Welcome to the last installment of my December Daily, 2014. Today I'm sharing pages 21 - 25, and wrapping up with some overall thoughts on the project.
I knew that I wanted to include some "around the house" pictures in my project, which turned out to be perfect for days 21 and 22 when I didn't have much going on. Whenever I felt stuck on a spread, I looked back through my completed pages and tried to repeat designs that I liked -- here, I borrowed a lot from day 5. (Another example: days 7 & 8 with days 18 & 19).
You might have noticed that I cut up the 6 x 8 "There Ought to be More Merry Making" paper into 3 x 4 cards and used them throughout the album. I like clean, pink-on-white design, and it definitely doesn't bother me that you can't read the whole phrase. I think it adds a cool, graphic element that doesn't distract from the overall spread.
Here, I combined days 23 and 24. By this point, I was running low on paper from the Ali Edwards kit, so this spread is mostly made up of papers that I had loved and saved from other projects. To keep these pages from looking disconnected from the rest of the book, I repeated some techniques that I'd been using throughout the project: white borders on photos, gold embossed wood veneer numbers, and those red sequin stars.
I love a bold yellow stripe.
On one of the photos for December 23rd, I printed a list of all of the clothing that I brought home for winter break - my own mini capsule wardrobe. I'm sure this is something that I'll enjoying looking back on from year to year, and it tells a story about my life right now, even though the pictures don't necessarily correspond to the words.
We made it to December 25th: a super easy spread to finish out the project. I wanted to add a little something extra because it was Christmas, so I added a handful of gold sequins to an extra 6 x 8 page protector and sewed the top shut so that they wouldn't fall out. I ended up making the width of the page protecter about one half inch thinner -- the final dimensions are around 5.5 x 8 -- and added another one of the tab stickers on the side. This sequin page was originally made to go between days 16 and 17, but I think it fits this spread better, and I love the final look.
thoughts on this project & lessons learned
I can't say it enough: I loved working on this little book. Many thanks to Ali Edwards for creating the concept of December Daily and for producing a kit that was both fun and easy to work with. I completed one other December Daily album on my own in 2011, and though I'm happy with the final product, I ended up skipping several days and rushing to complete others more after December was past. I was over it by the time I actually put it on the shelf. This year, I'm so excited that my December Daily 2014 is something I enjoy looking through and, most importantly, that it is done before April.
Working on this project solidified a lot of things for me: I love the look of hand and machine stitching on paper. I need my pages to have a healthy amount of white space. I prefer typed journaling on both patterned paper and on photos. I think white photo borders and square corners are the bomb.
I also learned some new things: Embossing is super fun. So are plastic shapes. You shouldn't use your heat gun near plastic shapes though, because they will curl up, melt, and make you feel very dumb. This was my first time working with a pre-made kit, and while I didn't use or love every single piece, it worked really well for me overall. I loved (and used) 80% of the papers, especially the neutral grays. I exhausted every gold foil label, rubber banner, and chipboard sticker, and I couldn't get enough of the red sequins.
There are a few things that I'd like to do better next December. Photos were definitely the limiting factor in this project for me; by mid month, I was struggling to remember to take pictures, and ended up having to combine multiple days into a single spread. I don't mind the look, but I'm sure that there are aspects of the month that I missed out on documenting because of it. Next time that I complete this project - or any project - I hope to be more mindful with my photography.
As excited as I am to have December 2014 "in the books", I know that I'll miss working on it a little bit each day, and I'm excited to find my next excuse to play with photos and paper soon. Stay tuned.
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