Christmas Scrap

It's been a busy past two weeks! It's crunch time with getting all of our Christmas crafts finished. Although I'm no where near being finished with all I had planned to do for this year, I am done with biggest, most important project of them all... a family scrapbook for both of our parents. How is it that I can spend hours trying to get one page to look right, then come back and spit out two pages in less then an hour like it was nothing?! Why can't I scrap like this all the time?!

I decided to go with Shabby Shoppe's Clementine kit throughout the whole book. I fell absolutely head over heels in love with this kit and had so much fun creating different pages with it. Shappy Shoppe is one of my favorite digital scrapbooking stores! I love their kits, freebies, and blog.

Besides finishing the scrapbooks, I am happy to report that I also finished and ordered our Christmas cards! This is another project I have been working on for far too long, dumping every design I came up with until tonight when I sat down and put this design together in less then 10 minutes. I used DeDe Smith's Practically Perfect kit, and ordered double sided 5x7 landscape flat panel cards through Mixbook. I have used Mixbook in the past and I cannot say enough wonderful things about this company! Their photobooks are great quality, their customer service is top notch, and I'm very happy with their product pricing.

So what's next on the Christmas craft agenda?! I hope to finish up another digital scrap inspired gift for my girls/besties, homemade ornaments, earring holder, and pull my poor neglected sewing machine out of the closet and see if I can whip out some doll diapers and diaper bags for Lollipop and her cousin! My husband, Lollidad has also been busy with a Christmas craft of his own when it's finished I cannot wait to show it off to all of blog land!

The Wonderful Craft World for Disney

When I was child going to Disney was much simpler then it is now as a parent! Planning, organizing, booking, ordering customs, and making autograph books... it sure wears a mama out!

I should mention I'm a bit obsessed with anything that gives Lollipop a chance to dress up in costume! Someday I dream of learning how to sew gorgeous dresses so I can make Lolli a fabulous costume closet of nothing but Mama made dresses. However by the time I learn how to do such amazing things with a sewing machine Lolli would for sure be too old for dressing up. In fact I'm sure that my future grandchildren would even be too old. So instead I go to the wonderful world of etsy and shop instead.

For Disney inspired costumes, my absolute favorite seamstress is no other then the Fairy Godmother herself, Ollie Girl Boutique. When I saw her Flowers for Minnie dress I knew Lollipop must have it for our first ever Disney trip! Lolli loved it and wore it everywhere that summer. Even Cruella De Vil gave noticed to it, but how could she not? Spots, she loves spots!

Then somehow a year later another Disney trip was planned. Lollipop's favorite princess at the time was Cinderella and was a bit let down that she never got to meet her at Disneyland so for Disney World we were determined to stalk Cindy down by any means possible (turns out that any means possible means dinner at her castle). For this trip there was no question that we were going to go back to Ollie Girl Boutique for another custom, and we knew which one we had to get to for our little princess. Cinderella's pink dress that mice made for her!

Lollipop was in love with this from the moment she first saw the Cinderella movie! We wanted it to be a surprise, so we kept it a secret for months. When we arrived at our hotel we had it waiting for her and she was beyond excited when she saw it. She truly believed that the mice made it just for her!

Her pink Cinderella dress was not the only surprise we had waiting for her at the hotel. I had spent months working on a very special autograph book for Lolli! It was the first project I set out to do when I purchased Creative Memories' Story Book Creator Plus, and it took me forever to figure out how I wanted to design it. So long, that we actually had to call CM customer service up and have them reroute/overnight it to our Disney hotel (I cannot speak highly enough of the wonderful costumer service they gave this panicked mom that day). Lolli received so much attention from the characters because of that book. Every single character mentioned how neat her book was while Lolli smiled ear to ear and proudly stated that her Mama made it just for her.

There are several very talented digital artists that create that most beautiful kits ever! My favorite Disney inspired digi-scrap artists are Britti-ish Designs and Kellybell Designs. Whenever I was drawing a blank on a certain character I would head over to their blogs and browse around their virtual stores getting ideas.

The only thing I would a caution against is choosing to do a softcover over a hardcover for an autograph book. Creative Memories does not offer a hardcover for their smallest book size, I went back and forth trying to decide if I should go ahead and order through them or upload my pages to different company so I could have a hardcover book made. I ended up sticking with CM and while I was happy with the end result of the book it did get beat up with the constant pulling in and out of my purse to have a character sign it. It's actually bad enough that instead of keeping it on Lolli's bookshelf it is put in a ziplock bag and stored with all of our old pictures so it doesn't get ruin any further.

We actually have another Disney family trip planned for next year. Believe it or not, I'm seriously not that Disney crazy, but yet somehow we end up doing 3 Disney vacations 3 years in a row. We already have big plans for Lollipop's custom that will prove to be nothing short of a Jolly Holiday! I'm also trying to figure out what Mama crafts I want to do for this trip myself!

Here are a few of the pages I designed for her book.

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