December Daily Day 8

Yesterday was so much fun - we took Natalie out to "Christmas on the Canal" to look around, and for the first time, we brought the K'Tan out so I could strap her to me and walk around with her! Usually we just try to keep her asleep in her car seat, but I knew she'd need some awake time so we tried it! I threw on Chris' coat over us and zipped it up to her head so just her head was sticking out! She got lots of attention while we were there!!

Before I delve into details, here is the prepped page again:

I ended up not liking the bottom left corner at all, so I actually pulled up the circles to maybe use later, and de-stapled the sequins and covered the messed up portion of the paper with my photos - I printed all 3 on one 4x6 with my Canon Selphy - only thing when doing that is you can't pick your format or which photos come out bigger since it's random, but it worked out perfectly this time, it blew up my favorite one and kept the other two together and smaller!

For the right side of the page, I scraplifted the idea from this card! For the banners I used some of the papers that came in this month's card kit add-on by Studio Calico.

I hadn't attached the "Love" title, just had it floating in there as an idea, so I swapped it out for "Silly" - those came as part of the Printshop collection.

December Daily Day 7

Wow, made it through day 7 and haven't gotten behind yet. Well I really have no excuse till I hit the pages that I haven't premade, aka Day 11. The pics of these pages aren't very good today - it was getting dark by the time we got back from church and going to "Christmas on the Canal".

Yesterday Chris got out the lights from the basement and began stringing them outside. He does such a mint job with them and brings his meticulous, borderline OCD way of thinking to carefully place each strand evenly and densely across our bushes. He buries the strands in between each so that it doesn't look messy and you can't see the light trail, and then he has it all hooked up to a remote control so we don't have to go outside to turn them on and off!

I punched a circle from a gold Reese's peanut butter cup wrapper and added that last night after Chris came home from a late night trip to Walmart with a candy cane full of mini reese's peanut butter cups! It was such a nice surprise!

Lastly, we just got the Baby Becko Gemini in the mail yesterday (baby carrier) so I put Natalie in it to take some pictures of Chris for this album, but had him take a few quick snapshots of us - so I look horrible, with my lazy nursing mom outfit, mismatching shoes and coat, and no makeup... but Natalie looked so cute in her carrier that I couldn't resist adding this picture to the album! I guess this album really is going to show "real life" not just pretty Christmas-y things :)

December Daily Day 6!

Thank goodness for prep work again! I didn't sit down to print my photos for the day and scrap till about 10pm or so last night! Luckily I only had to print out 3 photos, add a stamp and some journaling and it was done!

Last night Chris and I got dressed and ready to go out, and laughed at ourselves, thinking we were fooling ourselves that we could actually go out and do anything with the baby. On our way to attempt a quick dinner at a restaurant with Natalie, I suggested we call Chris' mom and see if she wouldn't mind if we dropped her off real quick - she didn't mind and we were FREE!!! In the car ride to the restaurant at first we kept talking real low because we're so used to that, but then we realized we didn't have to and started yelling, WOOHOO!! Haha! It was exhilarating!

Anyway, yesterday during the day, Natalie's friend was helping to rock her in her car seat haha, the "magic" trick to get Natalie to settle down! Thank goodness for snug car seats that still allow her to flail her arms!!

I just put together those small naughty & nice stamps that came with the Ali Edwards December Daily kit and stamped with Hero Arts (Royal Red?) ink. It was quick and easy so I called it a night!

December Daily Day 5

Aren't babies even cuter when together!? This one was the fastest and easiest spread yet! All I had to do was print my two photos, add a couple embellishments and journal and done!

The most "creative" thing I did on these pages was I made the reindeer border cut file by duplicating the blank stamp cut in the Silhouette software, pushing them together and melding them, then I cut it out and stamped over and over again on top of it with Hero Arts ink!

I had everything on this page already done except for the natural bark stars and winter wishes badge that came in this month's Cole card add-on kit by Studio Calico and arrived on my doorstep yesterday, just in time!

So far I'm looking good to hopefully keep up over the weekend and not get behind quite yet... hopefully!

December Daily Day 4

I love this project! Where else would I get to scrap this random pic I took yesterday morning when Natalie woke up and I found her crazy and sideways in her crib, "walking the rails" because she just learned (on day 3) how to roll onto her side!? She kicked one of her socks off on the rail and fell to the floor under her crib, and the other one she kicked off in the crib!

For this left side, I just printed a snapshot of my text to Chris. I added a little bow from the Printshop collection by Shanna Noel at Studio Calico - so cute!

Originally I had a black piece of paper for the right side, but I flipped it over to the other side and liked the way that looked with my photo better. Then I had this random piece of reddish color paper in the bottom left on the left side that I tossed because it no longer went with the color scheme, so I just picked one of the leftover 3x4 pieces I have and used that instead.

So I can't believe I haven't fallen behind yet, which sounds silly on day 4, except I'm barely scratching by! I've only prepped through day 9 and it seems to be taking me longer to make these spreads than a 12x12 page haha! I guess I'm just not used to the handbook size, but also half the time is spent selecting, editing, and printing the photos to the sizes I like. We'll see how long I last, but hoping if I do get behind I can play catch up on the weekends!

December Daily Day 3

So this time I definitely got better pictures! I took our good camera out with me on a walk around the neighborhood with Natalie at lunch! Any pics of her will be great, and then any pics of her bathed in natural light will be my favorite days!! And you just can't beat that toothless grin... my heart just melts as I look at that picture!!

I had most of this spread prepped and ready to go, except I removed a filler card from the right side where I added her picture and the stamp "Love this" embossed in gold glitter Zing!

It's Day 3 and already I'm learning what I like and don't like... as I said yesterday, I like pictures on each side of the spread. I also realized I don't like in places where I've prepped and force myself to use the same card or paper for both sides. I like being able to move around the pieces I do have prepped after I print my photos to see what looks best, but if the back is being used on the previous or next spread, then I'm sort of locked into my placement - I don't like that!

Other than that, you can see I didn't mind that my photos didn't match the papers I used here - her blanket is purple but there's a lot of red in this spread. Oh well! :)

December Daily Day 2

Well, even though I had the prep done, this one took a bit longer - we had a short evening after work... by then, Natalie was so tired and Chris made dinner, but those photos didn't turn out great. So I took some pics from the start of our new home gym in the basement that's starting to come together!

I used a stamp from last year and embossed it on top of that pic of me haha!

I didn't add anything else to this cut out by Ali Edwards, so decided to put a badge on the photo above since there wasn't much going on this side.

Since this is my first time making a handbook, I didn't know how it would look with photos - and after doing this layout, I definitely needed at least one photo on the right side - I didn't like the way it looked with two 4x6 pieces of decorated paper. Learning as we go! Hopefully today's won't take as long... I already got pictures because by 9am, I flooded the basement and Chris had to come home and help clean it up real quick haha!

December Daily Day 1!!

Um wow, prep work for December Daily paid off!! All I did today was print out 2 pictures from this afternoon, add some journaling, a sticker and a number clip!

Today's photos are of my daughter sleeping in her swing that I printed in black and white since the colors of the swing didn't really match - and the other is of our LED tabletop tree that Chris brought up from the basement... in lieu of going out and getting a tree today because we have to figure out what we're doing there still. So for 2013 so far I haven't gotten behind yet haha!

Pick One

The title of my page is sort of like telling myself to choose a design concept... I kinda got everything going on in this page ha!

This was the last of the pics from the public market and also the last page I planned to make with the Cuppa kit from Studio Calico, so I definitely wanted to use those colored transparency squares! I started playing around with the layout and cut a few more squares from patterned paper then embellished here and there to finish it up.

It is another grid layout for the books! Oh well, I'm happy I am caught up with pictures and layouts and here it is, December 1st, just in time for December Daily! Yay!!

Locavores

Here are more pics I quickly took at the public market a couple weekends ago! I love that I don't do scrapbooking as my job, or I would feel guilty for repeating this cut out windows technique for these pieces of paper!

I had some random pics of the items at the market and just decided they'd be perfect for this type of layout. I used the Cuppa kit along with some Heidi Swapp letter stickers.

Chris gave me my title for the page, Locavores - people who eat local food! I punched some stars from a strip of paper leftover from a card, added some journaling and voila!