December Daily 2012: Foundation & Planning

I have only ever once before attempted to make a december daily album. And though it's not finished, I'm not going to let that stop me from playing with NEW pretty paper for 2012.

Especially once I saw that lovely SC Handbook album. Oh yes.
It's the two inch binding rings that really sold me. I was going to do something smaller, but with the base of an old book and all patterned paper pages, and then I was going to bind it with my Cinch, but this seemed a bit easier. Plug and play, if you will.

Here's the plan.

• We start with the SC 6x8(ish) album. 
• Each day (plus a few for intro & closure) gets a two page spread, separated by a page protector (I miss you Hambly transparencies!)

• The handbook is painted with one coat of gesso, one coat of white acrylic paint, a wash of martha stewart pearl paint, then spritzed with SC shine, just to dazzle your eyes a little.

• The design will be based off of a variation on a 6x8 grid, with two 4x6 areas as the main base. 
• I plan to print only 4x6 photos.Though I may print smaller, if needed, using my usual photoshop tiny templates. 
• To that end, I've chopped up a variety of cute holiday papers, vellum, handmade specialty papers and some of my few remaining sheets of hambly. I've started out by cutting one 4x12 in strip from every paper. This will leave me with a few sheets to do a 6x8 full pattern later, if I so choose.

• Each page consists of a piece of blank white smooth textured cardstock that measures 7.5 w x 9 h. There is a box printed on front and back of each page. That box is 6 x 8.
• I can't quite bring myself to commit to putting down all the patterns and pages all at once now, but I've got all the pages and page protectors in, and as the papers are mostly already sliced up, it should be a simple matter of glue paper, glue photo, stick some journaling and stickers on there, and get it done.

That's the plan, anyway. Here's a bit where I was practicing with a starbucks red cup. Looks pretty good.

I've got a camera, I've got some papers, stamps, and glue. I think I'm ready.

Bring it on December!

December Daily 2010

Yes, you read that right... I am a little crazy, posting about a December Daily AND a Journal Your Christmas book. But hear me out. It's a little experiment. For Science!

Ahem.

Basically, this December Daily book is going to be for documenting the crazy random happenstances of my daily life this month. The Journal is going to be totally and completely Holiday focused. See? I have a plan. It totally makes sense.

The book is made from a Making Memories 9x9ish album (Great Escape kit). Most of the papers are from Basic Grey's Jovial line. The transparencies are Hambly, Teresa Collins and Making Memories.

Initially, I thought Jovial would be a challenge to work with, but I loved the colors and how untraditional they were. (And since there was no pink or purple I was totally willing to give it a try.) I thought they would be perfect for an everyday life book, that had just a bit of a holiday twist.

Here's a slideshow of the Flickr set I started (since 50+ pages would be a bit much to load on one post).

A few things about this book. One, it's pretty huge, both in terms of page size and number of pages. I did that on purpose so that I could make sort of "proper" scrapbook pages in it. I want this to be a bit less "matchy" than my week in the life book. I'm going to paint and sew and go a little crazy in here. There will probably be vintage book pages and who knows what kinds of crazy labels and stickers. I may take things out and I'm definitely going to be adding to it. It's going to be great. 

The second thing is that you may notice there are no page numbers.... That is intentional. I absolutely have plans to use up some of my wonderful grey numbers, but at this point I have no idea how many pages I am going to use up each day. You know I always take a ridiculous number of photos, and so I wanted space to well, have space. No worries about page limits = more sanity. We'll see how it goes. 

So are you getting into the holiday spirit yet?

My December Daily Book for 2008

Even though I blogged every day last December, and took a billion photos... I still haven't gotten around to finishing my December Daily book for last holiday season.

I don't really feel bad about it. After all, I finished my Christmas 2007 minibook last November.

But Ali has started posting peeks for her 2009 book, so it really got me thinking about the holidays. I know that Halloween is tomorrow, but we crafters often have to think ahead seasonally. ;)

Even though I had an absolute blast making the book, I realized I never posted the details on the blog. The book itself has been sitting in my box of unfinished projects (yes, I have enough that I need a whole box.) I finally uploaded all the photos to Flickr (there are nearly 60 of them). Here is a little slideshow.

Make up a hot cocoa and enjoy.

Really looking forward to this year's book too. I plan on doing something totally different. ;)

Happy Friday!