I’m pleased to announce that I’m finally making some progress on this project. Slowly. Surely.

Build-A-Bear is my family’s most-enduring holiday tradition. Others we’ve done many years—Santa pancakes on Christmas morning, Elf, Krispy Kreme right when they open (6 am) in our pajamas. Build-A-Bear is the only one we’ve done every single year since our first visit, which we didn’t know at the time would become a holiday tradition, in December 2013.

This mini album is very simple: mostly photos and holiday-themed paper, with very minimal extras and embellishments. So far, I’ve completed the cover page, a decorative insert, and the pages for 2013 through 2020. I’ve still got the intro page and the pages for 2022 through 2024 to go.

The album is clear acrylic with glitter that I ordered years and years ago from a shop that no longer exists (sorry!). The front of the cover page is the back of a Persnickety Prints coupon from almost 10 entire years ago. I’ve held onto it all this time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it in a project. I’m so glad I waited. It really is perfect for this project. To the back of it, I adhered a piece of a letterpress greeting card that I cut down to fit (3″ x 4″). Once I figure out what I want to say, I’ll type up a short blurb about this tradition on that piece of white card stock.

Following the currently blank intro page is a decorative insert I made using a Photo Flips pocket (I cut off the strip with the adhesive) filled with stuffing and a heart from Build-A-Bear (each year I ask to take a small handful of stuffing and a heart to keep as a memento of our family’s holiday tradition and every year (so far) they’ve allowed it), star-shaped glitter from my stash, and a few pieces of the gold thread I used to sew the pocket closed.

And then, the photos (and papers)! On the back of each photo, I adhered a piece of holiday-themed paper cut down to fit—gift wrap that I’ve saved from Chistmases past, old Project Life filler cards, and scrapbook paper. Before adhering, I played around with the order of these papers to ensure they flowed well with each other and with the photo they’d be opposite of (above) when flipping through the album. And then, of course, I messed up the order when adhering them. Such is life.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to include the date of each year’s visit. How to do this was the question. I decided to stamp each visit’s date on vellum using my Mega Date Stamp. Because I had only enough papers to work up to 2021 and because my date stamp was already set to 2021 and it’s a bitch to change, I worked backward from there. Had I worked forward from 2013, I would’ve learned much earlier in the process that my stamp only goes back to 2015. Oops! I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do about this.

I had the photos printed by Persnickety Prints. I decided on black and white because the lighting in Build-A-Bear is atrocious (it’s giving jaundice) and I wanted the finished project to be visually appealing and consistent without having to do much (any) editing.

I’ll pick this project back up around November—it’ll be easier to find holiday-themed papers then (I’m out of holiday-themed papers, I don’t want to repeat patterns, and while I could order holiday-themed paper online at any point during the year, I prefer to shop in person for paper items so I can see and feel the quality of them before committing)—and will share more photos of the finished (well, caught-up) album closer to the end of this year/the beginning of next.