I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas!!!

Welcome to the Christmas in July Blog Hop (organised by the fabulous Ruth  through a forum post over at Two Peas in a Bucket), inspiring you to get out your Christmas stash and use it before all the new collections are introduced this month.  Join the fun and create something too, use the hashtag #scrapbookchristmas in Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

You would have come here from Tasha's lovely blog, or you may have made your way on your own.

Well I was so excited when I found Ruth's post over at 2Peas as like most of you, I have left over Christmas product in my stash.  I have leftovers from a Studio Calico kit that I used for my 2012 December Daily Album, and even older product that I purchased when I first started scrapping.  I was really keen to use it up!

One thing I find challenging about Christmas product is that it isn't made for Southern Hemisphere Summer Christmases (here in New Zealand we celebrate Christmas with BBQs and sun!).  As I'm so blessed to live in Queenstown, where we get snow in Winter I decided to make non-Christmas Winter layouts with Christmas products.  

I made up the following kit of products:

Then I made the following layouts (my photos are not the best, we are mid-Winter here, and have had a lot of snow and grey days):

The first layout is of my beautiful niece Jessie-Rose, and her first snow experience:

The background stripe is a Simple Stories Paper that came with a Christmas themed Studio Calico add-on kit that I purchased last year for my December Daily Album.  I remembered about it after I took the photo of my full sheets of paper.

This next layout is my son playing in the snow last year during a "Snow Day", which is a day off school from a big snow dump!  Always lots of fun for the kids!

I enjoyed layering on this one, and used up some really old snowflake rubons.

This next layout has a photo of my daughter and I in 2011, outside my work.

I decided to fussy cut a couple of the large snow flakes, then I had the challenge of integrating them into the design of the page.  After I'd finished my journaling at the bottom I realised I had more of the story to tell, so added in some more!

This last page is not my favourite, as I was down to the real scraps, but I knew I wanted to use that typography paper, which has lyrics from Christmas songs on it.  I decided to scrap photos of my daughter playing in the snow this Winter, and I purposefully chose not to edit them by  lightening, as I really wanted to capture the nature of the weather the day her and my son got to play outside. I think this tells the true nature of the story, as it was still snowing when they begged me to go outside.  I tried to use up as many of the epoxy snowflakes as I could to represent the snow falling.

I hope you enjoyed my projects, I certainly had loads of fun making them, and I love that Winter Hemisphere Christmas product can work for scrapping Winter photos!  It feels so great to use up old stash, and now I know I can look forward to CHA product reveals next week even more!

Next on the hop is Alison, she makes beautiful layouts, do go and check out what she's made.

Thanks for visiting!
Be blessed
Melissa x