Christmas catch up part deux

As promised, here are four more pages of my Christmas journal. I have gotten totally into using American Crafts Thickers whilst doing this project - there are so many gorgeous styles and colours - that I just blew my resolution not to spend loads of cash out of the window and bought a load more from Papermaze yesterday! A girl can never have too many thickers. I also discovered whilst working on this project that I hate rub-ons (I now have bits of them stuck to every surface, apart from the pages of my journal), which is just as well really as I have so many stamps that there is no conceivable reason for me to buy rub-ons anyway.

Just one and a half more days till I'm back to work, and I plan on enjoying them as much as possible. I'm going to scrap a little bit for an hour now, and then my newly engaged friends Mags and Mark are coming round for dinner, vino and a catch up. So at least I won't be tempted to spend the evening working! Tune in tomorrow for more journal pages...

The wanderer returns...

Ok, ok, no excuses, I've been a terrible blogger this month! Work was manic up to the 19th, and then I had a few days to get all my presents sorted and clean the house before spending a week with my folks down in London. The blog kind of took a back seat. I've been back for a few days now and I've actually been putting off updating my blog - because I have SO many Christmas journal pages to upload here! I managed to get up to and including Christmas day this year - I may try and do Boxing Day but that may be just a pipe dream with all the work I have to get done to get ready for school on Monday (boooo!). I've decided I'm going to upload them in four page chunks, so I don't go totally insane scanning them all in :D So here are four more pages for your perusal...

I have in the last month completely embraced the awesomeness that is the iphone, as well as being given a little pink ipod nano by my Dad for Christmas. So I've been rediscovering all my favourite music - a very random mix, currently I'm enjoying The Animals, The Lovin Spoonful and a bit of David Bowie. As they say, variety is the spice of life!

So any New Year's resolutions? Other than the obvious - lose the mince pie weight and keep the house more tidy - I have also thought of a few scrap-related resolutions. Since I am no longer subscribed to a kit due to the appallingness of the current exchange rate, I'm going to try to curb my spending a little for a few months and spend the money I save on making the spare bedroom more hospitable. I know, I've been saying this for months but this time I actually mean it! I also mean to finish all the scrapping projects I signed up for over the last couple of years - I have three more double pages of the My Freedom project to do, and I also want to get on with There's No Place Like Home, as well as printing out all the photos I have taken for Scrap Your Day (at least the album is finished for that!). So expect to see bits and pieces of these over the next few months. I'm not saying I won't sign up for any new projects this year, but it would be nice not to have unfinished ones all over the place...

More journal pages...

I've not stopped journalling, don't worry! I just haven't had a chance to blog my pages yet. I'm not quite caught up - I have two pages to do this evening - but here are four more pages of my journal for your perusal. I'm really enjoying these, they are really quick to make and so bright and funky.

The fifth page in my journal shows my advent calendar this year - Cadbury's Dairy Milk, bought on a two for one offer in Sainsbury's so both me and Ed got one.


Next up we have my Christmas Memories page - probably my least favourite so far - I like the muted colours but didn't really have any appropriately coloured embellishments for the page. The green stickers aren't quite that bright in real life!

Next we have my To Do list page - still way too much on this one unfortunately, Christmas has snuck up on us a bit this year, so I'm hopelessly disorganised :(

Finally there is my sights of Christmas page - the only sight of Christmas around our house so far are the mince pies which we keep buying on a two for one offer from Somerfield! So I snapped a box for my page for the day...

So not quite caught up, but not too far behind either. Things are about to get even busier over the next few days though so not sure whether I'm ever going to be totally up to date with this project...

Christmas Journal 2008 begins...

Having been extraordinarly unprepared for my Christmas Journal this year, not even deciding to do it till the last minute, I finally got up to date this evening with the prompts. I have to admit to not having read the prompts for day three and four - I used last year's pages as a guide! From my experience of last year, I knew I needed to keep things simpler as all the title stamping and handcutting, while it looked great, took forever and stopped me completing the journal. So I decided to stick to some simple techniques for each page which would unite the pages whilst also allowing a little bit of creativity each day.

I stocked up with various shades of Doodlebug Bazzill (which are my favourite Bazzill colours and in my opinion can be made to go with everything!) and also an 8x8 pack of the Fancy Pants Happy Holidays range. I originally intended to do my album in 8x8 again, but having seen some of my friend Laura's pages, decided to go with the slightly different 6x12 which also allowed me to be more economical on the cardstock front! I returned to my trusty Autumn Leaves Rhonna's Christmas swirls stamps from last year, but used subtle shades of ink rather than the black of last year's album. I decided to use various packs of my mounting collection of AC Thickers, as well as my ever-loved Making Memories Tiny Alpha stickers. I grabbed some Scenic Route photo mattes which came in a kit a while back. Finally, I went for a common theme of punched scalloped circles and ovals to carry through the pages.

The first page is the Christmas manifesto - what you hope to achieve in your Christmas album. I wrote my own manifesto for this. I want to make this years album a little bit more 'personal' to the year - last year's album was a more general reflection on Christmas past.


The second page, about Christmas snow, was quite timely as we had half expected to get a flurry of the white stuff today, but it never quite reached down to our part of the country. I did however include a photo that Ed took on his phone of the freak snowfall we had in October this year! There is some hidden journalling behind the photo.

On the third page, about Christmas cards, I decided to include one of the cards I have bought to send out this year. I don't make cards - its just not my forte - but I really loved these ones I spotted in Marks and Spencers a few months ago. They have a lovely contemporary style, as well as being glittery. Perfect!


Finally, my fourth page is about my perfect Christmas celebrations this year. I'm sure in years to come my idea of the perfect Christmas will change dramatically, so I wanted to write down exactly what I would choose to do right now so I can compare it with (hopefully!) future Christmas journals.

So that is me up to date - I bet you can't believe it after my complete lack of scrapping for the last couple of weeks. Lets hope I can keep up over the next few days...

Days

Life continues to be busy, and dark, and cold...but I did have a fab weekend with my sis and her boyfriend Ross, and then on Monday I actually got around to doing some scrapping! Yes, can you believe it? I attempted another 6x12, a size I'm coming to like though it takes a while to get used to it at the start. The photo was taken in May this year on the Southbank and is of me and my mum. We had such a great day, and on my layout I just wanted to record the fact that sometimes its the little things that give you the most happiness. Its made mainly using scraps from the August Cocoa Daisy kit, of which I still have plenty left believe it or not!




In other news, I decided I'm going to try and keep another Christmas journal this year. It will have to be a lot simpler than last year as I just don't have the time to dedicate to it. But I'm kind of missing the excitement that it created last year - it definitley helped to get me into the christmas spirit! I have ordered most of my presents online this year - just my mum's and part of my sister's to get, and then I just have to wait for Ed to finally decide what he wants...

Albufeira

A few days absence from my blog, due entirely to me trying to catch up with school work and doing very little scrapping. I did manage to fit in a badly needed trip to the hairdressers on Saturday - my hair is gradually getting shorter and funkier - Colin, my hairdresser, styled it brilliantly, I haven't yet been able to replicate it at home, but isn't that always the way?

I'm off to a conference in Birmingham tomorrow for a developing leaders course I am on, but thought I would just drop in here and share my latest layout which is up over at Scrap, Paper, Scissors. With the weather the way it is at the moment, its almost impossible to remember our trip to Portugal in August, but here is a layout to prove that not so long ago I was enjoying blazing sunshine and leisurely days at the beach! I used a Crafter's Workshop template on this and sponge-painted the leaves through it - it all went a bit wrong when I smudged paint all over the bottom of the layout! A sneaky bit of cutting and sticking over the offensive smudge saved the day though - I was fortunate that two different bits of paper in the Fancy Pants Daily Grind range had exactly the same bottom left hand corner!

Tired, tired, tired!

Whoever believes teaching is easy, with (to quote my Dad) 22 weeks holiday a year, start at 10am and finish at 3pm, should really have been a fly on the wall in our department in recent weeks. We seem to be constantly on the go, with pantos and trainees and parents evenings and trips and all kinds of stuff to organise. If I just spent my days teaching my classes I would be happy - that is the easy part of the job!

So I have achieved very little in the way of scrapping in the last week. I did enjoy my weekend in London with my parents though, and discovered a shop in Covent Garden, David and Goliath, which had the most amazing PJs and T-shirts in it. Possible crimbo pressie alert, my dear family???