Thursday, January 8, 2015

December Daily 2014, Days 6 - 11

(Check out my December Daily Days 1 - 5 here)

Welcome to my December Daily 2014, Part II. Today I'm sharing days 6 - 11.


On December 6th, I went with my boyfriend to his fraternity formal. The lighting throughout the night wasn't great for pictures, so I didn't end up with many photos to work with and tried to focus on the words instead. The picture of Mike and I was grainy and dark, so I converted it to black and white using the Afterlight app on my phone, and printed it 2.5 x 2.5. To fill up the 3 x 4 pockets on the left, I used a photo of my shoes and clutch, and a picture from our dinner. 

I wanted to use the fun "clink clink" card, but I needed another blue embellishment somewhere else in the spread to tie it together. I decided on one of the chipboard stickers; the circle shape worked well with the plates in our dinner photo. To finish, I stamped "06" on top and added a tiny gold sequin.


Embossing the woodgrain numbers with gold glitter zing and using the stamps from the kit continue to be two of my favorite techniques for this album.


This page was so much fun to put together. 

When I started thinking about this project in September and October, I knew right away that I wanted to include a "Christmas sweater" pattern using cross stitch, and when I saw this paper in the Ali Edwards kit, I knew that graph paper pattern was the perfect way to make it happen. I made the pattern in MicrosoftExcel and then marked the stitches on my paper before I brought out the embroidery floss. I think the key to making this page work out for me was piercing all of the holes before I started stitching - lots of people use a paper piercer but a regular needle worked fine for me. All in all, it took about 45 minutes, and I love the look. If anyone would be interested in a free template for this page, leave a comment & I'd be happy to share. 


Above the stitching I embossed "December Stories" and below I printed a few lines about December 8th. 

The right side of the spread covers December 7th and December 8th. I didn't have many pictures from either one -- the 7th was a lazy Sunday and the 8th was a travel day -- so it made sense to combine them. I embellished my journaling cards with a date stamp and sewed a red and white strip of paper along the bottom. Each photo just got a red star sequin - simple and done. 


Of course I had to use the graphic number paper for Day 9. I already knew that I wanted Day 10 to be a 4 pocket page, so I cut the 6 x 8 paper into 3 x 4's and used some leftover embroidery floss from the previous page to emphasize the 9. The printed journaling along the side focuses on "9 Things I'm Loving Right Now," and includes Taylor Swift, fleece-lined tights, and being done with finals. 

Since the number page is visually heavy with a lot of black, I tried to balance the spread by keeping the left side visually light by using photos and journaling cards with a lot of white space. On each card, I stuck with simple, centrally-placed pink and gold embellishments. 


I'm not a huge fan of pastel colors, so I had a harder time putting days 10 and 11 together. Day 10, on the left, is made up of two photos, a number card (repeating the gold circle tag + gold embossed number look that I talked about in my first post) and a journaling card that I embellished with a strip of red and white paper. With day 11, on the right, I cut a 4 x 6 photo in half to fit into the top two pockets, and printed my journaling directly onto the photo. This left me with room for two decorative filler cards, which I used to tie the right half of the spread to the left with gold, pink, and grey accents. I hand stitched the plastic star in the rightmost pocket using more pink embroidery floss for a little extra texture. 

Check back soon for days 12 - 17!

3 comments:

  1. Hi Alexa...love your pages! You have great style! How did you print the journaling on the graphic numbers page? We're you working with a digital DD kit and added journaling before printing?
    And yes....would love if you shared your template of the "sweater" page!

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    1. Hi! Unfortunately there was no digital kit offered this year - fingers crossed for December 2015.

      When I need to add journaling to cards like these, I take a picture of the card and the open it in PhotoshopElements. Since both of the cards here were 3 x 4, I made the canvas that size. I cropped the picture so that there was no background and stretched it so that it filled the 3 x 4 canvas. This let me see where to type. Then, when I was done typing, I just turned off the Photoshop layer with the photo, and printed my text!

      Thanks so much for your interest in the pattern. I'll upload with my next blog.

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  2. Thanks for the info! The way you're using Photoshop to place your journaling just right is so clever! I always have a hard time placing it in the right spot. I'm def going to try that!!
    Looking forward to the template....thanks!

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