Done and Done

For Shimelle's class, Journal Your Christmas, the Day 1 prompt is to write a manifesto.  Here's what I've written:
"Stop. Ponder. Savor the present.  This holiday season I will stop and ponder our life in the here and now, so that I may savor the present and leave a record for the future."
I think that captures what I want to do this year, which is really focus on Shimelle's prompts as they relate to our current life.  The last time I did JYC I did a lot of backward looking journaling and thinking about how I view the holidays in general.  I loved it, but I want to do something a bit different this time. I snapped a picture of my new Christmas mug filled with coffee and our calendar to illustrate my idea.
I also finished the first Tim Holtz tag.  Here it is:

I know it doesn't look that much like Tim's tag, but it's done!
I wanted to share some tips for doing Tim's tags quickly:
1.  I keep most of my Tim supplies in their own containers - all my distress inks are together, all my distress powders and crackle paints are in another, etc.  This makes it easy to grab the container(s) I need and to put them back away.
2.  I clean up as I go.  This not only keeps my home a bit neater, but it also means I can find what I want the next day.
3. I improvise.  Tim's tag for today included a very complicated house-build and some big things I don't own (the die cutter thing, the house die, the fence die, the embosser thing).  Instead, I took the haunted house from the holiday grunge board pack and cut it down to a smaller size and regular house shape.  I stamped the house with a crackle stamp for the texture.  I hand cut my fence with some of the leftover haunted house.  For the background, I sprayed some glimmer mist, instead of his perfect pearl mixture. I made wreaths for the house out of stickles, and I used glass glitter instead of white flocked stuff.  And, of course, my tag and top treatment are different than his.  In the end, mine looks a bit more like a Christmas mansion, I think that his more rustic cabin in the woods, but that's okay.  As Tim himself says, use the ideas as a jumping off point, rather than a rules.  I think of it like the Pirate Code; to quote Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow . . . "they're more like guidelines really!"