Days of December: Favorite TV Shows & Movies

We have watched so much Big Bang Theory this month. It's been kinda crazy. (If you haven't watched Big Bang Theory, check it out ... it's absolutely hilarious!) My son got a couple of seasons of the show for his birthday and we've been pretty focused. It's been fun - and such a big part of our month that I wanted to document it. We didn't even have time to watch many Christmas shows ... just a couple of Christmas movies (Elf and Home Alone). And then, my daughter became crazed with the movie Pitch Perfect. I haven't seen it yet (I'm sure I'll watch it with her soon), but my son gave her the movie for Christmas and within just a couple of days she watched it seven - yes SEVEN - times (sometimes by herself for our holiday car rides, with her cousins on both sides of the family ... lots of times).

Anyway this is regular life so I want to remember it!

For these pages I used:
Simply Tiffany Studios Heart of the Holidays Template Foundation Pack
Katie Pertiet Fa La La Paper Pack and Simple Spots 3
Pattie Knox (popcorn)
LivE Designs Needs + Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic and Channel

Days of December: a 2nd part to our early gift opening

This is partially a re-do/partially a new set of pages for my Days of December album. I had initially paired up the photos of the kids by the tree with my Christmas tree page but I decided I wanted to show my ornaments and decorations alongside my tree so I had to make some changes. I like this better. It makes more sense to me for placement in my book. (Details, details ... I know!)

This is a second set of pages for our early gift opening with just the 4 of us at home. It was a fun night. I like the large photo because it's such a normal everyday photo. It shows my messy table (that's reality) ... it shows my daughter being dramatic and funny ... it shows my son just being cool in his shorts and t-shirt (the style of clothes he wears every single day regardless of the weather). Normal stuff. Love it!

Days of December ... it's coming together quickly.

For these pages I used:
Simply Tiffany Studios: Heart of the Story Template Foundation Pack
Karla Dudley: Heart of the Holidays
Mye de Leon: Vintage Christmas
LivE Designs: Needs+Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic & Channel

Days of December: New Year's Eve - Party like it's 2013!

These will be the last pages that will be in my Days of December album. It was New Year's Eve ... that's it for December. (I still have pages to create, but chronologically these will be the last pages!)

For these pages I used:
Tiffany Tillman: Heart of the Holidays Template 8
Karla Dudley: Heart of the Holidays
Mye de Leon: Vintage Christmas
Cosmo Cricket: Social Club
Katie Pertiet: Linen Buttons
LivE Designs: Needs+Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic & Channel

Days of December: My Daughter's "Just Because" Christmas party

My daughter wanted to throw a party "just because." Just because she wanted to have some of her friends over. Just because it was Christmas. Just because she wanted to have fun. She's so sweet. I sure do love that girl!

She hosted her party after Christmas but before New Year's Eve. Lots of girls were traveling with their families for the holidays but there were 4 girls in town who could come over for the evening. A perfect number of kids. They had a blast!

FYI ... the other day, before her party, she came up to me and told me how much she loved me and how much she appreciated that we let her have "just because" parties. Awww! I love that! I told her she and her friends are awesome, she can have lots of parties!

For these pages I used:
Tiffany Tillman: Heart of the Holidays Template 17
Karla Dudley: Heart of the Holidays
Mye de Leon: Vintage Christmas
LivE Designs: Needs+Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic & Channel

Days of December: It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

I'm finishing up the last few pages for my Days of December album. OK, I still have a fair number of pages left to create, but not TOO many! I've made a big dent already! This is a little bit of a re-do. I had already made the tree page and had paired it with photos of my kids in front of the tree. I decided to change up the order and do a page of some of the details of Christmas decorations around the house and place that by the tree page. (We like to remember what room we decide to put the tree in every year - and besides I always LOVE lighted tree photos!) I thought it would be fun years down the road to be able to look back and see some of the details of how our house look at Christmas time with the decorations sitting about.

Just this Christmas my mom and sister were looking at a heritage album I had created of our growing up years. (It was an album spanning about 20 years.) What were some of the things I was hearing as they looked at the book? Hmmm... look at that catalog Santa Claus ... look at those decorations ... look at that wallpaper ... look at the xxx (a bunch of stuff!). It was a reminder that the little things bring back so many memories. So ... I'm going to make a point of including more "stuff" and "surroundings" in my albums! I want the kids to be able to look back and remember that I always hung their old (little kid) Christmas art projects on the wall every holiday and other little family traditions, as well as some of the little doo-dads (yup, that's the word I'm using!) we have sitting around the house. Little stuff!

For these pages I used:
Karla Dudley's Heart of the Holidays
Mye de Leon's Vintage Christmas
Katie Pertiet's Letterbox Holiday Corners, Buttoned Up Holiday and Christmas Blendables
The fonts were Century Gothic and Channel

Photo Book - 2012 Photo A Day Album

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly offers exclusive photobook layouts so you can make your book just the way you want.

I've done it. My 2012 Photo A Day album is on order. I'm so excited! This was year THREE of this project. and I absolutely LOVE it! Now that this book is on order I'm ready to start 2013!

Days of December: Christmas with the Unzen Family

I'm plugging away on the final pages of my Days of December album for 2012. I'm enjoying the process.  Today I'm sharing with you pages I created over the last couple of days of our Christmas Day celebration with my husband's side of the family. Aren't the holidays wonderful and busy and fun?!

Here are each of the 2 page spreads side by side:

Here are the closer-up versions:

I created these pages using in large part Design by Dani's Mistletoe collection.

P365+1 2012: December 30-31 ... the FINAL pages of my 2012 POTD album!

This is it. I'm done. I've completed the last pages for my 2012 photo-a-day album. I'm going to upload these last pages to Shutterfly this afternoon and send the book off to print. (I'm doing a happy dance here! I'm always so excited waiting to get my book in hand!!)

With this year being a leap year I had to end my book up a little differently (there were 2 days in Week 53 instead of only 1). It just made for an extra page in the book (more pictures, that can't be bad!). So ... here's my Week 53 page (December 30 & 31), 2 pages for the fun New Years Eve party we went to last night AND, as the last page of my album, my traditional family photo taken as we head out the door for the New Year's Eve Party.

Happy New Year everyone!

P365+1: Album cover pages & intro page

I'm almost there! Only 2 days left of 2012. I hope to order my book on Tuesday so I thought I'd better get going and design the intro page and the book cover, back and spine. Here goes!

Intro page:

Book's front cover:

Book's back cover:

P365+1: Week 52: December 23 - December 29, 2012 + my DD's party

Well, this is almost it for my photo-a-day pages for 2012. Only 2 more days to go. I can't believe it! It sure has been a fun project. I'm now completing my THIRD year of photo-a-day. I love it! I enjoy looking back at these books now already, but I think years down the road it'll be so very fun to look back and see how we lived our lives these days.

Today I'm sharing with you photos from last week (which includes Christmas). Since I already created (and posted) individual Christmas pages for this book, the photos for the 24th and 25th on these pages aren't necessarily Christmas-y. There will be plenty of Christmas photos in this book though!

Last night my daughter had a few of her friends over for a girls party. They had a great time. It was fun listening to them laughing downstairs. So ... I wanted to made an individual page for her party as well.

Like I said ... only 2 more days to go for 2012. Happy early New Years!

Days of December: Christmas with the May Family

We spent 2 days with my side of the family over the Christmas holidays. We celebrated up north at my sister's house (the "resort"). We were were all together Saturday night until about 8pm Christmas Eve night. I got TONS of pictures over the two days so, besides my two "standard" shall we say gift opening pages, I just had to put together 2 more pages to showcase some of the other things we all did while hanging out together. It was a great holiday!

FYI, I'm getting ready to start my photo-a day project for 2013. I'm strongly considering taking a totally new approach to the project this year and doing a Project Life style album so I loosely fashioned these multi-photo pages in a Project Life style pages. I'm trying to test it out to see if it works for me. I really liked that I could add a bunch of random journaling and stories to these multi-photo pages! I guess I'll just wait and see what approach I take. But, since 2013 is only a couple of days away, I'd really better make some decisions don't you think? LOL!

Here are the pages side-by-side as they'll look in the book:

Here are the pages closer up:

For these pages I used a variety of Echo Park Christmas kits. 

Days of December: My family's early gift opening

Hi. Me again! Here's another set of pages for my Days of December album. This one is my family's gift opening. We opened our gifts to each other pretty early this year ... Friday evening ... because we were going to be out of town for the long weekend for the holiday and we didn't want to bring our gifts with us. Also ... we certainly didn't want to wait and open our presents late. That just wouldn't fly with the kids. LOL! I think I'm still going to do another two pages from our evening of opening gifts and hanging out, but then that'll be it. After this it's on to the family gatherings over Christmas Eve and Christmas.

I'm really enjoying creating my Days of December album!

Here's my list of digi supplies for these pages:

Tiffany Tillman Heart of the Holidays 8

Karla Dudley Heart of the Holidays kit

Mye de Leon Vintage Christmas kit

Creashens Oh Joy kit

LivE Designs Needs + Wants Date Stamps

Fonts: Century Gothic and Channel

Days of December: Visiting Bentleyville, Tour of Lights (4 pages!)

We love to visit Bentleyville (a Tour of Lights in Duluth, Minnesota). I think we've been going to Bentleyville for the past 5 or so years in a row already. It's really quite wonderful. Bentleyville started out as a guy (with the last name of Bentley) decorating his yard in Cloquet with Christmas lights. His light display was really popular and eventually he moved to a different house in Carlton, Minnesota to accommodate the crowds. He even bussed people to see his light display. It got so crazy popular that eventually the City of Duluth offered to have him show his beautiful lights in Duluth by the lake. Reading the stats, I believe they had over 150,000 visitors  last year. It's amazing. They will accept donations (which we of course always do). He gets TONS of volunteers and offers free hot chocolate, hot apple cider, popcorn, cookies and even marshmallows to roast over the fire. Santa and Mrs. Claus are even at Bentleyville and the younger kids who visit Santa even get free ski hats. Bentleyville is just such a fun way to ring in the holidays! We usually try to go Thanksgiving weekend but this year we went right before Christmas ... on December 22nd. Later than usual but still amazing!

So ... here are my 4 (yup ... FOUR!) pages for Bentleyville ...

Here are the closer-up, 12x12 views:

Here's a list of the digi supplies I used on these pages:

Tiffany Tillman Heart of the Holidays Templates 8 and 20
Karla Dudley Heart of the Holidays kit
Mye de Leon Vintage Christmas kit
Katie Pertiet Linen Buttons and Buttoned Up Holidays
Amanda Dykan Whimsical Rain (glitter stuff)
Scrap Girls Glitter Tree
LivE Designs Needs+Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic and Channel

Days of December: Winter Wonderland (snowmobiling!)

It looked beautiful outside Christmas Eve Day - but it was really really cold out! (Minus 5 degrees I believe.) The kids decided they wanted to go snowmobiling so Scott and Tim went outside and worked for over an hour to get their snowmobiles up and running for the first time this year. Thanks guys! All six of the cousins went out for a ride on the lake and then when the kids came in Sheldin, Karen and Courtney went out for a ride. What fun!

Personally ... I was really happy running out and snapping a few photos and then going back in the warm house!

The supplies for these pages are:

Tiffany Tillman: Heart of the Holidays Template 8
Karla Dudley: Heart of the Holdays
Mye de Leon: Vintage Christmas
Nancie Rowe Janitz: Festive Borders
Katie Pertie: Capped Holiday and Capped Winter
LivE Designs: Needs + Wants Date Stamps
Fonts: Century Gothic & Channel

Days of December - O Christmas Tree & an attempt at a "portrait" of the kids

I've got a bunch of pages started to commemorate our Christmas celebrations over the last couple of days. Now it's time to finalize them. I'm pretty happy to have gotten so many pages started. My hope is to get my Days of December book off to the printer next week some time. I'm crossing my fingers!

I guess I should be thankful that I can scrap in the car. We had four 2-1/2 hour car ride segments between Christmas celebrations so I used that time to put pictures together for this book. I also grabbed a few minutes here and there during the holiday when the family would all be either napping or reading a book (we were gone for 4 days, naps were needed!). Realistically though most of the time was the drive time. Either way ... I've got 7 (seven!) more two page spreads started! (Good thing I'm keeping all these pages pretty simple!)

So ... here's the first ...

FYI ... I had hoped to get a good photo of the kids sitting in front of the Christmas tree. I really like the pictures I did get ... but they were far from serious. The kids were in a goofing off mood (I took the pictures shortly before we opened our gifts). I really like the fun pictures better than what I'd been planning actually!

Here's what I used to create these pages:
Tiffany Tillman's Heart of the Holidays Template 6
Karla Dudley's Heart of the Holidays kit
Mye de Leon's Vintage Christmas kit
Nancie Rowe Janitz's Merry Merry Holiday Brush Set
Katie Pertiet's Christmas Blendables
Paislee Press' Adorned Kit
LivE Designs: Needs + Wants Date Stamps
Font: Century Gothic