Christmas Picture Outtakes

This first picture is the picture we used for our Christmas cards this year. Of COURSE Maple was in it!

This post would be a little boring if I only shared that one decent picture.  I thought it would be MORE fun to share some of the outtakes from that night!!  We had over 100 pictures from this Christmas picture attempt to choose from, but here are some of the best ones narrowed down:

"Get this thing off my head!!"

 "My sofa over there looks more comfortable than this.."

"Okay momma, last one. You can go put the camera away now."

 

"What is the best way to get down from here..?"

 

"I'm going to make a run for it!"

"SEE YA!"

 

"Okay, I'll keep hugging deddy some more." 

"Can you really believe what these people put me through?"

25 Days of Christmas: Day 18

WHOO. WHAT a day it has been!!!

Luckily, it started out great!  I have been so anxious waiting for our Christmas cards to come in the mail.  Every time I check the shipping status, the delivery date was pushed back a day!  At that rate, our cards were going to be delivered to US on Christmas!  I was getting very frustrated.  Then, this morning as I was getting ready, I heard Maple start barking like crazy.  She was just letting me know that the mailman was stopping by early, and he was dropping off that orange package I'd been waiting for!!

We spent some more time at work today working on decorating our door.  There's a campus-wide door decorating contest for Christmas, and everyone is getting so into it this year!  I didn't get a chance to take pictures today, but I will tomorrow!  After that, I was just doing anything I could to get through the rest of the day, because I knew that waiting for me at home was a huge stack of Christmas cards that weren't going to address themselves!

I'm not going to share the actual card yet, because I want everyone to be surprised when the receive it in the mail.  But, no blog post is fun without pictures, so I did take a few....

25 Days of Christmas: Day 9

I am very excited about tonight's post!

When I first saw this idea on Pinterest over a year ago, I knew this was going to be something I had to do eventually. You see, I'm a very sentimental person, and I like to keep a lot of things. (BUT, I am getting a lot better about this....just believe me on that one.) I love to keep cards that I've received and I have just tons of cards! I have had our stack of Christmas cards we received last year sitting in a pile upstairs since last Christmas, waiting for me to actually do something with them.  Then, when I started brainstorming ideas for these 25 posts this Christmas, it was a perfect opportunity to actually follow through!

These card books are so perfect for keeping your cards nice and organized, and also displayed out for Christmas!  This craft doesn't take very long to do--I did it in about 20 minutes or so before bed tonight. haha.

The supplies you need are:

• Christmas color/patterened cardstock or scrapbook paper
• Letter and number stickers
• Double sided tape
• Binder Rings
• Three hole punch
• Your cards!

First, I made the cover for my book. I couldn't figure out how big I wanted to do it (I think the original website has it as a 5x7.).  I asked Matt his opinion and, as always, he comes to the best conclusion, and, it was the easiest thing to do.  I found our biggest card in the pile--this would be our last card.  I measured that, which ended up being 8x4.5 and that was the size I used for my cover.

After making the cover, I started hole punching away! It was fairly easy to punch through all of the cards, and to eye-ball whether or not they were centered over two of the punches.  I tried to not let my OCDness get the best of me on this part!  It doesn't need to be perfect!

Once all of the cards are punched, start putting them on the binder clips.  I used another suggestion from the original site and used one of our Christmas cards we sent out as the first card in the book, following the cover of course.  So, the first card is us wishing everyone warm wishes with pictures of us in Jamaica! haha.

Voila! I was very happy with how the cover turned out!  The candy-cane striped background was Matt's idea, so I will of course give him the credit on making it look even better!

Now, time for me to start working on our Bridal Shower and Wedding Cards! I've been wanting to do a book of those for quite a while now, so now that I'm in the swing of it, I think I'll try to get to it soon. Maybe over Winter Break??