I was recently helping my mom doing a little cleaning and I found some old Christmas photo cards that I sent her when the kids were really small. I also found other family member's photo cards.
"You saved these all these years?" I asked her
"Of course!" she replies. "The kids are so cute. I have to save them"
It does seem like a shame to throw away a photograph. I breaks my heart to do it, but each year at Christmas I get a few of these photo cards and I don't know what to do with them. People who are important to us go through the effort to make these cards and remember us at Christmas. But I can't be expected to keep them ALL, so I force myself to toss them.
Then I feel ashamed of myself. But not for much longer.
I got to thinking.... I could help mom (and me) by giving her a place to store these cards so they will all stay together and in nice condition.
After a few google and pinterest searches I thought I'd make scrapbook. But how? I have very little scrapbooking experience. It looks intimidating. There aren't any pre-made albums with pockets to slide in the cards of varying sizes and those magnetic pages are just bad for the photos over time. So I guess I have to go from scratch.
I found scrapbooks at Michael's for $5 each. They are not Christmas themed, but they do the job. Just a basic 12x12 20 page scrapbook. My favorite craft store to shop at is Jo-Ann. I love their coupon policy. I save beaucoup bucks there because of it. They had tons of Christmas themed papers to chose from.
I couldn't leave my in-laws out, so I made each of them one too. Then I found out 2 of my aunts also save every photo Christmas card they receive. So I'm making 6 albums all together. I needed to get an assembly line going because even though I love the creative process, I'll be darned if I'm going to do this again.
Buying stickers to make the yearly labels would have been super expensive. But I got lucky. My neighbor has a Cricut Machine (one of those nifty die cutting machines that cuts the papers to perfection). She let me borrow for as long as I needed. I was saved. I thought I was going to have to cut these all by hand.
I did have fun doing it. The end result looks like this:
Pretty basic, but it does exactly what I needed it to do: Organize by year, be Christmas-y and be flexible. Its fun to flip through and see how everyone changes year by year.
Now I have the bug and I want to use this machine as much as possible before I have to give it back. I'm making a scrapbook to put all my kids' professional photos in by age.
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Scrapbooking doesn't make me hungry. Staying up until midnight while scrapbooking does.
I'm trying to dramatically reduce the amount of refined sugar I'm consuming. I feel so much better without it. We had berries and I wanted to do something special for dessert one night so I made strawberry shortcake.
They were easy. Like the previous posts about baking, the cake part was dense. I liked it, didn't love it, but I'd eat it again. These instructions called for macerating the berries in sugar the night before. I didn't do this - I think its unnecessary. Berries are delicious just the way they are.
Strawberry shortcake HAS to have whipped cream, right? But we all know that is out of the picture. So the closest we get here is whipped coconut cream.
Its easy. Just prepare the night before by sticking a can of full fat coconut milk in the fridge to chill. This makes the coconut milk separate and easier to whip.
When ready to whip the cream, carefully open the top and scrape the thick cream part into a bowl. Don't shake the can- you want the separation or your cream won't get fluffy.
Them beat them with your mixer until fluffy. Mine took about 10 minutes.
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