Freebie Friday - Persnickety Prints Christmas Print

When I first got into the digital scrapbooking world, I found Persnickety Prints, their blog and their awesome freebies. Lots of digital paper and cute elements offered to their customers for free! Sweet!

Black and white is a theme in my Christmas spreads, so I loved this chalkboard printable for my Project Life album! I'm going to scale it down to a 3''x4'' card.

Get yours HERE.

Christmas Layouts Part I

I'm guest blogging over at One Little Bird later this month and I can't wait to show you the fun spread I made with the There's Something About Merry papers, elements and journaling cards. I normally don't use many embellishments, but since I decided not to do a December Daily album this year, I went a little more festive. And I really like it! Here's a sneak peek I shared on Instagram:

The layouts with a lot of black and white tend to be some of my favorite so I was happy to see a lot of black and white in this Christmas set! 

I've also worked on another Christmas layout using some Ali Edwards supplies: 

Man, if I could use a wood card in every layout, I would. I just love the warmth the wood brings. The right side of this layout is still a work in progress. I'm trying out Design Q (!?) with three 4x4 squares and four 6x4 rectangles so we'll see how it goes.

Note to Self: Let it Go! (like Elsa!)

Thanksgiving 2014 was my chance to shine! I've secretly wanted to host Thanksgiving for years, but didn't want to seem too eager. So when it was going to be small scale celebration this year with just the four from my family, my parents and two brothers, I decided to step up and take my place as hostess! ;-) It amazes me every year how we put hours and $$ into preparing this dinner and then everyone scarfs down the food in 15 minutes and heads back to watch football! Yet we keep doing it and I guess we like it? What about sitting around and smiling warmly at each other like I see on holiday movies or at the end of sitcoms!?

At the end of the day on Thanksgiving, I sat down and scrolled through my IG feed and looking at everyone's Thanksgiving pictures and I started to get down on myself! I was so busy hosting and cooking and cleaning and decorating that I felt that I hadn't taken enough photos to record it all! Oh no! Especially when my sister, who is training to be a missionary in another state, asked for a play by play of Thanksgiving and lots of pictures! Honestly, I felt like I had failed in that category (and my stuffing, that was a big fail).

BUT then I sat down a few days later to see what I had, and you know what!? I had done just fine! I had plenty to work with. The day was accurately captured and I was happy. And it just made me realize that even if you don't take a picture when you wanted to, it'll be ok. You have other pictures. You can tell other stories. All is not lost. Let it go and move on. So I'm going to keep that in mind this December. I hope we can all pick something that's looming over our heads and just let it go this season.

So with all that being said, here's my layout from Thanksgiving week. Due to circumstances that are too boring to write out, I used an insert (a cut down Design B) for the non-Thanksgiving part of the week and used a Design A full page for Thanksgiving:

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!