My opening page is a title created in Word using Word Art and a font called Fluoxetine. There is also an embossed snowflake in the centre which is difficult to see here.
So, I worked on my December Daily album all weekend! How happy am I! As usual, my inspiration came from Ali Edwards. She is the originator of this project...and most of the projects that I do. This is the third year that I have participated in this album project along with Ali and hundreds of other scrapbookers like myself.
The concept is quite simple. Since there are so many exciting events happening not just on Christmas Day, but for the entire month of December, they are all worthy of capturing. Each day in December take at least one photo (actually some people have made pages without pictures!) and do some journaling to tell the story of what happened that day. By the time Christmas has arrived, you will have a book full of stories of your holiday season. With my 2008 and 2009 books already completed, my girls are already asking if they will be displayed this Christmas for them to look at again. Of course the answer is 'yes'!
I started with a binder that I think is from BoBunny that I got on sale for $7 because the corner was dented! It has a raw chipboard cover with canvas around the binding. I will share the cover design in a post later this week!
Really, what makes this project manageable is that the skeleton of the album is made ahead of time (and I came in just under the wire this year!). The album is chosen and decorated. The pages are trimmed and ready. The embellishments are already attached (in some cases). Any 'extra pages' (explained in a post later this week) are added at random, and journaling spaces are ready to go. Therefore, once Dec 1st arrives, you are not fussing and scrambling and creating from scratch. Instead, you are simply taking a photo or two, adding it to your awaiting page, and writing a little story for the day. I assure you that this is a project worth doing!
The pages inside the album are also chipboard and have little tabs. I am not sure just yet if I am going to use these. I have already added my pages of patterned paper. I used a line called Jovial by Basic Grey.
Pictures are worth a thousand words, of course, so they add a great deal to the album. I find that my pictures will vary from day to day. Some days there is a lot going on and it is easy to have several shots that I want in my album. Some days we are just at home staying warm and reading. On those days I tend to take pictures of things around my house... like a new wreath, or candle arrangement, or our tree and then tell the story of how I acquired that item or why I chose to have it on display this year. Since I tend to have a lot of pictures, I have tried to keep my album flexible to accommodate up to 10 photos. To do this, I have designed photo templates for myself that I will discuss in further detail in a post later this week.
I have alternated double-sided paper with vanilla cardstock printed on either side with templates designed by Ali Edwards.
The stories are captured in the form of journaling. This can be a sentence or two, or a whole page story...it's up to you. I tend to take things to the limit and usually my journaling goes on and on because I don't want to forget any detail. Also, the journaling can be typed out and printed, or hand-written. I usually do a mix of both. In the past, I have tried to be original on each page and have loved the results, but this year I am choosing to keep it more streamlined and simple. Using the templates designed by Ali Edwards, I will do the journaling inside the boxes right on the vanilla cardstock. I plan to do most of my journaling by hand as I believe that original handwriting also tells a story.
To keep the format simple this year, I have alternated the patterned paper with the vanilla cardstock. The patterned paper, called Jovial, is designed by Basic Grey and is double-sided. This saved me time and money as I knew I would making use of both sides of the page. The cardstock, by Bazzil Basics, has a lovely texture called orange peel and the color is vanilla. I was able to print out the templates on either side of the cardstock so that I can use each two-page spread for one day. In between the printed cardstock and patterned paper, I plan on adding some other neat features. Watch for more posts coming later this week which will explain my plan for this in more detail!
As mentioned, I purchased and downloaded the page templates by Ali Edwards. I love how she has made them so simple and so flexible. She offered them as 6x8 templates, but I enlarged them just a bit in Photoshop to work on my 9x9 pages. I decided I wanted a little more room to work with... it's that taking the photos and journaling to the limit thing! There is room for creativity and imagination using her templates, but will still look stunning if all I do is pop in one photo! She really is brilliant.
So there you have it. The rest of my album follows the same format and I promise to show you all of them as the days of December unfold. Are you thinking of playing along?
