Kaitlin Sheaffer

Documenting December

 

Pre-orders are up for the Scraptastic Stocking Stuffer kit! 

I had so much fun working on the designs for this kit. Initially I was pretty excited that I wasn't going to be working on Christmas designs this year- but then as I started seeing all of the Christmas product coming out I was a little sad. When Jessica asked if I wanted to work on some cards and flair for the kit it was an enthusiastic yes! 

This kit is jammed pack! Seriously, Jessica gave me a list of what would be in the kit and then she must have added even more because I checked the listing on the site and there were many items she hadn't told me about. I am SO excited to recieve it and get it started. The colors are so bright and everything goes so well together. 

I've documented our December in numerous forms before but never with a kit. Last year I didn't finish an album because I was too overwhelmed with a new baby and keeping up with the shop. But this year, having a kit ready and no shop duties makes it seem a little more doable for me. Fingers crossed that it is! I don't think I will do a daily version- there just never seems to be enough that I want to include to do daily. But, I am still going to do my best to get this album jam packed with photos! We all love looking back at our previous albums so that is always my motivation. 

You can see more detailed photos of what is included up on the site and a full list of everything in the kit. 

Also, each of the cards are double sided (like the This Life Noted kit is) except, because the orientation for the pockets in the album are all vertical, I decided to keep the backsides of each card a pattern in place of a horizontal design. A few cards have a different design option instead of a pattern, especially in cases with snow or weather related designs. The backside of those has either a warmer climate design or another alternate design. I tried my best to be thoughtful of different traditions, locations and such when designing the cards and I hope you will love it as much as I do! 

On another note, my beautiful Colorado is terribly flooded. We live right in the middle of it- on basically what has become a little island. Although all we have to show for this rain is a nicer lawn, if I travel any farther in any direction there is flooding, even within my own city. The road we traveled on just a couple of weeks ago to head into the mountains is gone and many people are stranded in their town. I've never seen so much rain in my life- and I've lived here since I was a toddler. Please keep Colorado in your prayers! We are all so excited when we get rain, it being so dry here- but this was too much for us! 

Revisit the Past

Today we're going to revisit our past.  No, not the glorious 70's or even the rockin' 80's, but just one short month ago. 

Put your lights back up, get some presents wrapped and start rolling out some cookies because we are walking down the December Daily/December Journal road again!  I know you may have turned your focus to Project Life, Project 365 or just getting your supplies organized, but we're going to go back and tie up some loose ends.

On a personal note, this is HUGE for me!!  I was a Week in the Life fail, a December Daily 2010 fail and there is no way I will attempt Project Life because that would be an epic fail!!

My original December Journal post covered only a few pages so I'm here with the completed album (insert angels singing).

The cover (again):

I had a lot of fun with Jed, our Elf on the Shelf, this season!  Let's just say that when you're on your own in the evenings after the kids go to bed you may or may not have a lot of time on your hands, so I definitely wanted to document our antics together!

Of course there has to be a Santa page!  And we had THE BEST Santa ever at the museum we went to visit.

I had a "filler" page and decided to document their favorites for this year.  I think it'll be fun to look back on it and see how these all change!

We took a local trip to the National Zoo to see the lights they put up each year.

And our big to do for the holiday season was a great vacation to the Bahamas that we LOVED!!

And that's it! 

 

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December Journal

So I hemmed and hawed for many days about doing a December Daily.  Last year I was a huge failure and it still sits in a heaping mess and probably will never be finished.  I do well with deadlines, but do horribly with a week or month long deadline!  Crazy, right?!

So I decided to take a different approach to a December Daily this year and instead of a daily entry I'm simply journaling about the holiday season.  We have a lot of fun once Thanksgiving hits so I'm just highlighting those fun things and traditions that we do during that time. 

I used one of the binders from the shop and just painted it off white on the front and the spine.   Then I lightly sprayed some Mister Huey Shine over the top of the dried paint.  A bit of paper, washi tape and Ormolu Merrymaker/Fact or Fiction goodies and I was happy with it!

I started my December Journal actually in November-go figure!  We start our holiday season of family and fun during the Thanksgiving holiday so I thought it was a great place to start!

Decor is becoming a big part of our holiday prep too.  After many years of collecting and after holiday sales I finally have a nice snowman collection to display each year.

Finally, although not holiday inspired, but definitely spirit inspired, a gathering of friends for a holiday run.  Love these ladies and had to document some time well spent with them!

I'm having such a better time this year with a no pressure holiday book.  Just journaling about our holiday season and adding beautiful Ormolu products to the mix!

For page protectors in this album I just went to Staples and bought these 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 page protectors and interspersed with trimmed trading card page protectors.

Thanks for letting me share!

 

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December Daily

Hello everyone! You may remember this post, when I showed you the bones of my December Daily album. I am not all of the way caught up to where I need to be, but I wanted to share what I have accomplished.
Day 1:

My husband and I before heading to my work Christmas party. I tucked the journaling in that little envelope and added a Merrymaker Flapper in the top right corner. Not the best photo (a little too bright)...but that is what I love about projects such as this and Week in the Life. They allow you to focus more on the story and I find that very freeing:)

Day 2:

Off to serach for our Christmas tree. The Merrymaker Storytellers are the perfect size (2.5"x3.5") to fit in the pockets of the baseball card holders.

Day 3:

Decorating the tree:)

Day 4:

I saw Ali do this in one of her pockets in her album, and I loved it. I like how you can get a peek of the pages underneath. My journaling didn't quite fill up the entire Merrymaker Storyteller, so I added some patterned paper to cover up the empty space.

Day 5:

Dinner with Santa at my daughter's school:) So far I have added the date by doing this a lot, using a Merrymaker Flapper and adding the date with a rub-on.

Day 6:

I had to add some twine here somewhere...and the tag I had to use...went with Charlie Brown's shirt so well;)

Day 7:

Just a little bit of festive food:)

Day 9:

My daughter's school Christmas program. And yes, I did skip day 8. I have plans to share pictures of holiday decorations around the house.

So that is all I have so far, how is your December Daily going?!

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December Daily

Out of all the scrap related things I do throughout the year, the December Daily is my favourite project. I adore Christmas, and it’s so great to be able to see how each year progresses, and how some traditions never change. This will be my third time around doing one, and hopefully, as the saying goes, the third time’s a charm, since I have yet to complete the last two. I have both previous albums neatly tucked away with journaling and photos, and one day I’ll find the time to finish- maybe when my boys are married and moved out. ;)

 This year, in order to make things easier on myself, I decided to use the Ali Edwards templates, and I can tell you that it has been a HUGE factor in actually getting my pages done and up to date on a daily basis. I pre-printed everything a week before December began, and (also huge) I’ve decided to simplify the process even more by only doing one page per day.  I’m using the Ormolu binder as my album; it’s a 7x9 size that is nice and compact, yet large enough to accommodate my needs. One thing I have in mind that I haven’t shown here is the baseball protectors I’m using in between my pages, much like Kaitlin posted yesterday. I cut them down to a 4 photo grid, and will add extra photos and details in them throughout the month. I didn’t include them here, since I haven’t received the Studio Calico page protectors I’m planning on using, and want to wait to see how everything fits in the binder before I actually commit to that. I’d like to keep this pretty streamlined, and not too bulky.

 For the album itself, I wanted a natural feel, and chose this small flower print paper from Studio Calico that echoes the poinsettia on the Ormolu tag I used for my title block- a lucky find. I typed my title on theMerryMaker Storyteller tag, and added the December 2011 button. (LOVE that). I used brown bookcloth to cover the spine- in retrospect, I should probably have taken the binder apart and reattached it on top of the bookcloth, but it doesn’t really bother me. I added a grommet to the linen star tag, stamped it with some Distress ink, and just tied it to the inside of binder with the twine that comes with the MerryMaker charms.

 

 Here are my pages to date- I won’t always be using only one photo, but up to this point, it’s what has worked well for me. I’m using little bits and pieces from pretty much  all of the Ormolu lines for my embellishments, and I love how these are working for me to add just a little punch.

I’m working on Days 5 & 6 today, and feeling good that I can do this all the way through the end of December. If you’re interested in seeing how the rest of my album unfolds through the month, I’ll be posting it on my blog as I go. And if you're working on your own DD with any Ormolu products, I'd love it if you linked it up here for us to check out!

 

-Melanie

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December Daily | Kaitlin

This will be my fifth year doing a December album of sorts. I started doing Shimelle's class and gradually moved into more of a December Daily mode. I love both ways of doing it and sometimes combine both in my album now. What I noticed while taking out and looking over my past lbums this year is...I don't love all of them. In fact, the last few years my albums have gradually gotten thicker but I don't feel as they are as good as the first few years I did this type of album. This year I decided to streamline my entire approach and make it much simpler for me. So far, I love how it is coming out. I hope I keep up with it. 

For my album I used this one in the shop. I painted it white and then using my silhouette I cut out some fabric I ironed to a piece of heat bond. I know silhouette carries a fabric interfacing, but I could not find it in stock anywhere at the time I was doing this (and I kinda didn't want to wait for it to arrive either). It is holding up well and I am love how it turned out.

For the design I took measurements of the spine and drew a rectangle the size. 

I chose some doily shapes from the silhouette store and placed them overlapping my spine piece. I was originally going to use snowflake designs but I ended up liking these doily designs best. 

To combine the shapes I selected all of them and clicked on the weld button. Easy as that. 

I ran the fabric through my sewing machine to give it a little interest along the spine, then I ironed on the fabric to the chipboard binder (after painting it and removing the spine). After putting the album back together I added the December 2011 button I am putting in all orders. The only thing I would have changed is made the spine piece a little wider to overlap the front more. Other than that I really love it. 

My set up for my album is a baseball protector (cut down to 4 squares) and a full size page protector for each day. Because I started with the baseball protector, I was able to use the first side for an introduction page. The bottom right corner is empty still because I want to add a photo sometime during the month of our family. 

This is how the album lays out for one day. You will see the next day is just reversed (baseball page protector on the right, full size on the left). Doing it this way drastically reduced the amount of pages I will have- so that reduced the need for as much content and the thickness it will be in the end. Just what I wanted. For the template I wanted to use Ali's December Daily templates but because the page protectors I bought are 5.5 x 8.5 it would not work. Instead I drew out a skeleton of a template and am stamping in the number and day. 

Here is a closer look at the left side. 

For day two I typed onto my template: Do you see what I see, Do you hear what I hear, (and) Do you know what I know. Then I wrote in different things I have been seeing, hearing or 'knowing' lately. I love how it turned out. I got the idea listening to Christmas music in the car...probably will keep my ears open for more of these types of 'journaling prompts'.

It's really hard to see in photos, but for the 'Do you' part I printed it in an dotted outline and then filled it in with a glue pen and sprinkled a white glitter on it. This is my favorite page so far :) 

For day three I focused on photos I took of Jude playing with toys. Lately I have noticed him playing quietly with himself more and because of this I am very excited for him to open his gifts.

I don't have day four done yet, but I thought I would use this page to show how my album is set up for each day. I have each template printed and then I go in and stamp the number and day in (both stamps are from 7 Gypsies). Then the baseball card protector has a transparency with a number tag sewn to it. The number tag for on day is sewn on one side and for the next day on the other side (so on this page you see day 4 but on the other side is day 5). Then I fill in the remaining spots with journaling, photos, embellishments or emphemera. Easy. I made a few filler pieces (as seen above with the story tag- which I trimmed down from the original size). These pieces are thrown throughout the album and I can move them if I want to but this way I have some pieces done in case I need to fill in anything. 

When I am all finished, I will probably tie a ribbon around the entire album. I might also add something in the front or back of the interior- not quite sure yet. 

How are your December Daily's going? 

I would love to see some of them so please share in the comments any links you might have!

-Kaitlin 

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December Daily

Hi everyone! It's Pam here today and we are going to forget about Thanksgiving and talk about December Dailies;) I have done this project the past 2 years and am doing it again this year, only I am approaching the prep work a bit differently.

In the past, I have premade ALL of the pages in my album with the idea that it would be easier to plug in the pictures+words and be done with it. The problem with that is that when I am prepping my album, I have NO idea what we will be doing on that particular day, so then I ended up with too many pictures for the space (or the other way around!) or clashing colors with the papers+photos. I am doing things a little different this time around. I have made the covers of my album:

To create this album, I took 2 pieces of chipboard and trimmed them down to measure 8.5 inches high and 8 inches wide. I covered them with patterned paper, rounded the corners, and stitched around the edges. Then I punched holes through the cover and embellished it just a bit with some Merrymaker goodies.

As you can see in the photo below, I covered the inside of the covers with white cardstock.

For the opening page, I used an idea I saw pinned by Ali Edwards of someone using her digital word art in the beginning of her album. I loved that idea, so I went with it! I think it is the perfect thing to begin the album!

I used 3 different sized paged protectors in this album because I really love the way it looks all layered and you can see bits peeking out from different pages, once everything is filled in, of course! The bulk of the protectors are 6x6, then I took some baseball card holders and trimmed them down to 2x2 pockets. Finally, I threw a couple of 5x7 page protectors in there!

I prepped a couple of the pages that I knew for certain what we would be doing on that particular day. For example, on December 1st, we will be going to a work Christmas party, so I plan to stick a vertical picture in the white space and my journaling will go in that little envelope.

On this day, I know we will be going to my daughter's school to eat dinner with Santa, so I stuck a Merrymaker Storyteller in one of the pockets (they are the perfect size for these pockets, yay!!!) for my journaling, and left 3 slots for photos. I will overlap the Merrymaker Flapper with the number 5 over one of the photos and stitch across it.

As you can see from this picture, I stuck the Merrymaker Number Tags in the page protectors so that they are ready to go when I have my photos and stories.

I will be updating you all with how my book is coming along mid-December, once I have some photos in there!!

This is such a fun project, and I think one of my favorite things is to pull out the books around Christmas and look at all of our holiday memories, what our traditions are, etc. Are you planning on doing a December Daily? If you have used some Ormolu products to get your album ready, please link us up, I would love to see them!

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