Creative and personalized cards for friends and family without breaking the bank or spending hours creating them from scratch!

I’m a wife, mother and grandmother.  I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I grew up in Utah where my extended family still live, but I have now lived in Washington for over 30 years.  I worked full-time out of the home as a legal secretary for over 15 years before making my move to working from home.  I’ve been a Close To My Heart Maker (consultant) for over 27 years.  I’ve always been creative at heart and love making personalized cards and gifts.

When I first moved away from my extended family, my first born was 6 months old and I wanted them to be a part of his life and see him grow.  There was no such thing as the internet then, so it was old school letter writing for me.  I still wanted to be a part of their lives as well and so it was store bought cards or writing letters on notebook paper and getting duplicates of photos to send to them of our lives in Washington.  Since I was working full-time at a law firm in Seattle, then taking care of my son and home at night, I didn’t have a lot of free time to get creative or a lot of money to get more personalized cards.  A few years later we added a daughter to our family so now we had two kids that kept us busy and more letters to write to share her growing as well. 

Money was really tight with a new growing family and my husband worked nights while I worked days.  I had Saturdays and Sundays off and he had Wednesdays and Thursdays off.  We worked this schedule to save money on daycare and also to have our kids at home as much as possible.  This schedule meant that I had the kids alone at night and my days off, while my husband had the kids alone during the day and his days off and the kids were only in daycare a few hours a day 3 days a week.  Basically we were living the lives of single parents and had a ships-passing-in-the-night relationship.

My desire to be creative and send more personalized mail to my extended family just wasn’t happening.  I bought cheap, generic cards through Current with everyone getting something similar in the mail.  I also bought a spiral bound notebook and wrote letters on those boring, basic pages.  Neither of which solved my desire to send personalized mail or have a chance to be creative.

One day at work I walked past the desk of another secretary that I knew and she had these beautiful, creative cards hanging up at her desk.  I knew instantly that is what I wanted to do for my extended family.  She introduced me to stamping and card making.  She also came up with the idea to have a stamping club at work so that we could make cute, personalized cards together during our lunch hours.  I knew my cousin made stamped cards as well, so I got in touch with her and she sent me my first D.O.T.S. (now known as Close To My Heart) catalog and I was hooked!

Close To My Heart has many card making workshop kits with everything predesigned and includes instructions on how to put them together quickly.  You get personalized cards and the creativity you crave.  All you have to do is click on this link Workshops & Kits and it will take you to the workshops & kits category on my website renaemcbarron.closetomyherart.com.