My Christmas Album-The Base Pages

This year, instead of my usual December Daily, I decided to sign up for Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas class. I really want this Christmas to be recorded a little more deeply and not be so much of a play-by-play kind of album. I'm really getting excited about it. It starts on December first and goes through January 6th. The other cool thing about this class is the fact that it's a perpetual kind of class. You pay once and you're in for life. :)


I've been poking around the forums a bit and there are a lot of other gals on there who have done it before and some of them have been doing this for a few years now! It seems like a really great bunch and I'm pretty sure I'll come out of this with a few new friends. ;)


So, on to my album. I decided on an 8x8 format for it this year. Bigger than I've done in the past with my December Daily albums but, I'm hoping to have a lot more journaling. This size should give me enough room without overwhelming me. Here is the album I chose, a cloth covered D-ring album from American Crafts in Cardinal.

I'm going with a kraft, cream and red color theme this year. I've done just Christmas themed product and all one line before but this is my first color theme. It's nice because I've been able to dig through my stash and pull out some seriously ancient paper! Scenic Route, anyone?


These are the base pages I've cut so far. I've got a little trick I'll share a bit further down for how I'm saving a bit of money even with having 8x8 pages. But first, some simple base pages. I've got a little stack of kraft and cream pages here. The cream is actually a metallic cream from American Crafts and it was a screamin' good deal! I picked up a 25 pack at Tuesday morning a year ago for $2.99. Score!


The red candy cane paper is from my scrap stash and is from one of last year's My Mind's Eye Christmas lines called Holly Jolly. The other sheet is from the Amy Tangerine line that I won on the American Crafts blog earlier this year.

Now, here's how I was able to stretch my paper a bit and get two 8x8 background pages from one piece of patterned paper and the scraps from my cream and craft pages. First up, he's a little shot of the way I cut my 12x12s into 8x8s. Not terribly ground breaking but you can see that I'm left with one 12x4 piece and one 8x4 piece. All I did was take my chosen patterned paper and cut a four inch strip off of it, just like the original. But then, instead of cutting off another 4" strip, cut the 8" x 12" piece in half. This will give you two sheets of 8"x6" from your one sheet of paper. Now, grab a couple 4"x8" pieces of your solid cardstock leftover from before, border punch one 8" side of your patterned paper and then adhere them together. Here I used a sheet from The Girl's Paperie Twig & Tinsel line (my most favorite Christmas line of all time!) and my leftover cardstock scraps!.

Here I did the same thing with another sheet from Twig & Tinsel and my leftover cream scraps. This method will get you three base pages out of one sheet of cardstock and one sheet of patterned paper and you'll still have a couple scraps left over for embellishing!

Here's the rest of my pages and the lines I used. This is one of the ancients I referred to, it's from Scenic Route (RIP!) and it's from the Garland line.

Here's another sheet from that line. (I've got a bit of a snowflake theme going on!)

And, another one from Scenic Route, I think this is the Roxbury line.

This next one has the leftovers from the above pages adhered to a piece of Scenic Route's Liberty line. It's actually a 4th of July line but the colors work amazingly well together! I cut the Liberty paper like I did the previous pages but the scrap is actually the 12x4 piece cut down to 8x12 and then cut in half lengthwise so I had two pieces of 8x2. I cut a piece of cream 4x8 in half the same way and border punched the edges and then used it to adhere the two patterned pieces together. By doing this I got five pages out of three sheets of paper. :)

This last page uses another scrap from my stash (more My Mind's Eye) that just wasn't quite tall enough to make a up an 8x8 page. So, I grabbed one of the leftover Girl's Paperie pieces and adhered it to the top.

Finally, I've got quite the stash of divided page protectors and cut a few different styles to be either 8x8(the two on the left) or 8x6(the one on the right). So, with all these, I should have enough pages to get started. I've got more of the cream and kraft if I should need a few more pages. I think there are 36 or 37 journaling prompts and I've got 33 regular pages. I'm getting some embellishments and such premade as well and I'll share those later.

Are you doing a Christmas/Holiday album this year? If you are, please post a link in the comments, I'd love to see it! :)