Christmas in August?!

So, I took a wee little break from the ol' bloggie.  No, I wasn't off powering through and completing my Christmas gift list, as the title to this post may imply.  One day, I WILL proudly add the task of completing my Christmas shopping and wrapping months in advance, to my own personal resume, though!  However, I was working on some scrapbook pages, continuing the planning and prep for our big guy's birthday bash, and might have taken a little trip with the hubs to Chicago (more details and pictures to come in another post!)!  Add all that fun stuff to: filling out loads of paperwork for the upcoming school year, ordering school uniforms, shopping for school supplies, and squaring away all of the allergy forms I have to fill out for our big guy, and that adds up to ZERO time for the blog.  I know, I know, you don't want to hear the excuses, you come here for the pages and the pictures...so let's get on with it! ;)

I am certainly not one to scrapbook chronologically.  For me, scrapbooking is as much as about the creative process as it is the memory keeping.  So, that often means that my current projects are inspired by an idea, a picture or in many cases ... some new supplies.  And some fun, inspiring, new scrapbook supplies are just what started my creative wheels moving towards creating these most recent pages.  Add that to the fact that I had spotted the latest My Mind's Eye sketch challenge on their blog, and thought I'd give it a try and play along.  Here is the sketch:

And here is what I did with it:

I spotted MME's new '12 days of Christmas' line and had to snatch some up immediately.  The colors in this line are just so bright and fun, and I absolutely loved all of the diecut icons that went along with it.  Admittedly, despite my hesitation to scrapbook 'in order', I am fairly caught up on Christmas pictures, but I knew this line would be a perfect compliment to a darling picture of Justin from last December.  Here are a couple of detail shots; a closer look at the journaling:

And a peek at the top left of the page.  I LOVED those little peppermints and couldn't resists embellishing the centers of them, in this case with a button and some of the yummy coordinating bakers twine:



This line was just so fun, I couldn't stop at one page, and used all my extras, plus some added supplies, to create the next page:

This one features a picture of Justin on his very first Christmas, back in 2009.  I wanted the title to have the same fun look and color scheme as the patterned papers, so I simply typed it into my word processing program, selected a coordinating font, and changed the colors of the letters to mimic those seen throughout the patterned paper.  Here's a closer look:

I loved and wanted to use so many of the patterned papers, but at the same time I didn't want the page to take away from that sweet photo.  So, I used the circles, to highlight a variety of the papers, while still keep the focus on the picture and the memory. 

I will be back soon, to share some school pages I've been working on.  Thanks for stopping by!