Getitng Ready

   December is fast approaching and for me it is a busy time creating and capturing memories. This is my fifth year of documenting my December in a daily album. Every year, my album base is different, I have had them bond with split rings, 3-d ring binders, and even did my own binding with cardstock. This year's album is going to held together with a wire spine. I deconstructed a Fancy Pants brag book.

  

   Today, I am going to walk you through my kit I created and give you tips on how to have you album completed after the 25 days. 

   First step is to create a kit, since I have a small stash of Christmas embellishments I basically pulled everything in this kit.  I have stickers, chipboard pieces, twine, sequins, tags wood veneers, doilies, washi tape and die cuts. 

This year I decided to use stamps for the numbers for the days. For the journaling spots I did something different than previous years. I normally, use tags I cut out or Christmas journaling cards but this year I am challenging myself to use some basic design cards from My Mind's Eye. I have a nice big stack of these so I want to make a dent in the pile.

   I already decorated my foundation pages and stamped the day on the lined page. I used almost all my Christmas paper stash on this album. I have Heidi Swapp, American Crafts, My Mind's Eye and the Paper Studio. Since nothing is bound yet I can choose any day page for that day. Since the paper is rather thing in these books I doubled up the pages so they had a nice feel to them. I just glued the extra pages that were in the book together so I didn't have to worry about having to cut out the holes for the binding wire.
   One thing I learned about the stamping thing. Make sure you are wearing your glasses so you do end up stamping the Thursday on all the Tuesday pages.

   In my album foundation I have photo sleeves, blank journaling pages, decorated pages, and some kraft split pocket pages (these I will use to slide recipes in), and my decorated covers.

   To keep everything together and ready for me to use at the end of each day I used one of those huge freezer bags to hold everything. I found out last year this was one thing that helped me to succeed unlike two years ago where I failed big time, that album has hardly any journaling. Another thing to do is make sure you print the photos everyday so you don't put it off. If you can't print from home just make sure you take good notes so you what was each photo was about.

   I hope this has helped you to decided to rake the Dec. Daily plunge. You don't need one of those expensive kits to document you holiday celebrations. All this stuff I had in my stash so I spent nothing for this.