Merry Days with Crate Paper

I know it’s only October, but I’m going to talk Christmas. I wanted to get ahead of the game and get my December Daily foundation pages done and ready. The build up to Christmas is always hectic and I really want to be able to keep up this year. So, with that in mind I ordered the new Christmas collection from Crate Paper ‘Merry Days’ and got stuck straight in.
I ordered the following embellishments from the Crate Paper ‘Merry Days’ collection; 12 x 12″ chipboard elements, 6 x 12″ Cardstock Stickers, die-cut ephemera pack, phrase & accent gold puffy thickers, glossy black puffy alphabet thickers (not used yet), puffy stickers, shaker stickers, washi tape and waterfall stickers. I also used four papers from last years Christmas stash as I hadn’t ordered quite enough papers for the design I ended up going with.

I ordered the following 12 x 12″ papers too; Frosty Days, Mistletoe, Merrily, Holiday Love, Tinsel, Peace, Stockings, Sleigh Ride (not used), Sugar Plums, Twelve Days, Believe and the gorgeous printed vellum.

In addition to the Crate Paper ‘Merry Days’ collection I also ordered a 6 x 8″ Simple Stories Snap album (I’ve used this size for the last few years), gold die-cut numbers from Echo Park (Note – these are stickers, even though there’s no mention of that on the packet!) and a lovely paper by Pebbles called ‘Warm & Cozy’.

The first thing I did was to cover my album. I used 2 sheets of Mistletoe paper from the outside and a sheet of Frosty Days for the inside. I edged the join between the canvas covered spine and the paper with one of the washi tapes and embellished the bottom corner with die-cut ephemera pieces, cardstock and chipboard stickers and added one of the fab shakers snow globe stickers. The number thickers are from the Pink Paislee ‘Auburn Lane’ collection.




For my opening page I used one of the 6 x 8″ page protectors that came with the album and put a piece of the printed vellum inside. The page protectors are actually slightly larger than 6 x 8″ so I added a strip of washi tape down the inside edge to ‘fill the gap’. I embellished it with a snow globe shaker sticker surrounded by the gold foil puffy thicker snow globe on the front of the protector and placed a cardstock snow globe sticker on the reverse side.

I decided that this year I’d ditch the page protectors for the individual days and use a 7 x 8.5″ piece of white cardstock with holes punched in the side. (If you want to use them you can find them here). I have one day on the front of the page and another on the back. Each daily page has a 6 x 8.5″ piece of patterned paper with a strip of washi tape down near the inner edge to clearly define the page. I cut apart the ‘Stockings’ paper into the 25 days, roughed the edges and stuck them at the top of each daily page. On the bottom corner I stuck a die-cut number and added a puffy sticker next to it.


For extra preparation I have cut out little journaling spots from white cardstock left over from the pages. I’ve also cut out journaling tags from kraft cardstock which I can tuck behind the daily photo for hidden journaling or extra journaling if I need more space to write about the day. I plan to add more embellishments as I fill up the album, but I will chose items that go with the photo of that day.

I’m really excited for December now, knowing that my album is prepped and ready to go. Here’s some more daily spreads.


I hope I’ve inspired you to start planning your Christmas journal. You can find lots of Christmas collections and themed items here and you can also find more inspiration from past December Daily’s and Christmas journals here.
Thanks for stopping by,