Behind the scenes here at NettioDesigns HQ, I’ve been spending my days hanging out with an awesome group of ladies as part of the first ever Holiday Faves Mini Album Project Class. Those in the class have seen the progress I’ve made on my Holiday Faves album every week, but since Christmas is fast approaching, I wanted to share the first half of my Holiday Faves mini album here with you.

Holiday Faves is one of my favorite yearly scrapbooking projects and this year has been no exception. I skipped it last year with being pregnant so I’ve loved getting back into it again this year.

For my album this year I am using a 6×8-inch Studio Calico Handbook (purchased last year) along with the 6×8 mini album templates I created for the Holiday Faves Project Class.

Inside Cover Page | One new thing I’ve done this year is put all my pages in page protectors, which is nice because it makes it easy to move pages around and protects the pages should Ryan want to look through it one day.

Back of cover page | On the back of the inside cover page, I have an accent page followed by a journaling card template for my holiday manifesto. This is basically a “why I made this album” page but I find it’s a good way to kick off the album and I love looking back at my why’s each year. I also try to include our ages and where we live since as a military family it tends to change often.

Holiday Fave No. 1 | Holiday Fave No. 1 is the Christmas countdown calendar I finally finished earlier this year (after two years!). For the photo page I used one of the photo page templates and added a gold star from Studio Calico for some dimension.

On the back of the Fave No. 1 spread is another accent page, followed by a 4×6 photo attached to a gold glitter scrapbooking paper from Teresa Collins. I love all the digital pages, but I also find adding actual scrapbooking paper and physical elements into the album keeps things interesting.

I’m not a huge embellisher with paper (I’d probably be the most boring paper scrapbooker ever, haha) but I did add a few details to this page. At the bottom I added a label – the star is from Studio Calico and the sticker label is from Kelly Purkey.

At the top I added a little Merry wood chip piece from Studio Calico.

Holiday Fave No. 2 | Holiday Fave No. 2 is our “watch Elf and drink hot chocolate night.” It was late and the light wasn’t great but I decided not to overthink it and just went with the photos I had. Holiday Faves is much more about the story than it is perfectly staged photos.

On the photo, I added a digital stamp from Ali Edwards to fill up some of the white space from the TV screen.

And at the bottom of the journal card I added some digital elements. I love digital elements because you can layer them to your heart’s content but they don’t make your page actually thicker like real elements do.

In between my journal card and photo page, I added a printed transparency of one of the Holiday Faves templates I designed.

On the second page of the Holiday Fave No. 2 spread I used a two photo page template to create a collage. I’m not going to lie – I’m not 100% happy with this page yet. I think it needs some embellishment of some kind but I couldn’t decide on something that wouldn’t interfere with the look of the transparency page, so for now I’m leaving it as is and figure I can always add to it later if I want.

One of the reasons I chose to create my Holiday Faves mini album as a hybrid album rather than a straight digital album this year is due to one big thing: pocket pages.

If you’ve been around scrapbooking the past year, you probably already know that pocket scrapbooking has become all the rage thanks to Project Life and those pocket-style pages have trickled down into smaller albums as well. The Studio Calico album I’m using includes a handful of pocket page protectors in various combinations of 3×4 & 4×6 pocket sizes and I plan to use these pages in a few different ways in my album.

Below is a look at the back of my Holiday Faves No. 2 page. For now the page on the left is blank but I plan to add a photo of our Christmas tree. On the right I plan to use the themed card to write a little bit about our decorations.

On the back of the pocket page (below left), I plan to add photos of our decorations. Since this will likely be our last Christmas living here, I want to make sure I capture all those details as part of my album.

Holiday Fave No. 3 | For Holiday Fave No. 3 I chose Ryan’s First Christmas since it’s a pretty big deal around here. To start the section, I made a sort of sudo title page featuring a cute photo of him.

One of my favorite things about his first Christmas is watching him experience everything for the first time. The looks on his face as he tries to figure out what in the world is happening is just priceless! So I plan to use another pocket page protector to hold a collection of those types of photos from the entire holiday season.

This pocket page has 2×2-inch squares and is by Simple Stories so it doesn’t quite fit into my album as is (it’s slightly taller) but I just punched new holes using my Crop-o-dile punch and it fits fine.

You can see I’ve kept it pretty simple for now but I plan to add more embellishments and details once I have a better idea of how many photos I’ll have all together. I’ll also likely live some of the pockets blank, or with small embellishments so you can see through to the journal card behind.

Once you turn the page protector you can see the Holiday Faves No. 3 journaling card with a photo of Ryan putting his very first ornament on the tree (with a bit of help, of course).

On the backside of the Holiday Faves No. 3 journal card, I added an accent page followed by a foundation page with a 4×6 photo on it.

The 4×6 photo captures where we were at exactly Dec 12, 2014 at 15:16 (aka 3:16), so 12-13-14 at 15:16. It’s only taken me a decade to capture a photo like this but since it’s the last one I’ll see in my lifetime, I figured I’d better get on it! The letter stickers are from Kelly Purkey and the gold star is from Studio Calico.

On the bottom of the photo I added a Kelly Purkey label tag with a little note about where we were. This is what I mean about my handwriting font being a little bit neater – the letters here are a wee bit wonky.

Holiday Fave No. 4 | For Holiday Fave No. 4, I chose to focus on Holiday Treats because what’s the holiday season without a little indulgence, right?

On the left I included the Holiday Faves No. 4 journal card template with some digital elements on it from a variety of kits.

On the right, I included a four pocket page protector which includes photos, memorabilia and an 3×4-inch accent card. The Sprinkles Cupcakes is a piece of the bag I trimmed down to 3×4-inches and the accent card is from Kristin Cronin-Barrow’s A Fairytale Christmas: Sweet digital kit.

On the back of the page protector are two more photos, another accent card and memorabilia. I added some digital text to one photo and a digital label to the other before I printed the photos.

Here’s a closer look at the bottom of the page protector. The bottle cap on the right does make the page a little puffy but no more than any other dimensional embellishment. I just glued it down using a little Tombow liquid adhesive.

On the right side of the spread is another accent page.

Holiday Fave No. 5 | Holiday Fave No. 5 was the Tomball German Christmas Market. I’m technically half-German but this was our first time going to a German Christmas Market. It was a lot of fun!

One thing I realized while putting together my Fave No. 5 pages is while I love the look of photo collages, they definitely add quite a bit of time to the process, especially when I have to select and edit all of the photos first. Adding them to the photo template is the quick part!

This page is actually a 6 square photo collage that I adjusted a bit on the right side for the one vertical photo I wanted to include. And yes that’s a boot of beer, haha, but it’s actually the same one because they were $21 a piece! The strap on the cup seemed a little dorky but it did come in handy when we were trying to carry food, beer and push a stroller at the same time.

 

On the right is another Holiday Faves journal card with digital elements.

On the back of the journal card is a 6×8 photo of Ryan meeting Sinterklaas and on the right is another photo collage.

As you can see Ryan wasn’t exactly a fan of the man in the white beard, haha. To keep things simple, I added some journaling on the photo before printing.

For the photo collage on the right, I used a 6 square photo template again, but this time I turned off the squares for photos 3 & 6 and added scrapbooking paper and a printed 3×4 card (trimmed down) after I printed the page. I really love the mix of digital and paper. And yes, we ate entirely too much food – this wasn’t even all of it, haha.

And that’s where I’m at with my album so far! Overall, I’m really happy with how it’s coming together. I’m always hesitant when I first start putting it together and then once I start seeing the album come together, I get more and more excited to see it make it to the finished version. As we get closer to Christmas, my momentum definitely picks up and this year is no exception.

A little note about credits: Digital elements include a variety of Christmas kits by Zoe Pearn & Kristin Cronin-Barrow, primarily Memorable: Christmas, A Homemade Christmas and Life Stories: Christmas.  I didn’t include links for any of the paper products I used because they were all purchased in years past and are quite possibly not available any more. But if you feel like hunting any of them down, you should be able to do a Google search using any of the names I mentioned.