14th December: Scrapbooking Christmas

Each December I follow along with Journal Your Christmas, a lovely online class run by Shimelle.  Each day, prompts arrive in my inbox with ideas for fully embracing and remembering Christmas.  For the last couple of years, I have found that the best way for me to follow this class is through my blog, sharing pictures and a little journalling each day to record the beauty of the season around me.  While many people scrapbook every day, I like taking a blog approach as I feel I can make time for it, and then the inspiration is there for me to come back to later.

Last week, I found some time to scrapbook in my preferred 12x12 format, and I used photos and journalling from one of the festive blog posts I wrote last year, when the man and I visited the beautiful gardens at Kew to see their lights.  And you can read that post here if you fancy it!

I love crafting at this time of year: it feels warm and cosy somehow, and beautifully indulgent to take a little time away from the hustle and bustle.  Don't get me wrong: I like the busy excitement too, but the importance of pretty paper cannot be denied.

I selected my photo, and got to work on my title, drawing a template, cutting it out and tracing round the template onto white cardstock.  I started off with a navy background originally, but actually I ended up switching to this lovely starry paper as the navy seemed too dark, especially given the photo is a dark night scene as well.  Plus, I love the look of a white, lacy title on white.

And the finished page!  I used the moodboard from Jot magazine to select my colour scheme, drawing from it the navy and gold influences, and I used quite a few of my go-to design elements, including the hand cut title, and lots of little layers.

The journalling is on tags which are tied together in a little bow and tucked in a kraft pocket behind the photo.  It's nice to be able to tuck it away behind layers of paper, and writing on tags in a pocket means I don't have to restrict the amount of space I have for writing.

I'm really chuffed with how this page came out, as I think it's festive without being too traditionally Christmassy, and I think the design really reflects the starry picture.  Anyway, it was lovely to do some festive scrapbooking and I hope I can make time to do a little more.

Kisses xxx

P.S. This post is another in the series of advent posts I'm blogging as part of Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas class, which is all about capturing lovely festive memories.

P.P.S. And it's time to go ice skating with the Maths Department tonight.  Wish me luck!