December Daily 2015

Hi, everyone :-)

I have tried to create a December Daily for several years now. Probably for as long as Ali Edwards have actually made one :-D

So, this year I am going to make it happen, and I enlist you, my readers, to help me with it.

1) Assign a place to "make it happen". You need what you need to make art journals, scrap books, or any paper crafting. To me that means a table with reasonable bare working surface, a chair that is OK to sit on for hours and all my tools and materials available and close-by.
I have already a work place, which I intend to use for this, too.

2) Make a plan for your December Daily. Look at pictures, and pic some 20 that you find wonderful, the photos that made you want to make DD yourself. And then just decide. If you don't like it, you can always make a new one next year. But remember, "done is better than perfect". You should see what I have inside my head! The awesomeness would break the Internet! Like all fantasies...
So - pick a format and go for it. It's just 31 days. You can do it.

- choose color scheme
- collect some ephemera, embellishments etc.
-- you will need numbers, from 1 to 31
-- you might want some ribbon and string.
-- Christmas wrapping materials are great - wrapping paper and ribbon
-- any paper scraps in your chosen color scheme. If it's red and green, the junk mail, catalogues etc. will be full of these colors.
-- I like anything glittery for Yule.
-- anything flat can be used, like flat ornaments, buttons, crocheted shapes, cupcake toppers and drink sticks, napkins, paint chips, sequins, post cards, paper scraps... Found objects are a nice, unusual addition, and there's usually something in junkmail at this time of the year, that can be used. There's also interesting things used as packing material.
-- I think snowflakes are perfect for DD and paper doilies look very much like snow.
-- I also like transparencies. It could be plastic or tissue paper. You can make your own printed tissue paper and washi tape.
-- I like metal embellishments. You can make quite a lot yourself, from old cans and tins or with aluminium foil.
-- I also like wood vaneer. It's not difficult to make fake wood.
-- You can fake almost any material. There's tutorials online on how to make fake wood, stone, metal, enamel etc.
- get some stamps and stencils.
- I like my albums layered. So learn to make different minialbums and tip-ins. Lapbook community has tons of tutorials on how to make interesting things to add more surface and layers, like minibooks, flaps and folders.

3) Make the album or covers or what ever you decided on. Get the empty journal. Get the photo album. Get what ever it is you decided.
Get the empty pages or make some sort of note or draw a sketch of each empty page as placeholder for when you get the actual page. Some might want to use this year's holiday greeting cards or junkmail as pages. You need to have some sort of marking of that "here is a page".

4) Have a sketchy plan on what you want to have on each page. With "sketchy", I mean "this page is going to be about our trip to fetch the tree" or "this page is going to be about holiday baking".
There are tons of lists and suggestions on what to put on pages, just search "December Daily", "December photo a day", "December journal prompts"  and "December project life", etc.

5) Get into habit of taking at least one photo each day. If you don't have a camera, or if you don't want photos, you can skip this step. But don't expect that on December 1st you wake up with an irresistible lust to take photos, if you haven't done it in November. Make yourself take at least one photo each day, from today.
Remember, NO-ONE DOESN'T NEED TO SEE YOUR PHOTOS. Not even you. You can delete them right after shooting them. But if you want photos, you need to take photos, and the only way of getting better with it, is to do it.

6) Look at the embellishments and backgrounds of people's DDs and start collecting that kind of things. Most people seem to have a basket to store these things. You need a box or basket or tray big enough to hold your December Daily album and a couple of boxes, bowls or cups to hold the "small stuffs", like stickers and gold flakes and buttons etc.

Now you are ready for December.