I have been working on some digital pages at 6×8″ to go into my Handbook album, which is on its way to me from Studio Calico. I wanted to do some December Daily type pages to remember the fun I had last month.
(December Daily is a photo scrapbooking project by Ali Edwards that thousands of people around the world do along with her, taking photos and writing stories daily during December to celebrate and commemorate the holiday season. You can see her posts about it here and see her beautiful album and links to lots of other wonderful albums. The way she makes it work is by preparing the album pages in November so she can paste in her photos and write in her stories each day in December without having to a lot of designing and crafting during the busy holidays. It’s a neat idea.)
haha, every pictures was taken with my iPhone, except the one of me and hubby at the Hobbit, which was taken by one of the lovely library ladies :) That Hobbit title on black was a photo of the screen I took as the movie started!
What I’ve done is created a few pages about specific days during December where I did something fun and interesting. Not necessarily Christmasy. I made the first 2 a few days ago, the last one this morning. I created my own templates for the 6×8″ size (the Hobbit is a double page spread) and used PL seafoam digital papers and cards. I pulled the taupe color out of the ampersand card and used that to tone down some of the papers (I made a taupe layer and then put a patterned seafoam paper over the top and decreased the opacity of the patterned layer to let the taupe show through). I like the chevron paper toned down this way. Now that I see the Hobbit layout with the Seattle Xmas layout I think the Hobbit could use some of the color from the chevrons (although not necessarily the pattern). That yellowy color is in several photos in the theater. I might go back and rework that layout – digital is easy to change. The red number is the date. I pulled the color from the soloist’s dress in the Messiah page and decreased the opacity. I want all of the pages to go together, but they don’t need to be perfectly matched – which is good, because it’s a nuisance to have to go back and see what opacity and point size the numbers were on a previous page.
The font I used is called CK Sketch and it’s based on Becky Higgins’ brother’s handwriting. He died last year so the font is being offered as a fundraiser for his family here. I really like this architect printing style, especially in upper case, so I was happy to give them $2 for it. I don’t really remember why I chose to leave out capital letters on the journaling on the earliest 2 layouts. Maybe it just looked and fitted better.
I have more photos I will probably arrange into layouts (but may not share publicly here). I took some photos of my nephew on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and I took lots of photos of my Christmas decorations, although I only took one picture of the outside of my house lit up this year. The month really got away from me. And we were waiting for our candy cane rope lights to show up but the seller cancelled our order without telling us and so we never got them.
Maybe next year I will do something more daily… (if I’m still interested in doing scrapbooking) I might set up some digital pages ready to drop photos into. It seems like a neat idea to be able to pull out a Christmas album each Black Friday and see what you did the last year, and decide what you might want to do more of or less of this year. Some people do a December journal or Christmas planning binder – also good ideas, depending on what your preference or focus is.
These pages are also the beginnings of a Project Life album. No reason not to start with December. I don’t feel like I’m starting “behind” either. I’m working with what inspires me right now.
Jo:)
adventures in the here now 