Welcome back to the blog for our final post of Love Week! We couldn’t wrap up the week without sharing a new and beautiful collection centered around love, and our friends at Close to My Heart have certainly hit the mark! We can’t wait for you to see their new collection—we already have a list of what we want to create with it! Take a look!

Hi, scrapbooking friends! It’s Karen here with Close To My Heart, and I am so excited to share our Now & Forever collection with you! This amazing collection adds a beautifully classic feel to all your Valentine’s Day crafting. In addition to Valentine’s Day, this kit is perfect for celebrating any of the relationships in your life! Its vintage feel makes it an especially great choice for preserving heritage photos. With the paper packet + sticker sheet and new embroidered embellishments, this collection gives you a truly unique way to preserve your memories and photos with elegance and style!

It’s all about love with this collection! It features a new paper packet with a coordinating sticker sheet, cardstock pack, stamp set, Thin Cuts Dies, (both stamp coordinating dies, as well as a stand-alone heart doily die), and these fantastic new embroidered embellishments. As you can see, the embroidered embellishment stickers give texture, height, beauty, and detail to your project. Meanwhile, the heart doily is a great piece for tucking behind things, grounding an embellishment cluster, stamping sentiments on, or even being the star (or heart!) of the show on a card.

We’ve prepared two workshop projects—a cardmaking workshop and a scrapbooking workshop—to help you turn this collection into breathtaking art with plenty of fun techniques. We are excited to feature some of the techniques used in these workshops here on the blog so that you can try them on your next scrapbook layout or cards.

This kit lends itself beautifully to a lot of different distressing techniques in particular, including adding color to the edges of papers and die-cut pieces with inks and blending brushes (see card below) and using subtle tearing techniques. You can find a YouTube video highlighting this tearing technique here. These sorts of techniques are just the ticket to finishing off your projects!

The inking technique is so gorgeous on this card.  It’s easy to get this soft look using your blending tool. Start by inking your blending brush and then dab it off onto your All-purpose Mat or a scratch piece of paper to remove some of the excess ink. After dabbing off the brush, begin pushing your blending brush from off the paper onto the paper with gentle, circular motions. We have created a YouTube video showcasing this technique below.

The Now & Forever stamp set is full of great sentiments and icons for cards, as well as subtitles and accents for scrapbooking. Have you ever tried base and shade stamping? This set makes it easy! The butterfly and rose images on this set are created to do just that. It’s simple, you just stamp the solid butterfly (base) with a lighter ink color, and then stamp the detailed butterfly (shade) on top with a darker ink color. We have created a YouTube video highlighting this technique below.

You can do the same with the solid and detailed rose images! Our clear stamps and blocks make it so easy to line up your images, and the finished effect is fabulous!

One of my favorite things about Close To My Heart sticker sheets is that they are sturdy and substantial. They are a cardstock weight, so the stickers are easy to pull off the sheet and place on your project without worrying about the sticker sticking to itself or tearing. As you can see, we packed that 12″ x 12″ sticker sheet full of large and small icons, titles, borders, scatter elements, and more. In addition, THIS sticker sheet features gold foiling on many of the images. If vintage, love, flowers, butterflies, and gorgeous colors weren’t enough, the gold detail puts this collection over the top!

As a special treat, we’ll be giving away a Now & Forever Product Bundle to one lucky reader! Simply leave a comment on this post by midnight Eastern time on Wednesday, February 15th, telling us about the memories you’ll preserve with this beautiful collection, and you’ll be entered to win! The winner will be randomly selected and announced on Friday, February 17th here on the SCT blog! Happy crafting, and don’t forget to follow us at the links below for more ideas and inspiration!

Close to My Heart: Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube 

What a gorgeous collection, and the perfect way to wrap up a week filled with love! Don’t miss out on the opportunity to win it by leaving a comment!

The Taylored Expressions Magnetic Glass Board New & Noteworthy post and gift card giveaway was certainly popular, and this lucky commenter will be able to snag a new Glass Board with her prize:

“I absolutely love working on glass surfaces and having to tape everything down is time consuming. A magnetic glass board is brilliant!! I would be able to keep the glass surface I love without having to stop and tape, stop and tape, remove tape, remove tape, over and over! I love it!” ~ Cindy G.

Cindy, congratulations! Please email meghann@scrapbookandcards.com to claim your prize!

Thank you all for joining us for Love Week this week! We want to wish each of you a wonderful weekend, filled with moments spent with the ones you love! We’ll see you back here on Monday for more inspiration!