My friend Deborah Mahnken has been doing Shimelle Lane's Journal Your Christmas for years & her books look fabulous. My journey to this project has been slow indeed. I made a book with Deborah in 2010 and actually got 6 days done. 2011 saw me do nothing, 2012 make the base for the book and 2013 I took a book binding class with Deb that built another base to a book. That was the catalyst to triumph! I actually signed up this year and started working on these books. My idealistic mind had me working on all the books at once- on the same day at the same time. Right! That quickly became too confusing so I settled on working on 2012. As of today I am on Day 28! I don't have my covers done but I am saving that for last. My book is huge & chunky which I totally love. I am a bit worried I won't be able to fit it in the binding but time will tell.
A bit about the class. First off, for one sign up fee you are in and can participate every year and have access to all the previous information. That is amazing!!! So many classes give you a finite time and you are locked out but Shimelle is obviously a very generous spirit! She has PDF prompts everyday that arrive in your email which encourage you to watch, listen and taste the holiday. This year she also had a "focus" prompt to help you with your photo taking. There are some awesome tips and lessons on camera apps, SLR settings...I really appreciated all the work that was put into these PDF's. There is also a forum where folks post their pages and that is a great place to go for inspiration.
Ok so here we go. I will post a couple of days at a time-enjoy!!!
Day 1: So it begins!!! Inspired by Deb we stenciled over a glassine envelope (love this look) and used it as a pocket to hold tags and photos. My oldest son was in his high school play so that got my December memory journey off to a good start.
For most of this book I captured whatever was going on that day. I did also follow some of the prompts that Shimelle posted but as I am working on last year I didn't always have the photo or journaling to go with it...
The great thing about pockets is if you have multiple things going on that day it gives you the extra storage space you need in a cute package!! Plus it helps add to the chunkiness of the book-love!
The back side of Day1: I followed a Shimelle prompt and had a photo of our tree. I tend to work chronologically but this book helped me to be less rigid about that. I mean it isn't going to matter even 3 years from now if the story isn't on the exact day. The important thing is to get the story & photos archived.
Day 2: I didn't have any photos for this day so I went with a prompt of Shimelle's "a countdown memory". I switched it up a bit and put our Christmas photo from years ago in there along with the story of counting down to my husband being home for our holiday. I used a 7 gypsies card from my stash for this page-amazing how happy it makes me to use the products I have been "saving" for years!
So far so good, loving this class!!!!
