Simple page, simple problems; Complicated page, complicated problems

The festivity of Christmas makes me want to decorate my pages more, much more, than usual. I own more adorable and elegant embellishments than I could ever use. My usual practical style of producing pages can get bogged down trying to make festive pages. This month I obsessed and finished two festive Christmas pages that I almost like.

I planned a two page layout of our Christmas trees that I wanted to be festive (as if the Christmas trees would not convey the holiday). I fussed over cropping and arranging the photos into a nice collage that could be finished up quickly, but .........

Little paper labels would not be festive to put the year by each tree and label the small children, so...........

I bought some colored star tags with metal edges, but the strings were, well, stringy, so I searched for metallic string that would fit through the little tag hole. Alas, actually putting the string through the hole made the tag too lumpy and did not help with attachment. The tags alone had the disturbing little hole, so I tied little bows with the metallic string that I glued over the hole. So far, so good. Then I wrote the dates on the tags, making some errors and disliking (intensely) the shape of some of my numbers. NOTE FOR FUTURE: hand write first, and attach tiny hand tied bows second.

I bought red and green metallic photo pens to write names on the photos (strongly adhered to my maroon background), and I was unhappy the resulting pink and lime result. NOTE FOR FUTURE: Test first ! I actually used a silver Sharpie to write over the pink ink.

I printed my festive titles on clear adhesive sheets, trimmed them, adhered them to the maroon paper, and disliked them. They are unremoveable, so I needed to put my titles on paper to cover them up, not just paper but metallic festive paper, so I bought some nice green metallic paper that was actually turquoise when I got home. I like non-traditional Christmas colors, but not maroon and turquoise, so...........

After an unsuccessful search for metallic green paper, I bought some metallic navy paper on which to write my titles with the silver Sharpie that was of course now missing. So I bought another silver Sharpie.

I finished my pages. Thank goodness I was working on both at the same time. But then I noticed that empty spaces of maroon were more visually prominent. Those spaces need embellishment...................

Luckily in my cache of embellishment I found silver rimmed holiday sayings that I could fit into those maroon spaces.

Holidays can be overwrought, and so can holiday pages.