Handmade Christmas Gift

One of the things that I want to focus on this year is spending more quality time with the ones that I love.  I had been thinking about this a lot when I came upon a gift idea for my husband, 12 months of dates.  The idea I found was a basket filled with 12 envelopes, each holding a date for that month.  On the first of each month, he would open the envelope labeled with that month and they would plan a day to have that date.  I loved the idea but the thought of waiting to open each envelope didn't appeal to me.  I wanted J to see what he was getting for Christmas so I decided to create a little book.  My big dilemma was making it masculine enough to seem like a gift for him.  I'm not sure that I accomplished that but I knew that as soon as he saw Carolina Hurricanes hockey tickets in it, he wouldn't care.

I started with chipboard book pieces that Stampin' Up! sold a long time ago.  I bought some extra packs because I knew they would come in handy one day.  Without these, you can just cut chipboard to the size you prefer.  I used a pack of DSP, I Am Me, and cut it into 5 x 7.5 inch pieces.  I rounded the corners of each piece, covered the chipboard with glue stick and stuck them on.  After the glue dried, I sanded the edges to give it that finished touch.  Once the pages were all covered, I used my Big Shot letters and cut the names of the months.

You can see that I glued the month on the left side and then glued a pocket made from the chevron bags on the right.  My plan is to take a picture and glue it on the left so that this will become a little memory book of our 2014 dates.  In each pocket, I put a tag describing the date for the month and anything that goes with it.  For some of the dates, I went ahead and purchased a gift card so that the date would already be paid for leaving us with no excuse to skip the month.  I punched my holes with the crop-a-dile and put it all together with large binder rings.  I'm so excited with the final product and J loved it.  With Valentine's Day coming up, this is a perfect gift idea for your sweetie.  For dating ideas to go in the book, I highly recommend the Dating Divas.  Even if you aren't making a book, they have great ideas to check out!