Some Creative Ideas Before The Year Ends

With Close To My Heart's new catalog coming to you all soon, I am sure you can imagine how excited I am to bring you all new, fresh ideas, and awesome new product as well. January brings us "Inspirations" which is filled with some fun new things. "Wings" is the paper being offered in January and, my goodness, is it pretty. There are some fun stamp sets as well and some great new embellishments.

So now that the fun of the holidays is behind us and I can take a deep breath, I started to dabble a little in some simple tricks to help add a little "something" to my scrapbook pages. They really are very simple and easy to do. So I will offer you all a new tip/trick each day up until the 1st if the new year. I hope these will help you with your scrap projects.



Pictured above is a page I completed in no time at all. This is the "Wings" paper. It is wonderful and it features something that I happen to love, the butterfly. One of the things that butterflies symbolize is change. Being a mom of three daughters, I sometimes feel like I am raising butterflies. They start of as caterpillars and you raise them into cocoons...then when they are ready to use all you have taught them in life, they fly off as butterflies. Another reason why butterflies are so special to me at this moment is that I have my youngest daughter receiving her First Holy Communion in May 2011. She recently received the gift of grace and it was symbolized by a butterfly. So this will be the paper that I scrap all of her Communion memories with.

Pictured here, I took one of the pieces of B&T Duo from a level 2 paper pack (Wings). I noticed that one of the images on the patterned paper was a butterfly. On this specific sheet that I picked, the images are muted. So I wanted to bring out that image a little more. I took a butterfly stamp (from CTMH Picture This stamp set that I received from the 2010 convention) and stamped a handful of them scattered around the patterned paper with Versa Mark. I went ahead and embossed the paper using Cocoa embossing powder. Now the butterflies seem to be popping out of the page.


The last thing I did was add a simple paper flower using two different patterns of B&T cut into 1 1/4" circles. So you can do this too. You can bring any pattern to life by adding stamped images to the paper. If you emboss, it adds some shine and a little texture to the paper. Something so simple can add some fun to any page.