project organization :: all those holiday cards

I had big plans this weekend to complete yet another project... my Christmas card montage.  For both 2011 and 2012... Yeah.  I'm a little behind.  I even took all of the 2012 holiday cards off the display wall finally (insert sad face here)...

I even went out and purchased a new 3.5" square punch (my other one is totally MIA).  Then... I sat down... got all of my cards out...  ready to punch away... and I was able to punch one.meesley.card.  Yep.  You heard right... one card... one teeny, tiny square.... then my square punch broke.  Straight up stopped working.  I'm hoping to return it soon and still knock this project out in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I thought I'd re-post my thoughts on the Christmas card montage from a few years ago...

I wish I could take credit for this... but I can't. This is another genius idea from Ali Edwards. 

Ali 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.

A few years ago, I put these in the back of my December Daily book... but seeing how I'm super behind on those too... I'm just aiming to getting my cards on paper.  What about you?  How do you organize your holiday cards?