December Daily Album

Last week I was intrigued by a project that Ali Edwards posted on her blog- an album that is created ahead of time and ready to document each day in December leading up to Christmas. This weekend I sat down and made one of my own (I had more than enough supplies in my current stash to make this without buying anything new).

The cover is a pair of 8x8 acrylic sheets. I bought a large sheet of acrylic last year at Hobby Lobby. Mom and her mat cutter and Dad and his drill press helped me get the pages trimmed and punched for binder rings. I previously used a set of 12 pages in my Colorado acrylic album, and for this I simply used two pages, one for the back cover and one for the front.


I had some burlap and some gorgeous ribbon that I just hadn't known what to do with on a page, but they turned out to be the perfect things for this cover. The hardest part was figuring out how to make them stick! I would have taken many, many glue dots and possibly not worked, and ATG tape presented the same problem. Liquid glue does not adhere to acrylic well- it becomes brittle and breaks off after it dries. Plus, it would have absorbed into both the burlap and the ribbon and probably changed their coloring (made them darker). The final answer? Xyron 900, baby!! Mom and Dad got me one for Christmas several years ago- it applies adhesive to the back of just about anything up to 9 inches wide. I ran the burlap and the ribbon through it, and it worked beautifully.


Each page in this album is different- a different type of paper or material with different types of numbering.


This page is a cut-down baseball card holder- another idea from Ali's blog.


Some pages are very small compared to the others- I'm digging the mix. :)


Some old sheet music I've had in the stash for a while and not known what to do with (the other half of it is used as another page later in the album).



I made sure that this "LIVE" bingo card was my page for December 6th. I'm scheduled to take my very first snowboarding lesson that day and thought it would be appropriate.


This one is a transparency from Hambly- a little hard to see in the photos since you can see right through it to the next page.




I love this shaped paper!




This is another one that's hard to see in the picture. It's a piece of vellum printed with snowflakes. I think I've had this in my stash for somewhere between 8 and 10 years. Yikes!





I love this page. I made it by cutting down a page meant to hold slides. It has 9 tiny 2"x2" square pockets on it.





This is one of the few new sheets of paper I cut into to make this album (most of the pages were made from scraps of papers I've used on previous layouts). I just love this paper from Sassafras Lass- the Narwhals are what did me in. :)



Another transparency that may be difficult to see.



So, now the entire album is going into a project box along with some journaling cards and a few small Christmas/Winter themed embellishments. I'll try to post pages as I go along in December so you can see the album as it gets filled.