Welcome to December, the holiday season. This month there will be 4 weekly challenges, posted on Friday the 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd. DECEMBER MUSE: Christmas Nostalgia Week 3: TOUCH Christmas evokes nostalgia in many of us, bringing to mind past memories and thoughts of past holiday seasons. This week your challenge is to create a page based on "TOUCH". One of my favorite Christmas memories from my childhood is decorating the tree. My mom would solemnly, carefully, hand me some glass ornaments to place onto the tree and I would run my fingers over the patterns, the bulky glitter of the balls. To finish off the tree I would drape tinsel over my fingers, taking 1-2 strands at a time, to place onto the tree. We would decorate the windows with spray snow and stencils. I never could resist running my finger through some of the fake snow. Waking up on Christmas Day, I would race excitedly into the living room to see the gifts under the tree and my stocking filled with wonderful goodies. I would sit and slowly, carefully, pull each little wrapped gift out of the stocking, savoring the quiet, private time to myself. Often I would get jacks, which I would play endlessly for hours. There was always a coloring book with crayons, and then in later years, I graduated to colored pencils, and markers. The holiday season from my childhood reminds me of snow, back East we had a lot of snow at Christmas time and there is nothing more remarkable to a child than standing outside, catching snowflakes as they fell and making snowballs to throw. I would wrap a large scarf around my neck, pulling it up over my mouth and nose, to warm up, as my friends and I would pelt each other with snowballs. Such happy memories. What nostalgic memories do you have of the winter season? Use the photo prompts to inspire you or create your project based on memories that come to mind. However you wish, have fun creating about something nostalgic. You may create any style of layout you wish, with or without photos. This is for everyone! There are no restrictions, have fun and see where the inspiration takes you. Create any size page you wish, including the template set from @Scrapping with Liz if would like to continue with the Skinnies. If you do decide to go for the Skinnies, you can find the templates available HERE. In addition @cfile created one cool triangle template that you could use (Christa's awesome template is HERE on PSD- let us know if you need any other format!). Please post your layout to the Art Journaling Gallery HERE prior to December 31st and then post it in this thread by copying the code (at the right of your gallery image) from the box under "Share BB Code". We will draw a winner at the beginning of next month, even more incentives for your inspiration! You can use any products in The Lilypad store, make sure you follow our gallery guidelines. Pages are due last day of the month. If you have any questions, ask here in this thread. Have fun and I can't wait to see how "Christmas Nostalgia" inspires you.
On the "mood board" for this challenge was the wide-eyed girl looking at the santa window stencil. We had those stencils when I was growing up, but what made me "wide-eyed" were bubble lights. This ad for them I found reminded me of the mood board image. I also liked the fact that, with 1950's era Christmas lights, when one bulb in the strand burnt out, the ENTIRE STRING we dark. You had to take an extra bulb and, one-by-one, unscrew a bulb in the strand and replace it with the extra bulb. If the string lighted up, you'd found the burnt bulb. If not, you put the bulb back on the string and repeated the process until you had LIGHTS! I know. I was/am a bit odd! This is an ATC:
I remember my warm fur hat and matching muff, paper dolls, dolls, toys and more toys with a bit of tinsel thrown into the mix.
