Tomorrow Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas class begins again. This will be my seventh year doing the journal, and I've never tired of it. Earlier this week, I brought out the first six journals which reside in a basket in our living room during the holiday. I flipped through a couple of them, and it brought back memories of things I might well have forgotten if I hadn't captured them in the journals. Over the next month, I'll probably read through all of them again.
This year I actually did some preparation ahead of time. During the October Papertrey release I saw a Simple Stories album that seemed just perfect. It's an 8 X 6 two ring binder, and it might become my new favorite size for single topic scrapbooks. Here's the spine and cover.
The cover is a simple circle cut with Spellbinders Nestabilities and a piece of Teresa Collin's Christmas paper from last year. The holly is cut from felt with Papertrey's Holly Jolly dies. The title is created with my old favorite SEI alpha stickers.
The binder comes with several patterned paper pages:
They seem perfect for Christmas, but I decided to embellish most of them. I've left some (above) to embellish as I go along.
A piece of Washi tape, a circle of paper from the Merry Mint pad by American Crafts, and an American Crafts sticker.
More Washi tape and Crate Paper Thickers by American Crafts.
The border of the paper is just about the same red as the stamped banners, but sure doesn't look like that in this photo. The banner was stamped and hand cut using Papertrey's Countdown to Christmas stamps--the only new addition to my Christmas collection. The twine came in a Studio Calico kit. I also used the stamp set to create the numbers for the daily pages:
The frame and arrow are die cuts by Papertrey Ink, the button was from my stash. There'll be a photo in the frame eventually.
I saw this idea somewhere and thought I'd pinned in on my Pinterest board, but I don't see it there. This is a Starbucks sleeve from last year, and I'll be using it for journaling. If anyone knows the source, let me know.
One of the things I like the most about this scrapbook is the divided photo pages. I bought some of Ali Edwards digital journaling cards, printed them out and found some subway art on the internet as well.
I'm hoping this will be easy to assemble as we go through December. Several years ago, I gave up trying to respond to all of Shimelle's prompts or to do a page for every day. Shimelle has updated the prompts for this year, so I'm looking forward to some new ideas. Mostly I just want a record of our time as we travel through the Advent season.