For the last 4 or more years, I have done a Christmas Album. All of them have ended up being spiral bound, each year growing thicker than the year before. This last holiday season, I took Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas class and attempted to incorporate her class prompts and ideas into my usual album. 

I start my album with Thanksgiving, as it is the start of the season for our family. It just seems right to me, so I do it. The Journal Your Christmas class doesn't start until the first day of December. What I did to make it work in my album is do the cover page, the title page, etc in accordance with the class and then added in my Thanksgiving page right away after the title and cover page. 

I did follow along, and take photos everyday according to the class prompts but could not keep up with the actual creating until way after the holidays. I got the cover, and the first page or so finished and then I didn't have any more time. I spent months working on this album, stealing time here and there until mid-summer when I finally felt like I had it all completed.

Because I always do this album, I have certain things that I have always captured and want to include in the album. With Shimelle's class, the additional pages of content that I did made this album 3x the normal size for me. I am incredibly happy with the way that it turned out, but don't think I could do it again, as it took me so long and took so many pages. Because I could not fit into the normal one spiral bound album, (which is actually pretty typical for me--- I usually end up combining 2 together on one spiral) I ended up ripping out the spiral and actually using the 2inch red rings in place of the spirals. It was a pain to transfer all of the pages that I had completed at that point into the rings, I wish I had thought of it right away, but It makes the album work out so much better. It is so thick! 

I found during the process of creating this album, that I don't like the vintage christmas products, darker colors and off color greens and reds. I really do like the traditional red and green. Fire Engine Red, and Kelly Green.  and the colors from them, like the varied pinks, lime greens, etc. I just love it. As you can see from every page of this album. In addition to finding a love for those colors, I found a new love for circle punches. Circles in general. I hand cut so many circles and rings. I love the color gradient rings and circles. AND I fell in love with different textured papers, the flocked in particular is a favorite. On pretty much every page of this album you will find Doodlebug Products. The colors, textures and styles just worked right into this mix so well. I also used a lot of the Ki Memories holiday collection from last year and years past. They have at times included a pink in their collections and I tend to horde the papers and products I like best, so I can use them in more than one year's worth of books. Because I punched so much and tend to NOT fill a page with a patterned paper I am able to keep a lot of scraps of my favorite papers. Since it doesn't take a lot of paper to punch a small circle, I have a lot of scraps left over from this year for my next year's album. 

I have not included every page of this book. I tried to include as many of the Journal Your Christmas pages as I could. For those pages, I used a digital Kit from Erica, that was numbers in circles. On all of the class prompt pages, there is one of these numbers to reflect the number of the prompt that I created the page for. Some of the prompts are simply tags or little pages that I added to the album in between other pages. I really enjoyed adding these little parts and pieces in the album. Some of the prompts-- 4 and 8 for example, are made up of multiple pages. Each page is tiny pages or pages made from photos that I punched the edge holes on and created a stacked journal of sorts in between the larger album pages. I journaled A LOT in this album. On everything it seemed. 

And I pulled products from everywhere for this. Tags, acrylic album pages, sheer album pages, chipboards, papers, 3d stickers and so many letter stickers its not even funny! I adore letter stickers. (page 10 has one letter sticker missing, please ignore that. must go on a hunt to find that missing w that fell off). I used a 8x8 Teresa Collins transparency to create a pocket (photo 19), I layered the transparency and a piece of vellum with the cardstock I wanted to back it, and then ran the 3 sides through my sewing machine to create the pocket. The cover, and tree on the inside cover are designs that I had been creating with my sewing machine to decorate my house, I made copies of those and attached them to my album. 

In every one of my holiday albums I have one element that I use on EVERY page in the album. This year it was the verb stickers from Heidi Swapp. Every page has one somewhere on it. There may be one or 2 exceptions in the beginning, but otherwise, I put them on every page and incorporated them into the design and composition of the page. 

Not all of my albums have turned out this way, and I think there will not be another like this one. It took an amazingly long time to create, used more products than I have ever used before from so many different sources. It was amazing and fun to create. My family loves it. Which was my purpose. :)