Christmas Memories

Can you believe Christmas has already come and gone!?!? It certainly has been a busy month and with the giant snow storm that left my new, lighted flamingo by my koi pond completely covered in snow, I just lost track of time.

We spent the entire weekend before Christmas digging out, and by losing that weekend to the weather, I became quickly overwhelmed with not much time to get ready for Santa's visit. But Christmas did come with most of our usual traditions.

I did manage to pick up some oysters for our traditional fry on Christmas Eve. I even manged to convince Luke to try one, even though he hates them. Only my mother, Nicky and I enjoy them.

Our tree was beautiful this year - very fat and tall - all adorned with sparkling gold and white velvet ribbons.

All of our stockings were hung on the mantle, waiting for Santa to stuff them full of goodies and surprises. Even the dogs have their stockings up waiting for Bone treats.

Christmas Day brough wonderful gifts, a hearty breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy and time to play with the kids. I had my traditional Christmas afternoon soak in our huge bathtub and then began to prepare the evening meals for our family.

The table was dressed in gold and red this year. Dinner included eighteen guests consisting of both my husband's and my parents.

And after our huge Christmas dinner of Prime Rib, we enjoyed lovely desserts brought over by Aunt Erica.

If I ever get around to scrapping all of these delightful memories, I'll be amazed. Unfortunately I have a Design Team Kit due January 1 (which I haven't started yet) and the colors are brown and blue - all wrong for my Christmas memories, so I may not get started on scrapping this year's Christmas until after the New Year.

Hope your Christmas was filled with old and new traditions and you get time to scrap all of your 2009 memories.

S~

December Design Team - Scrapbooks-Plus

I was the Designer this month for the Scrapbooks-Plus Designe Team. I chose the Christmas Mint and Winter Song papers from SEI for my kits. I gave the other designers the flexibility to chose their own embellishments. My Favorite layout is VISIONS above, but I had such a wonderful time with the kit, I really enjoyed making every layout and project and truly like the results.

This is a great photo I took last winter of my two dogs, Bailey and Maggie, running in the snow. I altered the colors slightly to get the blues of the photo to align with the blue of the paper. I may add glitter to the title when I get it back from the store - still debating.

This is a total scraplift from the February "All About Me" series from Basic Grey. Becky Fleck provided the design; I just reinvented the theme and made a two-pager that tells the story of the many ornaments on our tree.

This is my layout in accordance with my page-map design. The large snowflakes were cut with my Big Kick and Sissix dies.

I made this very cute ribbon bound photo journal as a gift for one of my sisters-in-laws.

It's Snowing!

Except for last year, we have had snow of some sort here in Virginia every year for the past seven years. How do I know this? Because I always scrapbook the first snow! So the dates are recorded in my books. We haven't even had our first frost and my geraniums are still going strong on the front porch. This will be a great backdrop for a layout using Eskimo Kisses! Its a great day to scrap!

Cinderella's Castle - Take Two

Okay, so I made some changes. We all have to sometime! I dropped the memory frame for the subtitle. When I added the flourish, it was just too busy and the supporting title just wasn't worth the effort. I transformed the layout a bit in the process. I cut up a Prima flower and added a green feather and a blue flourish cut with my Big Kick. Kind of reminded me of Tinkerbell (I just couldn't put an actual Tinkerbell sticker or embellishment on one of my pages...call me crazy, but to me that would be "cheating"). I kind of liked the feather so I added a second one under the sheer ribbon on the bottom left. Sort of gave me a sense of balance. I'm happier with it all now. What I liked most was playing with these new Smooch paints. I cut the flourish from glittered paper and the color was all wrong, so I "smooched" them with blue and purple. I used green Smooch to ink the edges of the green papers. Just love this stuff. I bought the "lollipop" line, but they come in a ton of colors. A new favorite toy to play with!