December Daily 2012

For this year's holiday season, I decided to challenge myself to be a bit more creative and truly document the day to day happenings of the season.  The bits and pieces of my Christmas experience that truly make the season special for me and my family: our traditions, favorite things, and fun and unique experiences that I am going to have this season. :)

I absolutely fell in love with this idea from one of my favorite papercrafters/scrapbookers/cardmakers, Nichol Magouirk.  She made an amazing album last year that documented her family's traditions and everyday life during the holiday season and it made me want to have one of these of my own.  I can just imagine looking back on it in years to come and remembering some of my favorite holiday traditions and seeing how things have changed. I also loved Nichol's actual design of the album and I used her provided PDF sketches as a springboard for my album. You can see Nichol's December Daily album here: http://nicholmagouirk.typepad.com/things_that_really_matter/december-daily-2011/

The actual idea for this album came from Ali Edwards.  She is an amazing photographer and captures everyday life in a truly amazing way.  I am also in *love* with her stamps and will be using several sets in my album. To see more about the concept of the December Daily Album and also to see Ali's past albums, you can go here: http://aliedwards.com/2009/12/december-daily-compilation.html and here: http://aliedwards.com/projects/december-daily

For my album I am sticking with a pretty dedicated supply of products for the majority of the album with some fun doo-dads and such thrown in.  Here are the basic products I am using this year:

Simple Stories Snap Album: This is an amazing new product and I just love the smaller album concept for these types of albums.  There are also divided pages and all sorts of fun stuff for use in these albums as well as your full scrapbooks too. :)

 

Echo Park This and That Collection: A perfect collection with gorgeous patterns and colors to create my pages with.  Love, love, love this collection...oh and pick up the 6x6 paper pack too. Its perfect for diecutting small shapes.



 

Silhouette Cameo Machine: The perfect diecutting machine.  It lets you cut pretty much anything you want and if they don't have it you can create your own diecuts using any JPEG or PNG image...And the intricacy, oh the intricacy! It cuts images that my other digital diecutter could only ever dream of doing. 

 

Diecuts from Kerri Bradford Designs: About 90% of the diecuts I am using in my album are from Kerri Bradford Designs. She creates the most gorgeous diecuts and they are pretty reasonably priced too. Here is a link to her online store: http://www.kerribradford.com/products-page/  She is a whiz with the Silhouette and if you want to learn more about your Silhouette, take one (or all) of her classes over at JessicaSprague.com. 

 

Ali Edwards Christmas stamps: As I mentioned above, I *love* Ali Edwards' stamps.  They are perfection....the perfect blend of words and design to use on scrapbook pages, cards, and other projects.  I have become quite the collector and user of her stamps and this album will be no exception. You can check all of her stamps out here: http://www.techniquetuesday.com/category/Ali-Edwards-Designs.html

 

I also pre-prepped all of my pages prior to beginning the album. I drew out sketches of what I wanted everything to look like and precut all the background papers and most of the diecuts for each page.  I then just put the pieces in the album pages so all I have to do is pull out the pieces I need and look at my sketch, print my pictures, and put together my page. This should speed up my process drastically.

 

 



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These are my first few pages for this year's album:

 

 

 

Around our house the holiday season kicks off the day before Thanksgiving when my dad and I head out to do our Christmas shopping. We love it because we still get a lot of the great deals you get on Friday but without the crowds. This layout documents our traditions and some of our stops this year. :)

 

The details: The large tree is a Hero Arts diecut for Silhouette.  Love how elegant the tree is but it is super delicate and I had a heck of a time getting it off the mat.  I ended up having to piece it back together again for my layout.  I think next time I will make it a bit thicker with the offset feature.

But altogether this was a super simple and easy layout to put together.

 

 

Just higlighting a few of my favorite photos and stories from Thanksgiving Day.  This was a relatively quick page to put together because all I had to do was print my photos, stamp the date and phrase and do a bit of journaling and it was complete.

 

The details: I created the quick photo collage in photoshop elements and printed it all out as one photo. The "Gathering Together" piece is a grouping of several different diecuts from Kerri Bradford and the Silhouette store.  Love the holes in the red paper that let the text paper peek through. 

 

 

This is one of those layouts that I did more prep work on than others.  The presents and date were completely done for this layout, so all I had to do was add my photos, a bit of stamping, and my journaling and the page was complete.  It took me maybe 20 minutes to complete it tonight.  :)

 

The details: The presents were all created in my Silhouette software using a few different bow diecuts and squares of paper for the boxes. I used papers from the 6x6 paper pad so that the patterns would be more in scale with the size of the boxes.  I also nestled my journaling box in with the presents and added a bit of stamping  to personalize it.  I also added the holly stamping and the red dots to the top of the page because I felt like they needed more color. :)

 

 

Well this has turned into a CrAzY long post, but I will be back later to share more of my December Daily pages with you. :)