Advent in November: Pause

The first of the preparation posts for Pause, Ponder and Prepare can be found here.  It talks about how the Advent Study and Calendar will work.

Let's pause and think about what we are going to do.  Are you going to do the study, the calendar or both?

While you're thinking about that go through all your stash and find all your Christmas related stamps, stencils, papers, paints, ribbons, embellishments and anything else you can think of.   One of the best things I learned from Shimelle was to get together all the stash you need for a project.

I thought I hadn't got many Christmas story stamps so I bought lots from a decluttering group on Facebook.  Beware!  Check what you have first.  When I put it all together this is what I have.  Overload!

I have rather less stencils and embossing folders.  You can use embossing folders as stamps as well as putting them through your embossing machine.

I have a box that I put embellishments and other Christmas related items in.

It's well worth tidying it up so that you can actually see what you have.

And I had lots of scrapbooking paper in a bag. It's well worth spending the time now sorting the papers into colour schemes.

I also found some old Christmas cards which I had kept.  They are useful for design inspiration or for cutting up.

And lastly I found some tags I had made either with Tim Holtz online 12 Tags of Christmas or at a workshop with Anneliese Bates.  These are also useful for design ideas.

At this point I have rather a lot of stuff and will need to think about what I actually want to use.  Do I want to use a mixed media approach to my tags or a more scrapbooking type look.  Decisions! Decisions!

In my next preparation post I'm going to look at preparing my book for the Advent Study.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice