Christmas Scrapping

Completed several Christmas scrapping projects this week. First is my December mini-album created using the photo collages and paragraph descriptions for each day from my daily blog posts. Here's a look at the completed album; the pages are 12x6 and I used binder clips to bind it together.

I printed the first photo collages and started the album in mid-December (you can see some of my pages here). Assembling the album went fairly quickly once I had printed, cut and inked my  journaling paragraphs. I adhered patterned paper to the back of each printed photo collage page, then added the date with number stickers, the journal box, and one embellishment item. Most of the embellishment items were the fronts of Christmas cards that I have saved over the past several years. Here are a couple of examples.

I am so excited to use these card fronts that have been in my stash for a while, just waiting for the right project. Here's one of my favorite card fronts.

There were a few pages where I used different embellishments to reflect something about the day, like these two examples. The first is the day we watched the Fantastic Four movie and the other was our anniversary.

My second project of the week also involved Christmas cards, this time it was the cards we received this year. I've seen quite a few ideas for using Christmas cards on scrapbook layouts. My favorite idea is to use a square punch to save parts of the cards and use them on a layout. I saw this idea last year and am pretty sure it was credited to Ali Edwards. She has several examples in her scrapbook layout portfolio. (I almost got distracted from my Christmas scrapping just scrolling through that gallery of inspiration!) Recently I have enjoyed Sue's layout and Cheri's layout, both of which use the square punch idea.

I started with a Christmas themed paper that's been in my stash for at least five years. I knew I wouldn't use this pre-printed layout, however I really liked the border so I decided to cover the middle with cardstock and use that as my base for the Christmas cards.

 Here's my layout with cards and photos from 2010.

And one more Christmas layout, this one highlighting our Christmas decorations from 2007. I totally scraplifted the idea, the title, and the layout design from this post by S on her blog Snaps and Snippets.

Anyone else still working on Christmas layouts? I think I'm done for now, however I did order prints (and a couple of enlargements) of some of my favorite photos from December that will likely crop up in layouts from time to time.