Christmas journal.

So I decided to take a month-long "Journal Your Christmas" class online, through Shimelle Laine's website. I took a mini album class from her in January that was a lot of fun, and this Christmas class gets rave reviews from people who've taken it in the past.

Each day in December, you get a journaling prompt. How you interpret it is up to you, but the idea is to end up with a journal of your thoughts and memories of Christmas.

Here's my December 1 page.

I think I might try to put big numbers somewhere on the pages, for each day's date, but I haven't found the right thing yet. For December 1, we were just supposed to write about why we wanted to make a Christmas journal. I don't know if my journaling is legible...it reads:

"I used to love Christmas and everything that went with it. But time, age and general grouchiness have taken away much of the pleasure and joy I used to feel at Christmastime, and turned me into a bit of a Scrooge at times.

"My hope is that creating this journal with my memories and feelings about Christmas will help rekindle some of that holiday pleasure inside me!"

For December 2, the prompt was about Christmas weather, snow in particular. We were supposed to create a snowflake and put it somewhere on the page.


I hand cut a snowflake, and then decided to glitter it up, forgetting my cardinal rule about glitter: don't use it! I adhered it with a glue stick, instead of wet glue, and it just didn't take well at all.

So I layered a transparency over it, thinking I'd contain it a little bit that way...but glitter pours out around the edges every time I touch it.

So I tried taping up the edges of the page...but that glitter is still sneaking out. Glitter sucks!
I'm sure my journaling for this page is illegible, being on the transparency and all. I picked a bad font, I'm afraid. Here it is:

"Living in Virginia, Christmas always catches me off-guard. I’ve never lived in a place where the weather is still warm well into December. Each chilly day makes me hopeful that winter is finally here—and each balmy day makes me impatient for some real winter weather, the kind that makes you ready for Christmas.And as far as snow goes—that is even rarer here than cold snaps. I loved the Ohio Christmases where the snow would come in time for Christmas Eve…so perfectly magical."

You can see some of the other students' interpretations of their Christmas journals at Written Down. Very inspiring!

More pages to come, and I'm still working on the journal cover. I'm using a square Sarabinder with tabbed and pocket and envelope pages...it feels good to finally use a long ago purchase instead of hoarding it!

Holiday project.

Here's the holiday project I did with my at-home class on Friday morning.

The idea came from Ali Edwards' blog and the e-zine she puts out periodically. In November, she had a holiday collage project that you can see here, if you scroll down to Holiday Project #2.

The idea is to construct an 8x10 piece using 20 2x2" squares. Ali did a lot of stamping and used large images in hers...I didn't have quite as many good large images, so I concentrated more on pattern, using some of the new Basic Grey holiday papers as a base.

Placed in an 8x10" mat, some of the edges get cut off, so I'm thinking one might have to have a specially cut mat, or else mount the piece raised on a matboard background. I'm not sure how Ali managed to get hers looking the way it does--maybe spacers?

Anyway, it's a fun and easy way to use up holiday odds and ends, and the possibilities are really endless--you could use bits from old Christmas cards, or old Christmas postage stamps, Jolee's dimensional stickers, etc. I'm thinking about making a few more vintage-y looking pieces for holiday gifts for my aunties.