Merry Christmas Eve

I'm not one for scrapbooking Christmas. It's odd, I know, but back when my kids were young, the layouts just filled my albums. I think I got burned out. Today I do a retrospective of the whole month on a layout, then I only scrap the stories that I want to remember. Two stories stuck out: one was Rowan being a Wise Man in the Christmas pageant; you can see that page up on the Fancy Pants Designs blog Miss Fancy Pants today. I'll post that one here next week. The other story was our family tradition of attending every service Christmas Eve. Here's the page I made from that:

I used Fancy Pants Designs' Merry Little Christmas for this page. Since our family sings in many choirs at church, we perform at every service. This last year I took pictures and decided to scrap this page. With a piece of patterned paper as gorgeous as December Daily, I wanted to let that piece shine, so I printed the photos small and designed the page to let the pattern on the bottom stand out. I matted the photos with a banner from the piece of paper called Caroling that I hand cut; I curled the edges to add some dimension.

And the details:

When I hand journal, I draw lines about 1/4 inch apart with a pencil. I journal in pen (I live life on the edge), then hand draw over the lines with a pen, erasing the pencil afterwards. I like the slightly imperfect lines that are evenly spaced. I also did a lot of hand stitching on this page, including the star burst here. A simple addition, but I think it adds a nice touch.

I added die cuts, buttons, and stickers on top of tags which housed the clusters. I did them on opposite sides of the photos for balance.

Thank you for checking out my page! Merry Christmas! In a few days I'll share some of the scrapbooking gifts I sent out this season.