December Daily 2014

In my previous post I was telling you how excited I was to get into my craft room and use up some of my Christmas stash. In addition to the cards and layouts I made, I also planned and put together my December Daily album for this year. I haven't done one in a few years, but I love how they capture the magic and excitement of the month of December...not JUST Christmas Day. (You can learn all about the December Daily phenomenon at Ali Edward's website.)

I actually plan on documenting all the way to December 31st this year because we have lots of events and activities planned and I wanted to make sure I capture all the fun! For me, part of that fun is thinking about, planning and creating the actual album, and I love pinning pictures of all the December Daily Albums out there that inspire me.

I knew that I wanted to have the album ready before December 1st came so that I could just pop the photos and journaling in. I toyed with the idea of using a 6x8 pocket page book because they are so easy and I love the way they look, but I had a cute, sparkly green 8x8 Creative Memories Album just begging to be used.

I loved the color and the shimmer, but it had the traditional strap hinge CM pages so I had to think a little about how I could pre-make the pages without knowing what orientation the photos would be in advance. I did some quick scrapbookers math and came up with two basic page layouts that were pretty flexible. Each layout uses only 2 pieces of 2 x 4 patterned paper strips (great to use up scraps) and leaves space for one 4x6 and one 4x4 photo, plus a little extra for journaling. Here's the first layout option:

And here's the second:

I figured out that with a 4x6 option and a 4x4 option on each side of a double page spread, I can probably fit just about any photos onto any page.

After looking through my Christmas papers, I found quite a few scraps from a paper pad called "Christmas Party" by Momenta/ATD that I snapped up at Winners years ago for only $6.00! It had tons of papers, die cuts, borders and punch out letter circles. I've used it for lots of projects over the years, but there was enough left for this little album. I started by cutting up the scraps into 2 x 4 strips and adhering them to the pages based on my layouts above.

 

I added these scraps to every page in the album...all ready for photos and journaling. Next I made a title page with some of the larger scraps, word strips, die cuts and letters. I added CM number stickers to the die cut tag for the year.

I separated all the remaining die cuts, letters and numbers. I sorted them and put them into a little tin for easy access. I plan on adding them in small doses throughout the album for fun and a sense of consistency.

I also printed out a new batch of my very own December Daily Date Circles, which you can read about and get by visiting this blog post. I punched them out and stored them with the other die-cuts.

Finally I put all the components for my little album in a basket along with the CM Page Protectors, some adhesive and my journaling pens. The basket will live on my desk so it will be a visible reminder of my project and will always be near at hand when I'm ready to add in the daily photos.

So, I think I'm ready! I'm looking forward to making lots memories with my family this December and then capturing and documenting to enjoy again and again. I hope some of these ideas help you with your December Daily. I'll try to post a few layouts each week and I'd love to see yours as well - make sure to leave a comment with a link to your blog or Instagram photos below!

Happy December!