December Daily

I cannot believe that yesterday was December 1st.  Further reminder that time is flying by and I have not posted on this blog for 3 months.  I'm super excited for the holidays which started off with a bang with a really great trip back to Virginia Beach for Thanksgiving.  We stayed with Christina and the kids and it was awesome hanging out with them.  It was action packed and lots of fun.  We also had a chance to visit with Matt and Jenn and Larry was able to spend a lot of time with Matt too.  I'll do a separate post on the trip with more pictures soon.  We came back on November 25th and jumped right in on getting ready for Christmas.

One of my favorite things about Christmas for the past few years is following along with Ali Edwards on her December Daily project.  It's an album that documents the days of December leading up to and including the 25th.  It has become one of my most cherished of projects and the albums are so fun to look back on.  I started the project in 2009 so this will be my 3rd year completing the album.  It's really amazing that each year I have a whole album worth of holiday memories to document and so far I really haven't duplicated that much stuff.  It really is a fantastic way to document my favorite time of the year.  I plan on posting each days pages so you can follow along and see what were up to this year.

Here's a look at the last two album covers for 2009 and 2010.

I won't take the time to share the insides today but next time your come by they are out if you want to look at them.

Here's a look at this years cover. 

This year Ali developed a kit including the Album with Studio Calico.  I decided to purchase the kit at the 11th hour and I'm glad I did, it is now sold out.  The cover came as a plain Kraft chipboard album so I decided to paint it.  I did one coat of gesso then 2 coats of white acrylic paint.  I then sprayed it with Krylon Gold Glitter spray, and then sealed with Krylon Glitter sealer.  Its hard to see the glitter effect in this photo but its super subtle ad adds just a touch of shimmer.  I love this paint!  The star is a wood ornament purchased at Joann's painted with the same off white acrylic paint but no glitter spray was added.  The edge is painted with 4 coats of Martha Stewart Garnet Glitter Paint.  It took a lot of coats to get the look I wanted, its goes on pretty sheer and needs lots of layers.  The green numbers are from my stash, the metal rimmed tag is stamped using the date stamp that came in the Project Life kit last year.  Red bells purchased at Joann's.

One thing that really helps to get this project going is to have all of your foundation pages done in advance.  I worked really hard getting everything ready before we left for Virginia Beach because I knew it would be crazy when we got hom.  Here are those pages, blank and ready to go.

This is the title page when you open the album. It's designed to cover all the pages below.  The word art is not mine, its something Ali created that can be purchased at Designer Digitals.

This calendar page came with the kit and I'll add stuff to it as the month goes on.

I made three envelopes as inserts this year, this is the first of them.

This is a baseball card pocket page that will get filled up with lots of photos since it's also Simone's birthday this month.

Another of my envelopes.

The last envelope.

I hope you enjoy following along.  I'll put my Day 1 in a separate blog post, in a few minutes.