I recently designed a new "Holiday Memories" layered template in order to help me do something I haven't done in years: document Christmas.
I have a red Kolo binder where I keep my Christmas pages, and honestly? It's a little on the thin side. I just haven't done much Christmas scrapbooking. It's not that I'm a Scrooge or anything. I guess I just took the whole "you don't HAVE to document holidays" message a bit too seriously over the years.
But with my template in hand, an overflowing library of digital photos categorized conveniently in iPhoto by Month and Year, and one set of digital papers and embellishments, I set out to knock off a few years of Christmas past, just to see if I could. Here's layout number one:
SUPPLIES Layered Template No. 16 (Cathy Zielske) • I Believe Kit, I Believe Solids Pack (Mindy Terasawa) • Archer Medium font
And that literally took minutes. So I thought, what about 2007?
And 2006:
Boom. Just like that. Three years in less than 20 minutes. For realz.
Did I capture a complete picture of each holiday season? No. Did I capture a decent enough slice that will remind me of a time since passed? You bet.
When I was done with the designing part, I could have printed these at home, but to save ink I uploaded them to ScrapbookPictures.com and paid $2.49 per page. The quality is stellar and I think they look fantastic in the album.
The other cool and liberating part of all of this is how you can take one design, and one set of papers and embellishments—digital ones in this case—and use them more than once to tell your stories.To me, that's not a boring approach. It's an efficient one—both from a time and financial investment standpoint—and one that let me add a group of new pages to an album that was feeling a bit neglected.
It also reminded me that there's no real time limit to when you can tell a story. That in and of itself is a pretty liberating thought. Tell it when you're ready.
I think I've got a new holiday tradition for covering a few highs from each Christmas season from this day forward.
P.S. And this one? Took 8.5 minutes. I'm sorry, but there's some liberation in them there digital hills…
This template is also available in a 12 x 12 format.
P.S. If you like this template, but think, "Well I wish there were other title options to pair with the word 'memories'" then you're in luck. Here's a set of PNG and Brushes with different script words you can simply copy and paste into this template to cover a variety of different "memories."
