Michigan Christmas 2011

I hope no one reads this blog hoping to keep up with what's going on with me and Dave, because if so, you will be getting all our news about 6-12 months late!  That is my average for about how long it takes me to get around to scrapping big events, and since it is June that of course means it's time to talk about last Christmas!

Here is the page I just finished of our trip to Michigan last December to spend Christmas with Dave's family. This was a matter of having lots of pictures I wanted to include, yet I really wanted to keep it to a 2-page layout. So I squished them all in. I also had one random 12x12 sheet of really cute paper covered in penguins. I decided to cut out the penguins and assign each one to a member of the family in a border along the bottom. There weren't 12 different penguins, so some people have duplicates, but I did my best to match according to personality :-) 

Besides that, this is a really simple page and it cost me almost nothing besides a little bit of paper and some stickers along the bottom. Easy! 

Gingerbread Houses

Happy weekend! So far I've spent my weekend cleaning up my house (which was really overdue), taking care of a sick doggie, watching a cute family of ducks that live on the lake by my house, and reading this book:

Okay, I know I've read it about 50 times already, but it's just too good. Probably my favorite of the HP books. I got hooked on it again this morning and couldn't do anything else until I finished it. Now I'm tempted to start book 4, but not too tempted since it's one of my least favorites in the series (after #2). 

Here's my layout for today. It's from back in December when we decorated gingerbread houses. I finally overcame my fear of my sewing machine, and did some zigzag stitching. It took a few tries, and I'm still not good at figuring out the right tension, but it worked here! I've always wanted to do that. It's such a fun way to add subtle embellishing. I found a lot of good tips on how to stitch on paper here and here.

The paper is from a fun Paper Studio pack from Hobby Lobby. I really liked the patterns because they didn't scream Christmas, but they still give a Christmas-y feel. The title was done using my Cricut and free fonts I found in various places. 

While You Were Sleeping

While we were in Chicago with Aaron and Megan, we tried to find as many filming locations as we could from the movie While You Were Sleeping. It is one of my family's all-time favorite movies. We always have to watch it around Christmas (usually Christmas Eve). It's become such a tradition for us, that it actually feels weird to watch the movie when it's not Christmas time. I think together my sister and I could quote/act out the entire movie.

Since we had a day to spend in Chicago, I wanted to see as many While You Were Sleeping-sights as possible. Unfortunately I didn't get any shots of the train stations, since you had to pay for a ticket to get into that area (and I'm too cheap for that). We were able to see a few places though--my favorite was the river walk along the Chicago River (if you've seen the movie, it's where Bill Pullman and Sandra Bullock are walking back to Lucy's apartment after delivering the loveseat to Peter's apartment).

I always seem to have a hard time filling the last odd page in a scrapbook album. This one, however, was a perfect end to my 2010-2011 album. I used up some beautiful double-sided paper from October Afternoon (I just discovered their website and all their stuff is so fun!), and I added a little hand-stitching along the bottom, just for fun.

Thank you to Dave, Aaron, and Megan for being really good sports in dealing with my movie nerdiness. 

"Christmas Adam"

Sharing another layout that I did a few weeks ago. These were pictures of our Christmas celebration with my family. Since we were spending the actual Christmas day with Dave's family, my fam was nice and let us open gifts on December 23, or what we've always called Christmas Adam. (If you can't figure out why, it's the day before Christmas Eve.)

For a little explanation of the family traditions going on here: for Christmas lunch we always have appetizer-like food (everyone gets to pick their favorites, and it's always delicious). I try to take a picture of the food every year, and it's fun comparing what changes over the years. The paper my dad is reading is our "family journal" that my sister and I write at least once a year (we try to do it more often... so maybe twice a year). It's mostly full of inside family jokes, but it's always hilarious. Dad's smiling because he hasn't yet gotten to the article we wrote about him. :-)

And now about the scrapbook layout: I had a really fun pack of Christmas-themed paper, and I chose the red and turquoise for a little non-traditional Christmas color. Turns out I happened to have perfect ribbon to match too! The letters are cut out from my Cricut, and the journaling is stamped with brown ink.