Often due to the way the calendar falls, two month's land on one spread, as was the case here with the last few days of November and first few days of December. All the better to share a sweet picture since we kicked off the week with Olivia marching in the Thomasville Christmas Parade with her twirling group, Apex Twirling Academy. That Saturday was my birthday as well as a Hurricane Irma rescheduled FSU football game that we attended with a large group of my girls' marching band members. I don't always show the calendar side of these spreads since they can be a little boring, but sometimes I'll cut random magazine images that grab my attention to add some color to my calendar days, thus the lovely bowl of avocado and squash!
And speaking of magazines, that's where these fun boots came from, walking across the first art journaling spread of the month.
And yet again, another magazine clipping! I loved that jar and used it to bring a little sparkle to an otherwise not fun week due to a little oral surgery I had to endure. I cut things from a variety of magazines including Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, and Magnolia Journal. I'm also a home decorating magazine junkie, but those are sacred to me and have yet to see scissors. Though I have been thinking about doing something with all those fun doors of the month in HGTV Magazine. :-)
This page on the left and below is probably one of my favorite from the whole year. I started out collaging some random scraps of paper and then wasn't quite sure what to do next (I really struggle with choosing focal images....). I dug through my bin of stamps and found a plant-looking one. It was just the grassy looking things, which I stamped in black and then hated it. So after letting it dry, I painted it with a random selection of paint I had sitting out and added the sunshiny flowers and, voila, I loved it! The deer on the right is from an old Papaya Arts planner I took apart when it was out of date. This week represented our last week in Tallahassee before we headed home to Jacksonville for the Christmas break.
This spread came together nicely for me in regards to color. The art journaling side started out looking quite differently! It was an old ad, which you can see peeking through with a little "merchantile" and coral coloring at the top. Can't even remember what I started out doing, but clearly it went a different direction as I ended up with much softer colors through a little bit of paint, some napkins and a bird cage. We went down to South Florida to visit my dad the first part of this week and did a fun day at Lion County Safari. Can't believe that place is still there and better than it ever was! We had a hysterically funny several minutes thanks to an ostrich who really wanted the stuffed animal that was sitting on the dashboard of the car. He apparently was convinced he could get to it through the windshield and entertained us trying to do so. I have it on video somewhere!
Our Lion Country Safari goat friend, who the girls name Bert, above. I posted these two pictures to my Instagram feed and Lion Country Safari actually commented and said "Martin won't mind his new nickname! Thanks for visiting!"
Christmas Day brought us our usual Christmas morning walk out to Big Talbot Island's Black Rock Trail to Boneyard Beach. We had to go extra early due to the timing of the tides, and we caught a beautiful sunrise. Magical way to start the day.
And this last page closes out 2017. Both my 2016 and 2017 projects divided out into three books each, so I covered the covers of each volume in pretty papers and have all six of them sitting on a shelf in my workshop. Now, I'm working on 2018, and am only, oh, about seven months behind... Thanks for stopping in today! See more of my 2017 DLP project here; see 2016 here; see 2015 here; and see 2014 (my favorite!) here.
