Happy New Year's Eve! I hope that you all have fun (safe) plans for the evening! And, if your plans for tomorrow include changing the calendar, you're in luck because I have several to share with you today.

 

From left to right:

• I Scrap, U Scrap (the blog of Scrapbooks, Etc.) has a great article showing ways to use your paper scraps on layouts.
• Take a peek into Debee Campos' studio. I love the colors!
• I discovered Kinsey Wilson's scrapbooking through a post on Scissor Quirk, and I've fallen in love with her scrapbooking style- especially all that fabulous stitching!
• If you're in need of a wall calendar for the coming year, Decor8 has a free printable owl calendar you might enjoy.
• I love this travel themed take on a project I've seen used for Christmas decor. Check out this map tree at Maryjanes and Galoshes. 
• This simple calendar journal found at Design*Sponge is such a cool way to preserve a small memory from each day of the year, and it can be used for many years!
• Studio Calico features a pretty technique to bring a quilted look to your pages.
• BasicGrey has free downloadable desktop wallpaper calendars, and the design for January is just gorgeous!
• May Flaum walks her readers through her process of organizing, editing, printing, and storing photos from a big event. She also shares more information on her process here and here.

Have a scrappy new year!

Journal Your Christmas: December 19 through 22

I've packed up almost all the Christmas from everywhere except one room of my house- the scrap room. In here there's still Christmas stuff strewn across every available flat surface, and it'll likely stay that way until January 6th, when Journal Your Christmas officially ends. Whew!

I really think that I'm going to do this album all digital next year, for a few reasons. First, there's the aforementioned Christmas stuff scattered everywhere, and yet I'm still having trouble picking out embellishments that I'm happy with each day. Then there's the fact that since I'm getting prints several days behind, I'm obviously several days behind on album assembly as well. And it seems that as long as I still have pages to put together, I'm not working on any other projects, which is not a good thing. I love this album, but I don't want it completely taking over 37 days of my scrapbooking while I'm doing it- know what I mean?

All digital won't be bad- it'll still be words and photos, and there's tons of cute digital Christmas stuff (I'm thinking Cosmo Cricket or Echo Park). I can have it all printed as a photobook at the end, which will cost me about the same amount as having all the pages printed individually.

Anyway, on with the pages. December 19 is our annual letter to Santa. Mine was short and sweet this year. :)

I found this lovely paper at Paper Source when I was in DC in October, and I just love it with my photos from the Bahamas.

December 20th was the day we went to the aquarium at Atlantis, so I included a ton of photos from our visit.

I love this neon green contrasted with the turquoise (a Hambly print) for some reason. I've seen a lot of neon green this Christmas (mostly in store window displays) come to think of it.

December 21st- on our way home, and excited that the house is all decorated and waiting for us!

December 22nd was all about those things that still needed to be done. My list was, thankfully, very short since we'd finished so much of it before our trip!

Is anyone else still working on their December Daily or Journal Your Christmas albums? I'm so ready for mine to be done!

The Nassau Before Christmas: December 16 & 17

So, on the 16th Darren and I flew out to Nassau, Bahamas (thanks to some free tickets from AirTran) to spend a few days in the sunshine and help combat those serious cases of the winter blahs I've been known to get.

This is what the weather looked like when we took off from our connection in Baltimore...

...and this is what we landed in about three hours later. Gorgeous!

We stayed at Breezes Resort because a) it was all-inclusive and b) a much better value (because it was on a serious sale) than staying at a hotel and going on our own for food and airport transfers.

I kinda fell in love with the bathroom as soon as we got there.

And with the view from the beach behind the property (we arrived close to sunset).

And with being about to walk around cool streets like this right in front of the resort.

Oh, and I definitely fell in love with the buffet.

The next morning I woke up early. Really early. Like, before anyone else except the staff was up early. And I continued to do that for the rest of the week for some reason, but I didn't mind because that meant that for an hour or two each day we basically had the place to ourselves.

The pool area was really pretty. I loved this dolphin statue that was visible from the dining room- we tried to eat breakfast at the table near its window every morning.

Some of the tile work in the pools was really pretty, too.

Oh, and here's the beach in daylight. :)

We had planned on visiting Atlantis once or twice while we were in Nassau, and Friday seemed like as good a day as any to go.

I seriously want this yacht that was parked outside, by the way.

The inside of Atlantis is absolutely spectacular, and it was even more so when we were there because they had it all decked out for Christmas.

I took so many photos inside that they'll get their own post...eventually.

After running around Atlantis for a while, we decided to walk around Paradise Island a bit in search of the Versailles Gardens, which we'd been told were beautiful.

That's Darren, doing what we does- climbing stuff. :)

Turns out that we'd been told right- the gardens were gorgeous!

While there, we may or may not have accidentally crashed the Ocean Club (you know, the one from Casino Royale- that Ocean Club). In our defense, we never saw the sign...

I totally blame the Ocean Club for backing their hotel up to a public garden.

I just had to snap a photo of this sign while we were waiting for the water taxi back to New Providence Island- too cute!

Much of our trip involved adventures in public transportation, which I love! We took the water taxi both times we went to Atlantis because it's more fun, and also because it's a lot cheaper than taking a cab across the bridge. I can be notoriously cheap on vacation.

Once the water taxi dropped us back at NPI, all we had to do was hop a public bus that would drop us right in front of the resort. It doesn't get much easier than that!

Mmmmm, more sunset photos.

And that ended day 2 in Nassau. Next time I post about this, I'll share some amazing Atlantis photos. I loved that place!

Road Trip (and a Halloween Layout)

So, those Journal Your Christmas pages I was planning on posting today? Yeah, not so much (I will try to get to them tomorrow)...

Instead I went to the happiest place on Earth- IKEA!!

Those of you who have a version of this wonderful store in your neighborhood may be wondering why a trip there is such a blog-worthy event. Thing is, my closest one is four hours away, meaning that I don't go very often (and when I do, it's an all day event with looooooots of driving involved).

It's always a difficult choice- do I give up one of my vacation days to get some much-needed organizational items, or do I stay home and scrapbook, read, and generally goof around all day. We really did need some closet organizers and a pair of Expedit bookcases for the bedroom, though, so in the end I was a good, responsible girl and went.

I didn't have the chance to take many photos since there was just one little me and three cartloads of stuff to wrangle into the 4Runner (which is currently sitting in the driveway bursting at the seams welds. We'll get it all unloaded tomorrow morning. Tonight I need to clear a spot in the living room to stack it all until Friday when I start construction. I'm a pro at building Expedits by now. :)

In lieu of new Christmas pages, let me instead share with you a Halloween layout that I finished last week. I can't believe I've already scrapped my Halloween decor photos! It's kind of cool to already have them in an album.

This page is based on a sketch from Valerie Salmon's Got Sketch 106 class, and I pulled out some of my yummy new Pink Paislee "Hocus Pocus" papers to play with while I made it.

Okay exhausted me is going to try to make space in the living room now (by taking down the Christmas tree). Or maybe I'll just crawl into bed instead...