{Feeling festive}

The Christmas season is starting to come upon us now, and it has taken me a while to embrace it this year, but I feel ready now to fully accept the festivities! I tend not to scrap Christmas photos straight away - usually by the time I've uploaded and sorted through them all, and then got some printed, it's mid-February and I'm well and truely fed up of winter and ready for spring! So come November, I dig out the christmas photos from the year before and get scrapping. This month I've been working with one of my current favourite manufacturers - Simple Stories. They make great collections that are full of both 12x12" papers and cut apart designs, and they've also released books of journalling cards in both 4x6" and 2x3" sizes. These products are great for the split page protector style of scrapbooking that has become so popular, and you can bet I'll be using some of these in my project life book later this year, but I wanted to also show how they can be used on traditional full sized layouts too.

Simple Stories Handmade Holiday Collection

First up I went back two years to my son's first Christmas. We had a lovely day with the family, and I was able to get this wonderful group photo of all four generations together. I had an enlargement printed at 12x5" so that it was the entire width of the page - I love getting this size sometimes, it makes a great change from the standard print sizes and is fantastic for panorama style photos.  I layered up journalling cards, paper strips and stickers above and below the photo, overlapping some elements onto the photo itself to bring everything together. One thing I love about digital photos is that one print is not the only one we can ever have, so you can experiment with sticking stuff directly to it, and it's not the end of the world if the photo gets ruined.

This second page also features pictures from 2010, and tells the story of my little boy's christmas stocking. That year his grandma, my mum, made him an 'advent calendar' of gifts - one for each day in December leading up to Christmas. On Christmas Eve the most special gift was brought out - a stocking handmade just for him. Father Christmas certainly delivered, and filled it full of goodies to enjoy! He was only two and a half months old, but he took it all in, watching everything around him. Stockings are an important tradition in our house, and I love that he has his own special one right from his first Christmas.

For my third page this month I jumped forward a year and scrapped a photo from 2011. I like to do this with supplies, so that I don't have a bunch of pages all together in my (chronological) albums that are matching. I like them to be diferent! This photo was the one we chose to send out to friends and relatives with our cards last year. It was one of many photos from this mini home photoshoot, but one of only a couple that were any good! He may look sweet and innocent here but in fact he was not very happy about being put in a santa hat! I'm not sure how things will go this year on that front - he's much more active, but he now loves hats, so we may have more success, we'll have to see.
I love the picture so I printed it big - this isn't far from A4 size, and was printed at home on my own printer. The big "Merry and Bright" title piece comes from one of the cut apart sheets, and is 4x4" - perfect for a bold statement on a page. 

 

 Thanks for stopping by, and do feel free to share your own festive pages - we'd love to see!