I'm working on my 2011 album as part of a guest design spot in Lisa Wilkinson's December Memories class. She asked me to come on board to share Project Life layouts with the group (those will come a little later this month since I'm just now getting enough Christmas photos in my weeks to be able to use Christmas products with them), and as soon as the Woodland Christmas kit from Pretty Little Studio arrived, I knew that I wanted to use it for my 2011 Christmas journal, too!
Since I already have all of my photos and journaling on hand for 2011 and 2012, I'm working through those albums in stages, going through and putting in filler cards, photos, and journaling in big batches and leaving most of the embellishment until the very end. I put together a video for the class showing my process for getting started on a catch-up December Daily style album, and since the class is free (you can sign up here if you want to join in), Lisa said I was free to share the video here on my blog, too!
I'm using the December Documented collection from Simple Stories to put my 2012 album together, and the first eight pages of it + the title page were up on their blog over the weekend along with lots of tips to help you either catch up on this year's album if you're feeling behind or to help you get an album together for a past year.
For both of my catch-up album, my focus is very much on getting the words + photos into place and not so much on making a gorgeous, artsy album. Don't get me wrong- I love looking at those types of albums and went that route for a lot of my 2013 foundation pages! For these albums, though, I wanted to simplify, so I'm mostly sticking to pictures, journaling, a filler card of some sort, and then a tiny bit of embellishment per page.
I should probably point out that I do not expect to have any of these albums finished at the end of December and will probably be working on them into January. I'm crazy sometimes, but not that crazy! :) I am totally enjoying the process of documenting my Christmases, though, and it's actually really helped me to enjoy this season more as I look back on previous years' journaling and remember all the little details that I would have otherwise forgotten. And that is what makes this project so worth it!
Supplies:
