December Daily: The Beginning of the Album

Here are the first two pages in my December Daily Album.  I did decide to go ahead and document Black Friday and the decor of our house.

For this first page, I took a plain white 8x8 page and added a receipt from Hollister, a card from GrandTiti saying that she had renewed my gift subscription the Martha Stewart Living, the gift card cover to the Starbucks gift card Faye and Jim gave me for my birthday which I used to buy breakfast for myself on Black Friday, and the cup warmer from the coffee itself. 

The journaling above reads: Black Friday began just before midnight for me.  I met Mark, Lisa and the girls at Walmart.  After a pretty sleepless night (Addie was battling a cold), I was back out by 8:30 a.m. Picked up breakfast and coffee at Starbucks and hit the road running.

I used a free template off the internet to make up my page celebrating the decorations in our home.  Printing it out was easy enough.  On Photoshop Elements, I mounted the 8x8 page onto an 8x10 background and sent it to Walmart to be developed. (Developing an 8x8 page is a bit pricier when dealing with shipping costs and specialty sizes.  By mounting it to an 8x10 background, I can develop my page locally, skip the cost of shipping, and have my page within an hour.)  I sliced off the extra 2 inches from the bottom and slipped it right in to the page protector.

I took the chipboard tree I mentioned in my original December Daily post, covered it in a grid paper, inked the edges with black ink, added a clear sticker, and journaled directly on the tree.  I am so pleased so far!  The exciting thing with this album is that it begins to take shape each and every day.

The journaling on the tree reads as follows: For us, decorating begins the Monday before Thanksgiving.  My favorite parts of our Christmas decor this year are the red & white color scheme (story to come in a future post), the simplicity of the decorations, and the basket of Christmas books under the tree.  Seeing Addie's joy every morning has made it worth the effort.