Inspired by Christmas in July

Last month while I was working on my Christmas in July card, I realized that I have tons of magazines with Christmas card ideas that I lug around and flip through for inspiration. I had the brilliant idea to create an idea book of my very own with the magazines!! As I went through the magazines and I realized that most of the content was just adds and junk taking up space in my Christmas file. (Yes, I have a file which holds all of my Christmas embellishments, card samples, papers, stickers and stamps.)

First, I ripped out the cards that I wanted to keep and put them in a pile, then I found the perfect album. Finally, I got out my glue stick and started pasting them into the album by color. The primarily red cards got a layout page and so did the light blues, also pink, and the mostly green cards, they got their own page too! Of course I cut out things that I like from the magazines, like tags and directions for a seasonal gift box. I even snipped out big, cute Santa for the first page:


Finally, the fun part! I got to use some 3-D letters for the front. I really like to use the word JOY on my cards because it is so short I can whip up a stamp or use stickers and it generally fits on any card. For the cover of my Christmas Idea book, I used Close to My Heart 3-D Chipboard letters and I covered them in red glitter, they look just like Dorothy's Ruby Slippers in The Wizard of Oz!! I also got to use some gold embossing and I whipped out the paint for the chipboard frame.


I am super excited to use this book when making Christmas cards this year....Whenever I see it sitting across the room, I just want to grab it and brainstorm...I left lots of white areas for sketching out card layouts and trying out techniques before putting them on a card, I can even put in swatches of paper and stamp my stamps in the book so that I will know what I have without dragging it all out! (haha, yeah right...I drag everything out and spread it out so it looks like an explosion to most people...but to me...it is Inspiration Mountain!!)