December Daily 2014

I am so happy to finally be able to share a completed December Daily album here. I came across the idea back in 2011 and of all the years I've attempted to start a December mini album, this past December was the only one I actually finished. It also happened to be one of our busiest. Go figure.

A lot of people tend to build their foundation pages ahead of time so they can be filled in as things happen. In 2012, I tried to prepare for my album ahead of time by setting aside products and cutting up base pages for my album but that didn't work out very well for me. I like to design my pages around photos and stories. Some days, I have more stories to tell, other days I don't have any stories at all, so I like the flexibility of not having the constraints of pre-planned pages. 

This means I don't create each page as the days carry on and I certainly don't have a finished album by the end of December but that's okay with me. It was important to me, however, to have this project completed before Baby arrived. So I followed a similar process as the one I used with my Project Life catch up.

I chose an old Studio Calico Handbook to house my December Daily. Then, every few days, I would go through my photos, pick out a photo or two for each day or decide on a story I wanted to highlight.  Based on the photos and stories I had, I sketched out the layout for each day and put the pocket page into the album, so it was ready for when I had the photos printed and inserts finished. After that, I went through the whole book again and filled in the empty spots with ephemera and other "generic" December/Christmas-related journaling.

Once I had the basic skeleton planned out, everything came together quickly. At first, I wanted to type all the journaling up so it would look more neat and uniform but I soon realized I was spending more trying to rewrite my stories so they would fit the small journaling spaces than finishing up the project so for the longer stories, I ended up handwriting. The good thing about working on the album as a whole instead of finishing each page at the end of the day is that you can't tell where I decided to stop typewriting and start handwriting; it's all mixed in together.

The last thing I worked on was the album cover - I wanted to paint it white. The finished look isn't quite as clean and even as I had envisioned but it's good enough for me. I also wanted to spell out "December" instead of just "DEC" but I didn't have alpha stickers in the right size that would fit into that label space so I just went with what I had. I also wanted to decorate the cover with Christmas-y themed embellishments but in the end, enamel dots were just the right thing to finish it off.

Up next, the inside look of my December Daily 2014 album.