Creating a Christmas Journal gives me opportunities for experimenting. Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with the results and I have another technique up my sleeve for Project Life pages. For December 9, I tried printing on one of the patterned papers that came with the Ashley G. mini-kit offered by Ali Edwards. Can't say I'm thrilled with the results since reading the text is more difficult than I'd like, but I decided to go with it anyway. The idea for the page originated with the Ten on Tuesday posts that I discovered on Honoré's blog. This one was to record ten things you love to do around the holidays.
You can't tell from the photo, but the little dots are a beautiful gold, so the only embellishment was the 9 from the American Craft thickers I used on the cover of the journal. This list records ten things I love about Christmas: time with family, celebrating with friends, decorating the house, listening to Christmas music, entertaining, making Christmas cards, wrapping gifts, baking cookies, creating a Christmas Journal, and sitting by our new gas fireplace enjoying the lights on the tree and mantle.
December 10 records our trip to "meet" Santa at the George Eastman Museum. They always decorate the mansion beautifully, and this is the first time I've ever visited during the gingerbread house display. I have a lot more photos from this trip than I could fit in the journal, but even so I gave it three pages!
I wrote about Skylar's hesitations around meeting Santa, and you can clearly see that in the photo with Grandpa. I blurred the face of the little girl talking to Santa since I don't know her at all. I'm not sure I would have thought to take a portrait of Grandpa with the girls on the staircase, but it seemed to be a pretty popular activity, so we joined in and I finally got a shot without anyone's feet going up and down the stairs in the photo. The left-hand page is a free photo template by Cathy Zielske.
On this page, I included the two photos I shared yesterday for Pairs, one of Matt showing Skylar some projects on his phone while we were waiting for dinner, and one of the many gingerbread houses on display.
Day 11 documents our book group meeting. We meet at someone's house and discuss the book, then go out to dinner. That night we went to Lemoncello's, one of my favorite Italian restaurants. I decided to include a list of the books our group read in 2015.
I read all but one of them. Fortunately, there's no pressure in this group (Tracy, Mary, and I have belonged to this group since 1990!) to read a book that doesn't speak to you, or if you're just swamped with other commitments. Although most of our group liked Gutenberg's Apprentice, neither Mike nor I could slog our way through it. As you can see, we don't manage to meet every month; some years we read more than eight books---it all depends on peoples' travel schedules. (Lovely to be retired!) I'm planning to do a post of the best books I read in 2015, but I can recommend any of these except Gutenberg's Apprentice (which you might enjoy since others did) or Bury Your Life (a murder mystery that just had too many evil characters in it for my taste.)
The journaling card is from One Little Bird, and I colored the books with TomBow markers after printing it. As you can tell, the embellishments are pretty minimal. They take me the longest to figure out, and since it's the photos and stories I want to get done, I often give up after a few minutes and say, "Good enough." Maybe I'll come back after the holidays and reconsider, but I think I'd best get back to my Project Life pages!
