmmmm  Here is the promotion, I think I will go put that class together! I will also do a video series for kids across the country!  Keep your eyes out.

 During the month of June, when you purchase any My Crush® book and its accompanying assortment pictured in Annual Inspirations 2014–2015, you will receive the coordinating stamp set FREE! That is a savings of at least $9.95 USD / $10.95 CAD! Choose from five lovely My Crush book offerings that will provide a swoon-worthy background for your favorite memories. From family reunions to camping adventures to holiday countdowns—and much more—you will be crushing on all these books and the possibilities they provide. Every My Crush book features a hard cover with wire binding and cardstock-weight pages that are printed with eye-catching designs to form the perfect bases for your memory keeping. Additionally, each My Crush book also features unique details—from glossy print, to vellum pages, to gold foil, to ink-resistant patterns—that make displaying your personality easier than ever. Plus, once you add the artistry of the coordinating assortments featuring sticker sheets, envelopes, alphabets, cards, and journaling spots, along with your free stamp set, you will be well on your way to your own gorgeous mini book creation! This offer is only available while supplies last* and once they’re gone, these books are gone for good, so put your orders in early to get your summer romance rolling today!

Do you do digital scrapbooking? Myself, I am a hands all in kind of gal so I don’t do digital but Studio J has so much more to offer, even if you DON’T do your scrapbooking digitally. Today’s sketch is taken from Studio J and is so cute. I have to finish getting my pictures sorted so I can find my daughter’s pictures when she was growing up. The sketch can easily be converted to a male layout with a change in My Reflections Paper Pack.

Jackson from the Seasonal Expressions II catalog would look great for your little man and your big man too!  Here is the sketch as it appears on Studio J:

I will work on the same layout using the Jackson My Reflections Paper Pack to show you how it can be tailored to the men in your life.

Where do you get your scrapbook inspiration from? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May.

This is an important fact to remember as Memorial Day is also the traditional “beginning of summer” holiday.  Personally, I like to remember all those who have gone before me, not just the soldiers.  This is why I choose to scrapbook today and remember those fond stories of people that have passed.

Since it is Motivational Monday, I am still posting a sketch that I,too will try to complete this week. Submit your finished layout to be posted here and entered into the contest for this month. Just take a picture with your phone and send it to 801-597-4896 to enter.

I look forward to seeing your pages.

If you are like most scrapbookers and cardmakers I know, you HATE to waste, and you REALLY Hate to throw things away.  I was finishing up the layout for the sketch challenge yesterday and was staring at the sheet of unused letters on the page thinking “now will these be usable anymore?” after all, you only get so many letters, and it always seems to me that after you have make your first title with them, there is always a letter missing from what you want to do next.

Fast forward to just before bed, I pick up my tablet and take my turn at a couple of games of “Words with Friends” I have going with some very old friends.It is really good to feel a connection again after so many years. We were in Girl Scouts together, and good friends, even if we didn’t hang out all that much in high school, but the connection is kind of a warm fuzzy feeling… but then I am getting off the subject.  Sometimes I play with people that come up with words that I have never heard of and wonder if they are cheating and using a gaming program to unscramble letters (no, not you Kam). But it made me start thinking…. I have a sheet of half used letters on my table, and a program to make words from letters. Hmmm, Light bulb moment!!!

I put all the letters on my particular letter sheet into the program and now I have a list of words I can use on cards and scrapbook pages. Now granted, some would be a challenge to use, but others just might work!

I looked at three programs this morning as I googled for programs to make words from random letters.

The first one was called Word List Maker which is clearly for gamers since you can put in only 8 letters and you have the option for the “hook” or connecting letter for a game of scrabble or words.  Since I abhor cheating, I am not sharing the site with you, besides it limits the results for this purpose.

The 2nd one is called Word-grabber. and it will accommodate up to 15 letters and is not tied to any specific game model. Since the particular sheet of letters had only been used twice, I still had plenty of letters left so I just entered 15 of the letters, not using any duplicates. Out of these letters abdefhgijkltux came 40 pages of words!!  Who would have guessed that you could get  jubilated, fatigued, fixable or even fixated from this random set of letters!  If it could do this with just single letters, imagine what would happen if I threw in some more vowels!

The last one I tried was Wordsmith.org/anagrams/advanced.html.  This program would accept 25 letters.  So this time I entered all the vowels I had left, and some random letters to see what would happen. This one didn’t work so well, as it put all the letters in a very strange sentence. I think for now, I will have to stick to the Word Grabber.  Just think of the possibilities.

If you have any questions about this post or anything else, please leave a question for me below and I will get back to you asap!

Good Morning,

It is 5am and I am thinking it is time to start sharing sketches with you again. My hope is that I, too will complete a layout using the sketch and post it for all to see. I chose this sketch  because in my unsorted mess of pictures, a subject for another day, I believe I can find three related pictures to use. I also chose this sketch by L Eubank for it’s circles. In this month’s Stamp of the Month, Just Sayin‘ there are circles that will look great on this page and you could even use the stripe stamp or sayings in place of the strips in the sketch.   The more I look at it, the more I like the two together..

Take the challenge, and make the layout. Then take a picture with your phone and send it to 801-597-4896 so I can post it here. You will then be entered into a contest for a free stamp set.

Made from clear Acrylic, this Designer Decor Flip Stand Album Clear acrylic stand with rings for displaying photos up to 6½” × 5¾”. Stand has slot for inserting background image; instant photograph frames from the Cricut® Artbooking cartridge work great!  This stand would be helpful in so many ways, You can use it as a calendar with a page for each month, or perhaps a recipe card book, just flip to your favorite recipe and start cooking!  I have put these projects on my list, so watch for them in a future post. To order this Design Decor Flip Stand Album (Z1896) just click here.

If you have a comment or question or idea on a great way to use the Designer Decor Flip Stand Album, please leave a comment below.  If I need to chat about it, please give me a call at 801-597-4896.

I was first introduced to scrapbooking at a woman’s meeting at church, my daughter Karen was going and asked me to accompany her. If I knew then that I would be so involved with scrapbooking twelve years later would I still have gone? You bet!
Scrapbooking isn’t just creating pages with pretty papers, buttons and ribbon, scrapbooking is a social event too. After that first night, Karen and I found a local scrapbook store and joined in on their scrapbook night. It was $5 per person unless we spent a minimum of five dollars in the store, then it was free. This became a weekly event and my scrapbook stash began to grow. There were so many cute papers and little things called “embellishments” to put on pages it was easy to think, “oh I can use that for…”
I rarely go into a scrapbook store these days. Close to my Heart has made it so much easier to buy things that coordinate, and in much smaller portions. It used to be you bought an entire 100 count package of brads in the color you wanted to match your page, only to have the remainder sit in the drawer unused. That isn’t the case with the current selections Close to my Heart offers. This paper pack comes with the solid cardstock as well as the patterned paper to create a coordinated layout. There is also an offering of matching embellishments both flat and raised depending on your style.
Why am I sharing all this with you, that is easy, and if you have been scrapbooking a long time, you too might have this desire… USE UP THE OLD STUFF! So I am introducing a new meaning to “Throwback Thursdays” it now means create something from the older stash. This may mean re-learning how to do a technique or to use a particular product. You may also decide to start a box like I did for a local senior center or charity that helps battered women etc. Just don’t wait too long before delivering the cast offs to that place or you may find yourself second guessing your decisions.
Do you have a stash of older scrapbook supplies you want to use? Leave a comment below and tell me what kinds of things are in that stash and we can come up with ways to create something beautiful with them!

As I was looking to see what was happening on April 7th in years past. here is the first thing I see : April 7 is the 97th day of the year (98th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 268 days remaining until the end of the year.

I don’t know about you, but that was NOT information I really wanted to know. It means to me that I am 97 days past keeping New Year’s resolutions, and 261 days away from Christmas! Time is a funny thing. We all get the same amount, but some people seem to get so much more done with it than others. What do you do with your time? Have you thought about it, really thought about it? We do so much for others, from our significant other to our children, to bosses and friends. But how much do we take time to do something we truly enjoy? I love to craft, and once I get going, I am dynamite it is just the get going part I have trouble with.

Take today for instance. My plan was to get a week of twitter journaling posts done and scheduled, write a few blog posts, and do some crafting done. While I am not on track with the posts and tweets, I do have a craft project in mind. Come back later and see if I was able to accomplish this. In the meantime, sign up to follow me on Twitter so you can start digging a bit deeper into some journaling topics.

I would like to wish all of you a very Happy Easter. Whether your day is filled with eggs and candy, or religious observants, or both as we do in our home, I wanted to share good wishes to all of you. I will spend it with family, and since we finally live in a home big enough, I am cooking! What will you do today? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Creatively,
Carol

Spring is here and soon your kids (or grand kids in my case) will be gearing up for some fun baseball and softball games and you won’t want to miss any of it.  Prepare now by starting their sports scrapbook now with this layout from Close to my Heart’s Studio J Collection.

The left side is a great opening page for a sports album. You can put your child’s picture and team photo right here to show what this album is all about. I wish I had started when my boys were young, and while I have a few, not nearly enough. I did start a football album his freshman year at Crater High School in Central Point, Oregon – he hemmed and hawed about my not needing to do it, but it wasn’t long after when he his teammates would come by that he would grab the scrapbook to share or look up a score. Don’t wait until they are grown…and they grow so fast.

If you would rather do your album in digital form, Studio J by Close to my Heart is free to play with! You only pay if you are going to purchase the pictures of the layout and then put them in the album when you receive them.  Here is a link to the Studio J program. If you haven’t been there before, you will be asked to register. This is so if you only get part way through your album before you run out of time your layout is there waiting for you.

If you would like any additional information regarding Studio J Digital Scrapbooking or today’s layout, please leave me a comment below.

Whether you are a math whiz and love Pi or love the all-american apple pie (my personal favorite is Key Lime pie or anything with lemon) in celebration of Pi day, I am offering a 3.14% off any order placed today. I know 3.14% isn’t a big discount, I will also be including a free stamp set with each order placed. The size of the stamp set will depend on the size of your order. 🙂

My daughter-in-law baked this pie for a contest at work and won this apron!

Leave me a message below and tell me if you will be enjoying pie today and if so, what kind?

We have had some tutorials on Embossing, but I wanted to share with you a new twist on the standard embossing I thought you would enjoy.

Step 1 – Apply the Versamark ink liberally to the entire surface you wish to emboss, pressing it in and making sure the paper is saturated,

Step 2  – Pour on Clear Embossing Powder on to the paper, then shake off the excess.

Step 3 – Using your Craft Heater, begin heating the surface sections, removing the heat as soon as the powder begins to bubble up. For the best results move from corner to corner, allowing each section to cool as much as possible before going back and heating the adjacent section. If you overheat then you will get a standard emboss effect rather than the bubble emboss. Patience and focus helps make this effect a winner!

Have fun with this technique and if you have any questions, please leave them below in the comments box.  

As I was telling you yesterday, we hired a professional to paint the house and I couldn’t be more pleased with them! Five Star Painting out of Spanish Fork, Utah did an awesome job and even better, the company is nationwide so you can get a great paint job too!   Picking colors for our interior was fun. Gary and I started out picking up paint chip samples at Walmart so I could figure out some idea of what I wanted. Ok, truth be told, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted after watching so many episodes of “Property Brothers”.  The only problem with watching these types of shows, they make it look sooo easy!

Here are a few pictures to show you which way I went.  I determined where I wanted to go, then gave Gary a choice between a couple of colors. This way I got the color I wanted, and he could choose the actual color between the 2-3 I showed him. Now he can’t complain, he picked out the color!  I was determined to go with a soft grey inside. I KNEW I was done with Navajo White and all shades even close. Sorry if this is non politically correct but growing up in the 60-70’s that is what was used. Think of a beige with a brown undertone… at least that is how I remember it.

I wanted an accent wall in our bedroom for a pop of color and chose this one. I chose one with a bit more blue in it, but Gary really liked this one and it looks fabulous.

This is the Bold, outside my comfort zone bathroom. I LOVE IT!  This bathroom is the main floor bathroom and situated right next to the craft room, so I thought it deserved some dramatic color.  I can’t wait to incorporate some of the ideas I have see into this space.

So your turn, leave me a comment below and tell me what you think of my new color choices.