December Daily 2011 Foundation Pages

Christmas is fast approaching (the most wonderful time of the year!), and I'm excited to once again document our holiday events in a December Daily album. You can see my previous albums here, here and here. This year, I wanted to use some non-traditional colors, and make it a fun, bright album. I used mostly Echo Park's Holly Jolly paper line.

I decided to make my foundation pages 6"x 8", and I made my own album cover (see below), using just some cardboard with the paper glued to it. I'll probably be going back and using Mod Podge on top, but I haven't gotten that far yet. I did a little bit of stitching on the front cover, and the "Merry Christmas," "Life's Little Moments," "2011" and "december" are all stamps from separate manufacturers. The reindeer sticker is from the Holly Jolly line as well:

For my foundation pages, I wanted to use a couple different templates repeated several times throughout the album (but using different patterned paper and embellishments). I'm hoping this will create a uniform look and also make it a little easier on me to complete the album in December (the last album took me until SEPTEMBER of this year to finish, HA! Slacker! But, I had a newborn to attribute to my tardiness ;) I'm hoping to actually finish this one in December. I'll probably regret putting that down in writing, but oh well! The basic setup for my album will be to have a 6x8 page on the left for journaling and adding embellishments etc., and the 6x8 page on the right will be a full page photo from that day.

The first three photos are using the same design template. I used different PP on each, and stamped the numbers above the PP, using red ink for the number I wanted to highlight:

Below are three more pages using a different design (BTW, I haven't numbered most of the pages...leaving it a bit more flexible, so I can decide while I'm completing the pages each day which design to use). I used Washi tape at the top of the PP on these:

And another design, using the same stamps from the front cover (I'll either use the center area to journal in or just to add the number for the day, including the journaling directly onto the photo for that day in Photoshop):

I left these pages pretty simple, just stamping and embossing a background image, leaving more flexibility for the design on these days:

I probably should have photographed the following three separately, because it looks a bit chaotic with them all side by side like this, but for these pages I intead to add a white journaling strip in the largest section of each page. I left this cardstock off the page for now. The journaling on these pages will most likely be typed, and I'll use these pages for the days that I have a longer story to tell:

And finally, the last template (I have a few pages using the same design, just didn't photograph them all). I plan to add a small photo to the top portion of this page and some journaling typed below.

If you made it this far, thanks for looking! Hope you come back to check out my finished pages in December!