Laura Vegas

How is Christmas less than two weeks away? I put my Christmas tree up about two weeks ago, but my poor pre-lit tree of 11 years only had about 20% of it's lights working. So it took me a full week before I strung on more lights, since I also had to go out and purchase more of them. And I did string on the garland right after the lights. And it has sat like that, just lights and garland, for almost another full week. My ornaments are all just sitting on the kitchen table in bags. It just seems wrong when life is so busy, that you can't seem to make time to decorate a simple Christmas tree.

With all that being said, I have a new layout up at Kerri Bradford Studio today, and it's another Christmas layout. My youngest daughter, Sarah, loves to pull out the Santa hat to wear every Christmas when it's time to open presents. It's become a tradition over the years, and we all know that she will be the one to pass out all of the presents from under the Christmas tree. I thought it would be fun to put together a photo collage of her in the Santa hat from over the years for my layout. 

I had some left over sewn star garland from THIS project, and added it along the top of my page to act as a banner. I added a few red and silver sequins to some of the stars to pretty them up. Once again, I choose a fun handwritten cursive word for half of my title, taken from the December Twenty-Five kit, and used Kerri's Weathered Door alphas to create the rest of my title.

I used a template from Kerri's Storyboard #1 kit to hold 6 photos from the last 6 Christmas's, and added little number stickers directly to the photos for the year each photo was taken. I love seeing photos like this side by side, where you can see how your child has grown and changed over the years. But how they've stayed the exact same in many ways too. She's always had that great big smile, with the cute little dimple on her left cheek (just like her mom!).

The grid patterned paper that I used for the background of this page (by Fancy Pants) already has this fun border printed right across the bottom of the page, so that helped speed up the design of this page. I just added a few embellishments to finish it off.

And for a subtle touch I used a circle border, from Kerri's Simplicities: Best Thing Ever page kit, on the green patterned paper pieces on either side of my photo collage. The "believe" glittered chipboard piece is a really old Making Memories product that I happen to spot in my scraproom and it just called out to be thrown on this layout. It fit perfecty, so I figured it was meant to be.

Cross your fingers that I can get that tree finished this weekend. And maybe start thinking about any Christmas shopping I need to do. And I should really get a Christmas card out this year too, since I somehow skipped them the last two years. My list keeps growing, but nothing ever seems to get fully checked off. #christmasissues