Do you wait until January to craft holiday-themed layouts?
I used to stock up on festive Christmas-themed embellishments, papers and memorabilia throughout the month of December, and then go into hiding during the first week of January to complete a marathon scrapbooking session. However, my pages never turned out as well as I would have liked given my time crunch. I felt pressure to slap together holiday memory albums just so I could cross it off my to-do list. What’s more, I was extremely bothered by the idea of working on Christmas scrapbooks when Valentine’s Day was just around the corner.
These days I’ve learned to manage my time a bit better. I now try to design at least one or two layouts per week as various holiday-themed events take place… not two months after the fact. For example, rather than waiting until mid-January to craft a layout highlighting my daughter’s school Christmas concert, I try to assemble the page within a week of the performance when the details of the event are still fresh in my mind. This helps a lot, especially if you are adding journaling blocks to layouts. I find that even if I take notes of the event and place it on my scrapbooking table for future reference, many times I still forget to include cute anecdotes or touching moments I would like to preserve.
If you run into this issue there are ways to fill white space on your layouts. When I forget to jot down notes or I neglect to save a piece of memorabilia from a holiday-themed activity, I supplement with poems or song lyrics that tie into the page design. Classic Christmas poems are generic enough to use on a variety of layouts. Some of my favorites include Another Christmas by the Reverend W. M. Bell, Merry Christmas by Louisa May Alcott and Christmas Bells by Longfellow.