December 2011 as practice for my new obsession*

*VERY long post with MANY pictures. Don't say I didn't warn you!
I used to be a scrapbooker. A VERY long time ago.
The older kids have decent scrapbooks up until their early teen years.
Emily has a couple of years.
Jaxon's has...umm...a picture of the positive pregnancy test and the ultrasound that showed he was a boy.
Oy!
I seriously dropped the ball.
Then came blogging. I thought this would be a great way to easily keep documenting our family's day to day life.
I planned to blog faithfully and then have a printed book made of the blog posts every year.
So far, not one printed book.
Nada, zip, zilch.
Blogger, my family is counting on YOU to safeguard those memories. Don't let them down!
At least it's here though, if the kids want to thumb through their memories. Right?
The problem with that is that I also like to collect memorabilia of our experiences. Maps of places we've been, brochures, scraps of this and that. Know what I mean? And there's not a great way to incorporate those bits and pieces into the blog. I suppose I could scan them in and post them. But I don't.
For a couple of months now I've been kind of itching to go back to pen and paper scrapping.
The kids just love going through those old books. Lately it has been so much fun to look through them and compare the grandbabies now with their moms at the same ages and stages.
But I just can't get into doing it like the old days. It was just too cutesy, trendy, expensive, time and space consuming and frankly, kind of stressful. Making pages that match pictures. Keeping it all in order and keeping up. ugh!
I know that digital scrapbooking is all the rage now too. But even that is still kind of more of the same to me.
I have friends who do it and love it and are really talented with it. But it just isn't me.
So then I thought maybe journaling would be the way to go. Hmm....much more intriguing to me.
I was busy, busy, busy getting ready for Christmas so I kind of put it in the back of my head for a beginning of the year project.
And then...THEN! I stumbled across this blog.
I stayed up till 1 or 2 or some crazy time in the morning reading through her blog. Very cool lady with a seemingly very cool life. But I was especially intrigued by her homemade journals. Just GORGEOUS things that I wanted so badly to reach through the screen and just start digging through.
I noticed on the sidebar that she has some online classes available for learning how to make those amazing books! So I signed up for the Remains of The Day classes. And then proceeded to go crazy because I didn't have time to take the classes till after Christmas.
But I had been inspired enough by what I did see to start a little practice run using an old photo album I had kicking around. I used it for sticker storage WAY back when I did scrapbooking.

So in between the chaos of preparing for Christmas (BTW I failed miserably at keeping Christmas calm and simple this year. Miserably. Christmas day was awesome but the weeks leading up to it? Not so much.) I proceeded to makeover that little album to test out the style and see if it felt as right to me as it seemed.
I stole moments here and there to get it ready to become our December 2011 book.
I finished it today.
And I was right. This style is totally ME. Kinda messy, kinda random, kinda scrappy and just so visually tempting to me. And there is also fabric and sewing! Jackpot!
I CANNOT wait to make an actual Remains of the Day journal. It's going to be so much better than this!
I've already tried my practice book out on two of the kids, Emily and Crystal, and they seemed to love flipping through the pages and discovering the tucked away things. Maybe they're just playing along with mom's latest thing, humoring me, but I think they really did enjoy it.
And now I'll show it to you. Ready?
Click on the pictures to enlarge, if you're so inclined.

my shabby, scrappy December 2011 family journal

It's a little messier than necessary. LOL But I love it and it was so much fun. I'm glad I did a little test run because I learned a lot.
Not the least of which is that computers have been the ruin of my handwriting skills. But I'll soon be back in practice. :)
Okay, I'm off to begin the real thing now! The family probably doesn't really NEED dinner. Right?