The story begins...

Yesterday I showed you the front cover of my Christmas 2009 paperbag book, today you can see the first two pages. Hopefully I will manage to do some more pages and will post them as I go along.

Page 1 features my Secret Santa Advent parcel from Bubbly Funk Forum. We were all allocated a forum member to send a 'crafty' advent calendar and we have a lot of fun every day telling each other what we got in our little parcels and trying to guess who sent the
m! They are small things like buttons, gems, die-cut shapes nothing too expensive but it's just great to open a little parcel every day. My Advent parcel came beautifully presented in a box lined with vintage images and every little package made from folded gold paper with a red tag. I included the first tag in my page. There is a journallying tag tucked under the photo explaining about the swap.

Page 2 is about my Christmas Tree which is an eclectic mix of ornaments that I have chosen, made or have been given as gifts and there are a few that the boys made too. When I considered my tree I was very aware that it leans towards a 'folk art' style with a bit of bling thrown in, which probably sums me up too lol!
I wanted to show some of the tree decorations, so I made a little concertina book. Mickey and Goofy came from the Christmas Shop at Epcot in Disney World, my Mum gave me the rag doll angel last year and my crafting friend Tracey R gave me the gorgeous glittery shoe dec when we met at the NEC in November 2008. The one Karen gave me is on the tree too, but I couldn't take pics of them all or there would have been nothing but tree ornaments in the book!
On the back of the concertina, I have a pic of a salt dough wreath that I made about 15 years ago, I resurrected it this year as it hasn't been out for a while. The last pic is of the holly branches and pine boughs that I cut from the garden, they are soaking in a bucket of water....but you will have to wait and see what I did with them next, hee hee.