While so many other scrappers out in blogland are posting photos of their beautiful December Daily and Journal Your Christmas albums in progress, I'm happy just to be keeping up with journaling and taking photos for mine! Admittedly, it's a lot better than I did with the project last year, so my plan is to just keep trucking along with what I can do (and, really, photos + journaling are the most important part of this project, anyway) and then assemble as I have time- probably at the next crop I go to with the girls at church in January.
I haven't been totally slacking in the creative crafty paper play department with my album, though- I've at least got the title page done! I went back and forth over the best way to do an intro spread for my album given the Project Life format I'm using and eventually settled on something that's super simple and at the same time makes me super happy.
It's so simple that I hesitated to even show it here because, really, there's not much to it, but then again that's the beauty of it!
I think that sheet of Antarctic map paper from Crate Paper's Sleigh Ride collection might have been one of my favorite patterns to come out of all of the CHA Summer show. Maps make me happy. Christmas makes me happy. So Christmas themed maps? Yeah, off the charts levels of happiness, here. :)
I wanted to preserve as much of the pattern from the paper as possible, so I decided to chop it up and use it in its entirety as my cover page, inserting a piece of it into each slot of a Design A Project Life page protector. I also added in a couple of screen prints from Tina Aszmus' shop (love the vellum ones that you can still see the pattern through!) and finished off with some customized Thickers.
The end result? Love. :)
I went searching in my stash for gold Thickers to use for this page and came up empty-handed except for a set of really bold gold glittered letters. I wanted something more subtle, so I did a quick DIY job to get the look I wanted. Faber-Castell recently sent the Lawn Fawn team a few of their items to try out (you'll see another project with their stuff coming up next week!), including PITT artist pens in lovely metallics (I got silver and gold). These pens were perfect for coloring on natural chipboard Thickers, and the ink is permanent so I don't have to worry about it rubbing off. I stuck the Thickers right on top of the page protector, and they're staying put beautifully!
I loved this idea for my Journal Your Christmas cover page so much that I went back to do something similar for my sadly neglected 2011 album. This sheet of October Afternoon paper from Holiday Style has a lovely print that is nearly impossible to scrap with, so I just used it as-is, cut into sections again to fit the Design A Project Life page.
If you're like me and not quite at the assembly step your for your December Daily or Journal Your Christmas album, don't despair! Just take a deep breath and jump in with today- take a photo, write something down. If you find a few spare minutes, perhaps you can do that for another day or two, as well, if you're behind. Documenting the season is definitely easier while events are in progress, but nobody said you had to put together your album at the same time!
Supplies (click on images for product links):
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