Welcome New Year!

Finally, finally a little time to play.  I love December with all the joy filled events that keep us busy and happy but January is not my favorite.  It's personal to our family really, but it's a tough month for mama and her littles.  See, daddy has to work ALL MONTH LONG!  It means we still have some Christmas decorations up that won't come down for weeks.  It means that while everyone else is back to "routine" and crossing things off the list, we feel like we are forever in catch up mode. All those things forgotten during December are normally taken care of in January, but see, mine is even busier than December because I am left to fend for myself, the children, and the homefront while my husband endures endless hours at the office. Oh well, life will go on but let's just say it's hard to get much crafting done in January! 
However, today I forgo Sunday football in order to do a simple project and enjoy the process.  I had yet to capture our New Year's Eve celebration and so that was a great place to start.  For the last several years we have simply stayed at home and celebrated with dear friends.  We let the kids have a party, put them to bed, and then spend some time as adults.  This year, we were all yawning by 11pm but hey, that's ok.  We had a nice relaxing time together.  Yes, those kind of friends where the excitement level doesn't matter because we were together.

Anyhow, I was looking through my ephemera from the Favorite Things collection and realized I had a lot of it!  So I thought, let's use some circles for fun and I still had a sheet of the circle paper so yeah!  And It was colorful so I just went with it.  I dotted with colorshine, used lots of color, and put together a fun filled page about our NYE.  It's a bit different for me, but I love how it turned out!

Planner Love

Planners are a huge rage right now.  Have you noticed?  It seems like every paper crafting company is releasing a planner for the year along with plentiful accessories.  I have a confession...I love organization and I'm a complete geek for office supplies.  So a pretty planner - yeah that's right up my alley. 
I've always maintained a printed planner despite the electronic options I also use with my family.  I knew for 2015 I wanted something a bit different and when I started seeing previews of new planner releases a few months ago I was VERY excited.  So what did I get?  Well...

The Heidi Swapp 2015 memory planner in black and white.  And I love it!  I had pre-ordered mine from Studio Calico so it arrived just before year end, ready for me to begin in January.  Although, the planner doesn't come with numbers on it so you really could use it any year.  I also got one of their limited addition stamp sets and have really enjoyed using it to fill out my pages.

What I loved most about this one was that there is plenty of space to write things down, it has binders to add more pages or remove them, and it's really pretty!

I also enrolled in the Capture30 class taught by Heidi Swapp at Big Picture Classes.  It's been great to focus on some new goals and get organized to accomplish them this year.  

At the beginning of the class we wrote down 15 things about ourselves and tucked them away in a pretty little envelope.  At first I really didn't want to do this but then I dived in and actually had a lot of fun.  It will be really great to look back on this at the end of the year.  I have a feeling these are the things that are not going to change much.

I've also formulated a goal, documented the areas to focus on, noted possible limitations, and (gulp) wrote out an action plan.  Yes, wow!  I felt so good after getting that done and by tucking it right into the planner I have easy access to remind myself.  And as the year goes on, it's easy to change if need be. 
Another exercise encouraged us to identify the items we needed to do each day to feel successful - to head to bed with out a list running through our minds.  I wrote down five things on a card and move that along with my day at a glance pages as a useful reminder.  And they really do work. 
After completing this exercise I realized I also wanted a place to just pat myself on the back.

I found an old mini memory file, trimmed it a bit, and stitched it up so that I could slide big journal cards in and out of the top.  Inside I've already written down a few things I'm proud of myself for doing this year.  It will be a great place to go to for focus and encouragement.
If you haven't thought about goals in some time, I'd really encourage you to give it a try!   It doesn't have to be for the year.  Any ole time will do but I know you will be thankful you spent some time thinking about it.

December Mini Album Recap

 Ah December.  You are wonderful but you are FULL.  I think I would find January to be a breath of fresh air, all light and full of promise, if it weren't for the fact that my husband is very busy at work each January and more falls on my plate than usual around the home front.  However, no matter the busy nature of it, I love the many traditions and fun events that arrive each December.  And so I present a recap of my December daily-ish album.  ( I love the cute name of December Daily but I don't do daily). 

I hoard purchase craft supplies at a good deal when I see them.  So this little number was an old Heidi Swapp binder that was marked down at Michael's for about $3.  Crazy right?!?  Well, I didn't have a plan for it but when I was thinking about my December album I thought that might be a great thing to use.  I painted the cover with acrylic paint, added stamping, and some embellishment.  For this project I ordered some of the new Pink Paislee Merry & Bright collection but also mixed in some left over items from the Heidi Swapp Believe collection I used last year.  I love how well they mixed together.

 The binder came with divider pages that I removed but for this one.  I thought the music notes were perfect and I decorated a cute intro page.

 Of course, we always start out the year decorating after Thanksgiving!  We got a new tree this year so it was fun to put that upstairs and move or other one down to the basement for the kids to decorate.  That is where they play a lot so we thought it might be fun to have it there for them to enjoy.

 They even decorated the dog!

 And of course our Elf arrived as well.  I really enjoyed mixing and matching different sizes and styles of pocket pages within this album. It created fun interest and allowed me to work with many different items and photo sizes. 

 Those cute tabs and the beautiful craft tags were frequent in my album.  I used the tags to do most of my journaling!

 This year I decided to write down the holiday movies that the boys enjoyed.  It's fun to introduce them to classics but seriously all they wanted to do was watch the Elf on the Shelf movie.  Like five times a day.  In. a. row.

 And to increase the FULLness of the month, our oldest son has his birthday!  The big 4 this year and so I added in a few non traditional colors to set apart his birthday pages but I did enjoy using the Merry & Bright collection papers to keep it consistent.

 So that is just an overview and peek at the album.  What I love most about it is how simple I kept it.  It was still fun but very manageable to work on during the month.  It was also great to show a few friends who think they have no time for this craftiness thing just how simple and cute it can be.  Until next year...