The flu meets the best of intentions.

This time, my project lag can actually be attributed to diagnosed illness, rather than laziness.  All of us except for the one kid who never gets sick (he subsists on a diet of oranges, apples, and bagels -- you, too, can emulate this lifestyle and avoid viral illness, perhaps) have had the flu in shifts over the past few weeks, leaving "getting optional scrapbooking completed" below "standing upright" and "not developing pneumonia" on the to-do list.

I am backfilling now, and it is going to take a while.

Here is day four, which I had managed to get to before we started falling one by one:

The patterned paper is from this year's December Daily kit, but the little star circle is from last year's.  The penguin stamp is from Mama Elephant.  Look how ambitious I was -- I even embossed.

On to day five:

The "magic" card is from Studio Calico's Christmas cards.  The wintry branch stamp is from Memory Box, and I colored it in.  I am not giving a close-up of it because my coloring skills are faulty.  As Cher would say, it is like a Monet -- up close, it's a big old mess.

Day six is a little moody for a holiday album:

I spent most of that day in a meeting on the thirty-third floor of an office building.  No one even blinked when I took pictures through the window.  The gold polka-dot envelope is about as festive as this spread is going to get, and it is in there functionally holding business cards.

Finally, day seven:

This layout features one of my favorite things to do (I will not say "my favorite techniques," because it does not rise to that level) -- stamping a title directly onto a photo, with a journaling block underneath:

This year I am also putting borders around most of my pictures as I print them at home.  I'm just printing the photos a quarter-inch smaller both vertically and horizontally and cutting them out by eyeballing the borders.