Creating lasting memories with scrapbooks, cards and other paper crafts. Selling the quality products for you to make them and showing you how!

Welcome to Heritage Stamp Arts by Xenia

My passion is preserving family photos through scrapbooking and creating pages with stamping, designer series paper and embellishment to create focal points and enhance the experience the viewer receives when looking through the album – whether that viewer is now or some time in the future. Family history has been very important to me since sitting on my grandmother's knee and listening to her tell me about her life and family here in Canada and in her childhood home in Austria. I have also discovered a passion for unleashing my creativity and artistic inclinations through making cards and other projects. Since preserving the past is important to me and I love vintage style, Heritage Stamp Arts feels like the best name for my business and blog.

My Story

I was born on a cold winter’s day on January 7 (my mother was Ukrainian, so this was her Christmas). I was raised mostly on my paternal grandparents’ homestead in Alberta. I was born into a family of artists. Sure, their money-making occupations were farmers and loggers, but their spare time was spent in artistic passions and mechanical innovations. My grandfather was a musician and carver in Austria. My grandmother was the one with farming experience. She really wanted to be a teacher, but her mother forbade it. They immigrated to Canada in 1908 with my one-year-old father.

The photos show me with the two most influential women in my life: my grandmother and my aunt who raised me.

Besides my siblings and grandparents, four of their adult children lived there. They were all musicians, but my aunt gave it up to look after her parents and her brother’s four children. I didn’t inherit any of the musical ability. Instead I dabbled in the arts, as they say. My aunt and an uncle exceeded any ability I had in drawing and painting, but it didn’t stop me from trying. My most successful pieces were taken by teachers and a boyfriend or stolen. So, for a long time I gave up, but I discovered poetry and writing at an early age and continued that throughout my life.

I started scrapbooking as an adult as a way of preserving family history. My grandmother was a storyteller and told me of her life in Austria and then in Canada. I inherited many photos along with the stories.

When I discovered Stampin’ Up! I was hooked. The quality and range of products meant I could do so much more to add interest to scrapbook pages than what I had been doing. My artistic nature was awakened by the many techniques to also make cards and other projects using the products.

That is why I am an independent Stampin’ Up! demonstrator to bring you the products and show you the techniques to create scrapbook pages and cards of your own.