12th December: Scrapbooking Secrets

 

For the last two years, the Man and I have been out for some Secret Christmas Fun.  This mini tradition started last year, with Secret Christmas Day of Fun (which you can read about here), and continued this year with Secret Christmas Weekend of Fun.  Or SCWoF. Which I blogged about yesterday here and which took place just over a week ago.  This is something I have planned for the two of us, keeping the details secret from the Man, so that we get some quality time together during the festive season, which is important as he travels a lot with work.

 

With this year's SCWoF journaled and photographed, it made me want to scrap about it.  My approach to Christmas scrapbooking is to not worry about trying to scrap anything from this December.  My memory-keeping goals are simply to record the photos and journaling of festive happenings, and keep it all here on the blog, which I have done for the past couple of years. This is ideal for me, as there's simply not time for me to scrapbook these memories each day; to much fun to be had and life to be lived! 

 

However, I have all my photos printed from last year so that when a little window of scrapbook time does make itself available, I have pictures, and the accompanying journaling I blogged, all ready to go.  Christmas scrapbooking is ready for action! I have had the pleasure of documenting this year's Secret Christmas, and now I can create a layout about last year's.

 

The main focus of this layout is the journaling. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and I had such a lot I wanted to write that it seemed obvious to make the journaling the focus of the page.  So I wrote out my full story on a sheet of white 12 x 12 cardstock.  With that ready and complete, I laid a 12 x 12 clear transparency over the top, and made my layout on top of that.  The journaling is therefore both a handwriting-style design in the background, but the layout can also be lifted off should anyone wish to read the full story.

I took hardly any photos on our day out, mainly because most places were in inside and dark, and I knew they weren't going to be great.  So in the end, I just printed two pictures; slightly silly portraits of each of us while we were at brunch, and I made them little Instax-style reminders of our day together.  At the end of the day, the lack of photos doesn't really matter as the story here is key.

 

I laid out my design in a grid shape: the two pictures forming two of the blocks, and turning the other two into little spots for embellishment.  I layered up scraps of patterned paper which would match the photos, and used a camera icon (something I think works for basically ANY layout as I love photography and there are pictures) and an ampersand (to represent him and me) to complete the blocks.

All that remained was to complete add a title, and I decided to go big with this one and create another layer to go along with the page. I made a template, drawing out my words and doodling until I was happy with the design, and then tracing it out onto white cardstock and cutting it out with a craft knife. I can lay the title over the top of the who page, or just underneath the transparency.  And actually I think that's the effect I prefer as it's another secret underneath the layout!

And there we have it: another complete page added to my Christmas album!

 

Kisses xxx

P.S. This post is one of my December series inspired by Shimelle’s scrapbooking class Journal Your Christmas.  My aim is to blog every day throughout the month to document all the little moments that make the most wonderful time of the year.  Merry Christmas!