Sneak Peeks of our Spring/Summer 2014 Catalog...

Hey There! I am so pleased to be able to show you some sneak peeks of some of the *new products* coming in our 2014 Spring/Summer Idea Book & Catalog! It's a rare occasion for Customers and Consultants to be getting an early look at any future catalog products so I'm thrilled to be able to show you these now!

Avonlea

I mentioned earlier this week that Close To My Heart will be releasing our own version of this popular Multi-Pocket/Multi-Photo Scrapbooking system. Our new Picture My Life™ Scrapbooking Program is going to simplify your memory keeping while at the same time offer you some variety in your albums. If you still LOVE playing with paper and glue like I do, that's great, but if in addition to playing with paper and glue you want some help getting MORE done in less time...then I hope you'll consider letting me help you! 

As you will see, we are going to be offering cards from two of our previous paper collections, four from our current paper collections and we will have two more from our new paper collections in the upcoming catalog (not yet released...it's a surprise!)

What will be included in our Picture My Life™ Scrapbooking Program?

Each individual program features a unique 12 x 12 cover page, 122 double-sided, designed cards plus 10 unique Memory Protectors™ to hold creative combinations of these cards and your own photos. You get 44 – 4" × 6" cards (2 each of 22 designs) which come in 14 vertical and 8 horizontal designs. You also get 78 – 3" × 4" cards (3 each of 26 designs) which come in 10 vertical designs and 16 horizontal designs.

Babycakes

Chantilly

How is the Picture My Life™ scrapbooking program intended to be used?

The product was designed to fill the 10 included Memory Protectors™ following a guideline of 50% photos to 50% cards (which will give you several different card options leftover to give you choice as you create your custom layout.) However, it’s just a fun and versatile product—you can use it any way you wish! If you use a higher ratio of photos, you can purchase additional Memory Protectors™ separately (all styles sold separately as well as part of the scrapbooking program); you can mix and match cards from different programs, and you can absolutely mix Picture My Life™ with classic 12" × 12" layouts, including those from Workshops on the Go™ and coordinating My Reflections™ paper packets.

Later Sk8r

Who should be using this new Picture My Life™ scrapbooking program?

Anyone who wants to preserve and showcase their photos beautifully, but may not be as interested in creativity or hands-on crafting. This style of memory keeping will help young moms, teens, and those of you with limited time or creative aspirations to organize dozens of photos quickly, easily, and with fast journaling options. The product is intended to be affordable, fast, and "individual," meaning it does not require group/club/workshop time to complete or extensive instruction to understand. It is intentionally intuitive.

For those of you who love Workshops on the Go™, how-to patterns, and hands-on creativity, we strongly encourage you to continue on with this memory-keeping style that you know! You may wish to purchase Picture My Life™ as a way to EXTEND your hand-crafted layouts or Workshops on the Go™ projects. You might choose to scrapbook your favorite photos from an event, but then use Picture My Life™ for all the other photos from that event.

Laughing Lola

Surf's Up

So how are they different from Becky Higgins' Project Life? 

Well the most obvious answer to that is that we are working with the design elements from our paper collections! Our embellishments AND stamps will work hand in hand with the Picture My Life™ scrapbooking program. Our cards are printed on the same Background & Texture weight cardstock which is heavier than similar programs on the market. Our 12" X 12" cover page will give your albums a unique, finished look and our Memory Protectors™remain the same heavy-weight, durable material you’ve come to depend on to protect your photos—absolutely the industry standard!

How can I get one of these Picture My Life™ Scrapbooking Program's for FREE?

Join my Team!!! If you sign up between November 1 and December 15, 2013, and you submit qualifying minimum personal sales, you will receive one of your choice of the incredible new Picture My Life™ scrapbooking programs! You will also become the newest member of the Close To My Heart family!

Please message me if you have ANY questions about this new product line or about joining my team. Remember that 'you are usually your best customer' when considering becoming a Consultant and that you get a discount/commission every time you order for yourself or your friends and family!

Have a wonderful weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Classes, Retreats and Specials...Oh My!!!

So I have a feeling that I might be back! Grab your favourite beverage because this post is a little wordy! Only because I'm so supercalifragilistically EXCITED to share a couple Campaigns running with Close To My Heart right now!

The first is our Holiday from the Heart Gift Guide!

This mini-catalog is featuring some Exclusive, limited time product which is available right now until December 31st. There are several items in the catalog that have a 'star' and you can earn for FREE with each $100 in your order! I am currently playing with several of the goodies from this little catalog and let me tell you it's packed with goodness!!! I only 'earned' one free item and purchased the rest at regular price but as usual CTMH has some great value packed into this little guide! Contact me for your own copy or follow this LINK to see it for yourself right now online :)

The next exciting Campaign is for any of you that are thinking you'd like to Join My Team! Right now we are working on launching our next catalog (live to customers in February) but we are getting some inside information about what new products are in store! For those of you that have read a post or two of mine, you will know that I have embraced the Project Life philosophy for almost a year now. Both in the Becky Higgins style of recording a week in our life over a two page multi-pocket format AND in integrating my multi-pocket pages in amongst my regular/traditional scrapbooking pages. I have found that I am experiencing a great 'relief' in getting WAY MORE DONE and a fantastic feeling of satisfaction because more of my photos are in my albums!

So that being said, you can only imagine that I was out of my mind with excitement (cause scrappy things do that to me!!!) when I saw our newest promo highlighting our newest product release called 'Picture My Life™'. As you can see from the image above, we are going to be releasing 8 new Picture My Life™ scrapbooking programs. They will be featuring themes based on some of our most popular paper packets, plus two brand new paper packets. Each individual program features 122 double-sided, designed cards plus 10 unique Memory Protectors™ to hold creative combinations of these cards and your own photos. You get 44 – 4" × 6" cards (2 each of 22 designs) which come in 14 vertical and 8 horizontal designs. You also get 78 – 3" × 4" cards (3 each of 26 designs) which come in 10 vertical designs and 16 horizontal designs.

For me this means a couple things...I not only get to conitine to work in this multi-pocket, multi-photo format that I've grown to love and appreciate but I also get to offer it to my customers. My customers now have even more options and more benefits with CTMH and the quality of our products and compatibility of it all has just increased exponentially!

The papers in the Picture My Life™ scrapbooking program kits co-ordinate with our current paper packs AND stamps and embellishments. We will have the multi-pocket pages available to order separately in various styles and at competitive prices AND the best thing is they will be in the same awesome heavy duty quality that all of our current page protectors are made from!

Not only are we offering these new page protector styles, but we have also added protectors to work with the current Creative Memories pages and albums! We are aware of the turmoil and changes in the CM Company and with their current customers. We want to be able to offer some compatible products to those of you that LOVE the CM album system :)

This is what our future page protectors selection, available in our next catalog, is going to look like:

• Top Load (10 protectors with a 12" x 12" pocket and a gutter seam, $9.95)
• Top Load Value Pack (25 protectors with a 12" x 12" pocket and a gutter seam, $19.95)
• Side Load (10 protectors with a 12" x 12" pocket and a gutter seam, $9.95)
• Side Load Value Pack (25 protectors with a 12" x 12" pocket and a gutter seam, $19.95)
• Strap Side Load (25 protectors with a 12" x 12" pocket for strap binding, no gutter seam, $19.95)
• Design 1 (10 protectors – 6 vertical 6" × 4" pockets each, $9.95)
• Design 2 (10 protectors – 6 horizontal 4" × 6" pockets each, $9.95)
• Design 3 (10 protectors – 4 vertical 6" × 4" pockets & 4 horizontal 3" x 4" pockets each, $9.95)
• Design 4 (10 protectors – 4 horizontal 4" × 6" pockets & 4 vertical 4" × 3" pockets each, $9.95)
• Design 5 (10 protectors – 3 vertical 6" × 4" pockets & 6 horizontal 3" × 4" pockets each, $9.95)

So as you can see, in a couple months we will be able to help those of you that might not be scrapbookers but do have a shoe box or computer full of photos! You will be able to simple organize and jazz up those photos in a very simple format AND you will have those special moments into an album you can sit down and enjoy! For those of you that enjoy playing with paper and glue, this new program will extend your creativity and ability to get more done in less time AND it will add some more interest into your albums while at the same time allowing you to get more photos and moments recorded and stored for future reference! It's all Goodness on the horizon ;)

Moving onto current events ;) I am working on some layouts for a couple classes at the Ultimate Scrapbook Retreat this November 22-24th...I always look sooooo forward to getting away and getting creative but this month I wanted to offer a class or two with some of CTMH's new Christmas and Winter collections!

I am totally enjoying the new products and our new Artbooking Cricut cartridge...have you seen it in action? Do you have yours yet? Let me know if you want it added to your Christmas Wish List or have your husband/family message me and I can hook you up for the Holidays ;) Remember that with the purchase of your Artbooking Cricut cartridge, you've just earned one FREE 'star' item out of the Holiday from the Heart Gift Guide!!!

Here's a couple sneaks of my upcoming classes...

Thanks so much for hanging out here today, I love hearing from you so leave me a note in the comments below if you'd like :)

Everything's Good!

Oh yeah..I'm safe and sound...just MIA!

I'm not sure what's happened there? I seem to go through phases every year where I'm super busy with DT stuff and Close To My Heart stuff and Project Life stuff and I'm so 'on top' of my Blog!

Seeing as I'm taking a break from my two previous Design Team's I seem to have fallen off the proverbial 'Bloggin' Wagon'...I apologize to those of you that like to see my artwork or for those of you that enjoy my banter ;)

Sooooo, what have I been up to you ask? Well since my last post the kids have returned to school of course which means I have been working more at my new job at my local Scrapbook Shoppe and re-organizing spaces in the house! Right? cause those two automatically go together. LOL

I have lots of updates to share this month but I thought I'd talk a little bit about my Project Life journey to date :)

I've been playing with my Project Life album, working on it means that I am constantly chipping away at organizing my photos, figuring out what I want to print and then ordering them...then once I've got them into their sleeves for the week I like to add my cards and journalling and embellies of course ;)

As you can see, I am working on several weeks...print some photos...add some cards and journalling...it's like a work in progress all the time but I'm OK with that...I'm currently printing photos for Weeks 31-44...I'm only 13 weeks behind!!! HaHaHa

You know the funny thing is that once I finish organizing 'what' photos I want to print and where they are going to go in my Project Life page spread...then send them off to print...It will only take me a few hours to corner round them and then put them into their proper spots in my page sleeves...I'll take several more hours to choose cards and embellish and journal on each weeks' spread...but I will have that many weeks worth of memories into an album...so it's all good!

One of the things that I've discovered works for me is I record each of my weeks activities into a calendar...sometimes I need to refer to my iPhoto Library to refresh my memory on dates and when I do I like to flag my photos so that they will be easy to find for future printing. The other resource I've found on the World Wide Web is Project Life planning sheets. I print them out to plan my pages, especially seeing as I'm so many weeks behind. This way I can plan my week spread, figure out photos and photo placement and I record it so that I know where to slide everything in once I have all my photos printed! Makes everything so much easier to sit and work through all those details first so that once I've got my photos in the sleeves I can start the creative part of recording our memories.

I like the planner pages I've found on these sites:
marcypenner.com
zoepearndesigns.com

The more you look around online, the more help AND inspiration AND motivation you find :)