December done and dusted!

I've finished my December 2014 album! Hurrah!
I followed the Journal Your Christmas Prompts throughout December - I love it. It's my version of an Advent Calendar and makes me feel really Christmassy but I kept a December Daily in my PL album this year. This meant I didn't have a separate Journal Your Christmas / December Daily book. I have made a Christmas book every year since 2008 and I really didn't like the thought of not having 2014

I am fairly strict with myself in PL and rarely use loads of photos of the same event, so I had plenty of extra photos I hadn't included. I decided to put all my favourite pictures together in a pictorial 2014 album. Simple, easy, cheap and not a great deal of journaling, but I like how it turned out. I have used up pretty much all my Christmas papers and embellishments too, which makes me happy. (It means I can go shopping this year!!)

These are my steps to creating a no-hassle album with scraps. It would be perfect  for a holiday album as well as Christmas.

1. Choose an album. I went for 8x8 as I think it's a very forgiving size. Big enough to showcase full size pictures but less demanding than a 12x12.

2. Print all the pictures you want. Almost all of them are 6x4, although there are a couple of collages or larger formats.  I printed them with white borders  and just inked the edges so I didn't need to mat them.

 3. Put them in the page protectors in order.
4. Choose backgrounds. I used both sides of the white inserts which came with the album. Much cheaper! I inked every edge with brown Distress Ink and then went through my Christmas stash cutting patterned papers to approx. 7x7.

5. Most of the pictures spoke for themselves but what little journaling I did I either handwrote straight onto the white background or on white paper strips and put into the page protectors with the photo and papers.

6. Now I had all the decision making done, it was easy to create a page or 2 whenever I felt like it. I still had all my Christmas stash in one place from December Daily so all I had to do was arrange the elements and search for some embellishments.
7. Do a few double pagers for variety

 

Here are the rest: