Christmas Memories

When it finally comes time to take down all of the Christmas cards we get, I get a little sad. I love looking at all those friendly faces. People that live far away that I miss so much.


Well, I don't have to be sad anymore! Thanks to Kierste at Brown Paper Packages.

Source: brownpaper--packages.com via Jill on Pinterest

This was such an easy (and cheap) project.

I started it before I even had a binder or page protectors. After the kids went to bed one night, I got all the pictures taped onto card stock. Then, I typed up a quick description of how we celebrated Christmas this year and also the label for the front and year tabs. Next, I cut a couple of of pieces of Christmas-y scrapbook paper to fit the binder. I'd picked up a binder and page protectors at Wal-mart on my way home from work on one day this week. I think the total for all of it was maybe $6.

Quick, easy and a great way to preserve all those great Christmas cards!

What do you do with all of your photo Christmas cards?

Organized recipes, here I come!

We were snowed in here from December 30th until January 2nd. Like, even if DH had snowblowed the driveway we couldn't have gone anywhere because the drift on our street was as tall as the mailbox.

Needeless to say, the Christmas stuff came down (and actually put away in an organized fashion for once), the house got cleaned, movies got watched and wine got drank.

Come Sunday though, the hall closet was driving me crazy. It had become a dumping ground. So, I took everything out of it, put the garabage in the garbage (novel idea), decided to donate the things I didn't love, didn't use and figured someone else could use, put what was left back in a way that made sense (another novel idea. why not put the things that get used the most on the middle shelf in the front!), and all was right with the world.

Until, I went to put away one of my recipe books. Sigh.

I print a lot of my recipes from online and emails I get. And, to date, they've been getting shoved into this one little book.  There are also quite a few written on scraps of paper that I've grabbed from either my mom's or my grandma's.  Everytime I need to find something I have to shuffle through the whole stack.

Well, on Sunday I'd finally had enough. I sat down and sorted all of the recipes into categories and threw out the crap that I'll never make. I had a vision of a lovely binder with all of my recipes organized by category.

Where would I find such a thing?

First stop? Target. They did have some lovely binders. But, they were over $5 and didn't come with any plastic sleeves. But, right next them were the plain jane binders. Aha! I'll make my own! Into my cart went a plain white binder ($1.84), 50  plastic sleeves ($3.84), and dividers ($.97).

(They joined the two 4 foot pre-lit Christmas trees that were $3.50 a piece. $3.50! I couldn't pass them up. Anywho, back to the binder.)

JoAnn's is right across the street from Target, so that was my next stop. Pretty paper, here we come! ($1.20 for two sheets.)

I broke out my Fiskars paper cutter and some scrapbook letters and went to work.

This was my final result!

Isn't it pretty? And all for $7.85. I sat and gazed adoringly at it for a bit.  The DH even thought it turned out nice.

(Please forgive me for the picture quality. As I mentioned in my 2011 goals post, I'm trying to figure out my camera. I'm extremely frustrated at the moment, but I'm hoping it will get better as the year goes on!)