oh, crafty weekend... how i love thee.

I adore craft projects. If I could make a living at playing "arts & crafts," I would definitely do so. However, with that being said, I am an accountant. That is what pays the bills. And unfortunately, due to a ridiculously long commute and the fact that Lance and I travel practically every other weekend, this leaves very little time for my long list of craft projects.

BUT... this weekend... oh this weekend was different. I declared this weekend a craft weekend long ago. As soon as I knew we would be in town, and as soon as I saw this on Ali Edwards blog, I knew exactly what I would be doing this weekend. It's absolutely genius.


She basically takes all of the Christmas cards and photos she receives for the year and creates a simple photo montage with all of them. I love it. I have always been one of those people that keeps cards (Christmas, birthday, thank yous, valentines... you name it, I keep it), but really they just sit in a box somewhere stored away. I am in love with this idea. At first, I was a little tentative about cutting and cropping my family and friends with a square paper punch... but I must say, it was kind of liberating. Nice to let my Type A personality live on the wild side a little. I just put the photo or card in my square punch, found my favorite part, and punched away. Here's the basic process...

I ordered this awesome square punch, the Marvy Uchida. I totally copied Ali again here, and purchased the same square punch she recommended on her blog. This punch was the perfect size, and for the most part allowed me to crop everyone inside the square. There were a few families who apparently don't like to stand very close to one another during Christmas photos... and for them, I'm sad to say I had to either separate them into two squares, or cut off some ears...

After punching out all the cards, I had to decide on some type of layout. I tried not to be too OCD about this, and really just tried to mix up the colors. You'll notice that I tried to select a good mix of both pictures and good old fashioned Christmas cards. I like the variation of it all.

Then I just used my favorite adhesive to paste the squares on some red 8x11 paper. I knew I would be using 8x11 sheets, so I let that determine how many squares would go on each page. I changed my layout ever-so-slightly (I guess the OCD did get the best of me) and called it finished. I ended up with 4 pages with 12 squares each.

Don't you just love it? I do. Now I just need to figure out what to do with all those other cards... Any suggestions?