Journal Your Christmas

This Christmas is going to be quite different from previous ones for a couple of reasons. Firstly - it's baby's first one! And secondly, we have family coming all the way from the UK to spend it with us!

So it's going to be AWESOME :-)

And because it's going to be like nothing that has come before it I have decided I want to record it.

For Christmas 2008 I joined up for Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas and completed all 37 days/pages. I love looking back at the album to see what we were up to 2 years ago and already have it out for the festive season.

Basically Shimelle sends out a prompt by email every day which makes you think about some aspect of Christmas and then blog/journal/scrapbook/photograph it. There's also an online forum where you can share what you've done and chat with others taking part. It's heaps of fun and the best bit is that once you've paid  you're in it for life and can take part every year if you wish. 

(And if you click on that link above you'll see there's some giveaways for class places happening this week).

It starts on 1st December and runs right through to the 6th January. 

As well as being a SPECIAL Christmas/December this year it's also going to be a BUSY one. Therefore I am going simple. I am not going to buy a stack of the latest christmas themed scrapbooking goodies - I will use up some of the stuff I already have. And I'm not going to worry too much about making this a hugely pretty album. It's going to capture some words and some photos so that we have something to look back on in years to come. I'm fairly certain baby is not going to judge me for not including lots of lovely scrapbook supplies when he's older!

I learnt last year not to over-complicate this process. I only made it to day 5 last year. I had morning sickness,  was mega busy at work and had an album/journal that required too much time and thought to complete.

I've made up some page numbers ready to go. I have a ream of pink card (bought for wedding thank-yous) that I cut into 2 by 1 inch rectangles. I then stamped the date on with my date stamper and added a punched xmas tree/star. I didn't have quite enough trees for all 37 days so went with Christmas trees for the December dates and stars for the January dates. I've also inked the edges in green ink.

And these are probably the fanciest things I'm going to have in the album!

 

I'm hoping to get a front and back cover made up over the next couple of days. I am probably going to have an A5 size journal because it's easy. And I'm thinking a mix of black and white card for pages. I am thinking about making it landscape in orientation and will hole-punch each page and join with book-rings.

And once I've prepped the cover and pages it's just a case of taking photos each day, writing some words and sticking it all together.

I really want to do this so keep your fingers crossed I can scrape ten minutes each day to get my pages done.

And as it will be very simple and smaller than the usual 12 by 12 pages I will get 50c per page for my scrapbook fund or $20 total if I complete all 37 pages.

Hopefully I will be able to share some of the pages and covers with you as December progresses.