Ali Edwards's Blog, page 36

December Daily® 2023 | Special Guest Kristin Ladstrom

Hello friends! 

I’m Kristin and I’m here to share how I batch made last year’s December Daily album! I hope it can give you some ideas if you feel like this is an approach that would work for you.

December 2022 didn't quite turn out how I had expected. Nothing serious, but I spent the first two weeks of December working a lot after an already stressful autumn, and then I came down with the flu. I was well enough by the 24th (Swedish Christmas!) to spend Christmas with my partner and parents, but then needed to spend the last week of December mostly resting. I was still taking photos (although not every day) and journaling, but I missed out on most of the fun December activities I had hoped to do. 

I had decided to do a 10x8 album, as I loved that format in 2021, but I only made two spreads during December. After that I just wasn't feeling it ... My December had been so meh! But NOT making an album wasn't an option for me - I love this project too much. And I truly believe that stress and illness are worth documenting, too; not to mention the lovely bits that were also still there, in between the hard or boring parts. 

So I let the project rest - this is what I do when inspiration isn’t flowing. And then, in April, I unexpectedly had a free weekend, when something I was going to do got cancelled. With all that free time, I decided to, for the first time, batch make a December Daily album! I switched to a 6x8 album as I didn't have enough photos I loved to want a 10x8 album, and designed the whole base of the album in one go on my computer.

For me that meant: 

1. I started by deciding what story I would tell for each day (referring back to my journal), roughly how much space that story would need, and whether I wanted page protectors or not. I also decided what photos I wanted to use for each day and in which sizes. 

2. Then, I laid out the designs of each spread in Photoshop. I added the photos where they should go, and used white squares to stand in for the blank spaces (pocket pages) where journaling or patterned paper would go later. Here’s what a spread could look like in Photoshop at this stage:

 

3. After that I realised that I wanted to simplify the decision-making and use a cohesive design for the journal cards - more on that in my next blog post!

4. Then I wrote all the journaling. Usually I strive for a mix of handwritten and printed journaling in my albums, but for this batch making process, writing it all out on the computer was faster and simpler. I based the journaling on my personal journal from December (which I write in every day anyway). 

5. Then I printed everything out in one big printing bonanza.  

A few weeks later I had a crafty day booked with a local friend, and then I spent a few hours cutting out all the photos and cards I had printed (I tend to assemble everything on A4 photo paper sheets and print many things at the same time), putting them into pocket pages in the correct places (referring to the layouts I did in Photoshop - those decisions were already made), and gluing full page photos back to back.

Over the next few months, I spent a couple of hours here and there embellishing and adding details like this flipout above, until I felt done. This part was the least "batch making" type part. Embellishing takes the longest for me, and I need to let it take a while, otherwise I don't enjoy it. At this point, do whatever brings you the most joy! 

So there's my process! In my next blog post, I will go into some design concepts that I chose to make this process simple and enjoyable for me. Hopefully they can give you an idea or two too!

December Daily® 2023 Kick Off | Photo Chat

Let's get this December Daily® party started! Can you believe that December 1st is FRIDAY? All this week, 
Ali and Lisa will be live on our @decemberdaily Instagram account chatting about a different December Daily®-themed topic each day. These conversations will happen at the same time each day, 1pm ET. All of our conversations will be recorded and available here to watch/listen to at your convenience. 

⁠⁠Monday, 27th: All About Preparation⁠. Find the recording here.   Tuesday, 28th: All About Stories⁠. Find the recording here.   Wednesday, 29th: All About Photos⁠  Thursday, 30th: All About Finishing⁠ + Playing With Product Friday, December 1st: Kick-Off + Pep Talk⁠⁠

Here's the recording of yesterday's chat. Thanks so much for those of you that were able to join us. 

Here are a few of the resources/links mentioned during Tuesday's conversation: 

Storytelling With December Daily® Ali's Amazon shop. Ali's current printers. Our lineup of December Daily® classes. 

Please let me know if there was a link I've missed! 

December Daily® 2023 Kick Off | Stories Chat

Let's get this December Daily® party started! Can you believe that December 1st is FRIDAY? All this week, 
Ali and Lisa will be live on our @decemberdaily Instagram account chatting about a different December Daily®-themed topic each day. These conversations will happen at the same time each day, 1pm ET. All of our conversations will be recorded and available here to watch/listen to at your convenience. 

⁠⁠Monday, 27th: All About Preparation⁠. Find the recording here.  
Tuesday, 28th: All About Stories⁠ 
Wednesday, 29th: All About Photos⁠ 
Thursday, 30th: All About Finishing⁠
Friday, December 1st: Kick-Off + Pep Talk⁠⁠

Here's the recording of yesterday's chat. Thanks so much for those of you that were able to join us. 

Here are a few of the resources/links mentioned during Tuesday's conversation: 

Storytelling With December Daily®Ali's Amazon shop.
Ali's current printers.
Our lineup of December Daily® classes. 

Please let me know if there was a link I've missed! 

December Daily® 2023 | Organization That's Working For Ali

A quick December Daily® video sharing a look at some of the things that are currently working for me to organize my supplies. Organization is like so many other things: you have to find what works for you and know that sometimes it changes based on the season of life you are in (and so many other factors). 

Let's dive right in: 

Here are a list of the things I share in this video: 

Embroidery Floss Boxes: these have been working so great to hold smaller embellishments (such as washi tape, chipboard, etc) 5x7 Boxes: these are great for storing larger embellishments such as the large hearts from this year's collection, tags, story cards, etc.  Rolling Cart: love having a cart dedicated to just DD supplies (if you don't have a dedicated craft space in your house this might be a great solution that can be moved around your space Scrapbook.com Organizer Boxes: currently storing puffy stickers, alphas and number stickers, etc  December Daily® 2023 Collection

December Daily® 2023 Kick Off | Prep Chat

Let's get this December Daily® party started! Can you believe that December 1st is FRIDAY? All this week, Ali and Lisa will be live on our @decemberdaily Instagram account chatting about a different December Daily®-themed topic each day. These conversations will happen at the same time each day, 1pm ET. All of our conversations will be recorded and available here to watch/listen to at your convenience. 

⁠⁠Monday, 27th: All About Preparation⁠ Tuesday, 28th: All About Stories⁠ Wednesday, 29th: All About Photos⁠ Thursday, 30th: All About Finishing⁠ Friday, December 1st: Kick-Off + Pep Talk⁠⁠

Here's the recording of yesterday's chat. Thanks so much for those of you that were able to join us. Please note the first five minutes of the conversation were not recorded due to at technical glitch. 

Here are a few of the resources/links mentioned during Monday's conversation: 

Ali's Amazon shop.Ali's current printers.Our lineup of December Daily® classes. 

Please let me know if there was a link I've missed! 

December Daily® 2023 | Special Guest Nolana Lynch

Hi Everyone!

I'm so happy to be here with you today to share my December Daily shenanigans! 

How fun was Prep Day? I got sidetracked wanting to make all the things!!! 

I made a few fun pages before focusing on my topic for this week “Paint on Acetate”! 

This has been one of my “Must Try” mixed media techniques for December Daily this year and I'm so happy I had a play with paint, paint pens, stencils, texture pastes etc. 

Here's the video of these adventures.

Here are a few photos and the list of supplies I used:

Insert remainder of images here 

Supply List 

Thick Acetate 

Ali Edwards Paints and Stencils

Nuvo Drops

Pops of Color  

Assorted Holiday Stencils

Paint Pens

Glitter , Lunar and WhiteTexture Pastes

Wishing you a wonderful holiday weekend!!! 

Nolana

In Case You Missed It | November 17

Happy Friday, friends! Welcome to the latest
In Case You Missed It. Just a reminder that this is a quick post that will happen every Friday afternoon with all the updates and links that have happened throughout the week. So, let's get to it:

DECEMBER DAILY® PREP DAY HAPPENING TOMORROW
Ten amazing hours, so many fantastic downloads, eight awesome contributors, countless fun moments and a partridge in a pear tree! Our team is always very proud of the value of our $5 Prep Days and this year is no exception! December Daily® 2023 Prep Day is THIS SATURDAY, November 18th, and we are thrilled to share that our finalized schedule is now available! Join the December Daily® community for a fun online prep day with ten hours of incredible content for only $5! ⁠Register here. 

50% OFF DIGITALS, CLASSES, AND RETIRED DIGITALS 

Get 50% off digitals and classes now through Sunday, November 19th at 11:59pm ET. This sale only happens a few times a year! Our Retired Digitals have been brought back for the 50% off event. December Daily® 2023 Digitals and December Daily® 2023 Classes are excluded from the 50% off sale. Files are available immediately upon purchase and saved in your account to access when it's convenient for you. We hope that this sale inspires you to try new ways of getting your stories told.  

STORY PLAY LITTLE MOMENTS 

For the last Story Play week of the year we are focusing on the lens of Little Moments while we seek out the seemingly insignificant moments that are often overlooked, or dismissed. ⁠ ⁠All this week Ali has been on theblog sharing a series of prompts and projects. Find them here.

DECEMBER DAILY® PRODUCT PLAY IS HAPPENING NOW 

Class has started in the December Daily® Product Play classroom. It's not too late to sign up! December Daily® Product Play is all about ideas and inspiration for working with physical products from the December Daily® Collection. For 30 days in November, you'll receive one idea per day from the contributors to this class (includes Ali). Ideas in this workshop will focus on physical products from our 2023 December Daily® collection. Whether you are preparing to document 2023 or finishing up telling stories from past years, we hope these fun, creative ideas help you use your products to get your stories told. Register here.

DECEMBER DAILY® DIGITALS

The 2023 December Daily® Digitals are here! Kits, Stamps, Paper, and Embellishments...the same fun & festive designs as the physical @decemberdaily products, only in digital format.⁠ We love to see how this incredibly creative community plays with digitals! Resizing elements and cards, adding journaling to papers, creating cut files, transforming files into transparencies, the sky is the limit with digital files. ⁠Want to learn more about creating with digital files? Our newest class December Daily® Hybrid Product Play is live and available to watch at your convenience.We have incredible content from six amazing contributors ready to explore at your convenience. Shop digitals here.

NEW CLASSES

2023 DECEMBER DAILY® PREP DAY. Join the December Daily® community for a fun online December Daily® prep day on Saturday, November 18th, 2023. Use this opportunity to finish past December Daily® projects or start working on your project for 2023. The first live video will start on Saturday, November 18th at 10:00 am Eastern. Cost is $5.
DECEMBER DAILY® PRODUCT PLAY | TRY THIS. December Daily® Product Play is all about ideas and inspiration for working with physical products from the December Daily® Collection. For 30 days in November, you'll receive one idea per day from the contributors to this class (includes Ali). Ideas in this workshop will focus on physical products from our 2023 December Daily® collection. Whether you are preparing to document 2023 or finishing up telling stories from past years, we hope these fun, creative ideas help you use your products to get your stories told.
2023 DECEMBER DAILY® HYBRID PRODUCT PLAY. Hybrid scrapbooking combines digital products with physical supplies to create paper (or printed) memory-keeping projects. For this class, our contributors will share with fun, creative ideas and inspiration for working with these digital products from the 2023 December Daily® Collection.

As always, we’re so grateful to have you all as members of this community! Thanks for joining me today and have a great weekend!

Story Play | Little Moments Live Zoom Call

Thanks for joining me for this Little Moments Story Play series! We wrapped up the week today with a community zoom call chatting and sharing about documenting Little Moments. 

Check out the recorded conversation here: 

Story Play will return next year with four themes: Day In The Life™, Love Story, Food and Read. 

December Daily® 2023 | Special Guest Nolana Lynch

Hi Everyone! Nolana (@nehlan.has.a.plan) here again to share with you where I am at with my December Daily Preparation!

Love that Prep Day is this weekend and I absolutely can not wait to play with all the things! 

Over the past week, I’ve been preparing for my Prep Day lesson and I am so very excited to be contributing; I can’t wait to share it all with you! 

In addition to that mini album, we received our Santa photos, so I was happy to begin playing with those. Since our son was born in 2021, I have loved doing a double photo spread using one of my favourite photos from our Santa visit, so I’ve been playing with the embellishments for that layout. I decided to try stitching sequins to the wood veneer stars inspired by CJ’s Product Play lesson and loved how they turned out! 

I needed some “slow crafting” time - so I decided to add sequins in the position of the baubles in the wreath in the photo. 

My initial thoughts were to embroider stitch all over the page, but since sequins are my favourite, here we are! I used these sequins here (https://shrsl.com/4b0e4) and I loved how it turned out, subtle and almost looks like it’s part of the photo, so I added it to the Christmas tree to the right. 

I also played around with some clusters of the felt presents - I love these embellishments from last year, and happily made them into a pocket to hold my journaling. I put together a cluster of tags using a tag from the Main Kit, some star vellum and a journal card from the Paislee Press kit. 

This year, I also want to lean into “Creating Easy Pages” - using the products to make the page creation process a bit easier. One of the things I challenged myself to do was use more journal cards. I typically use very little of the journal cards in my December Daily albums - so I pulled out these from the Paislee Press kit and the Specialty Cards and added them into these 3x4 pockets - I would use a mix of embellishments, photos, and words to create stories during some of the busier periods of the month.

Inspired by Santa, I wanted to use this 4x6 Specialty Card, with the postcard from the PP kit to open up the story about “Letters to Santa”, I would back this with a felt pocket and actual letters to Santa, or letters that I write to our family each year.

Other projects that I have worked on over the past week, are some mixed media fun, which I’d create some more structure around over the next few days. Here are some quick sneaks of what I created.

For this one, I used a mix of texture paste and the ornament, of which I’d create a full-page acetate pocket with photos and journaling inside. 

This one would be the base of a foundation page/layout for an upcoming Tropical Shirt Christmas party. I look forward to sharing with you how I used this background next week!

If you’d like to have a look at my December Daily Process videos and flip throughs from the past few years, here’s my December Daily playlist. 

I hope you’ll be joining in on all the DD Prep Day fun this weekend! Wishing you a great week ahead and happy December Daily Prepping!!!

Mixed Media Collage Ornaments With Ali | Completed Project

I am so excited to share the end result of my collage ornament adventure! 

You can read previous posts on this project  and . 

I had the best time working on this over the last few months and I'm so pleased with how it turned out! I love that I can add more if I want or just let this be the magic that it is right now! 

After collaging up more ornaments I went outside my house and cut a branch from one of our trees to use as the hanging rod. I love that makes it feel like it's rooted in this house and this season of my life. I used this 
red ribbon to tie a knot in each end in order to hang it on the chalkboard.

I ended up making about 50 ornaments. 

I used a variety of different twines and ribbons to hang each ornament from the branch. I liked mixing in some thicker ribbon with the thiner twine. With the thicker ribbon I used my Tiny Attacher stapler to staple the two ends after they go through the eyelet on the ornament and also stapled them together after looping the ends over the branch. When using the twine I tied knots. 

Here are links to the ribbons I used: 

Red + White Chevron Stripe Twill Red Satin Ribbon  Bakers Twine set that includes green/white + red/white + red/green/white Cream with Two Red Stripes

Here's a quick video showing what it looks like hanging in my house: 

I love the textures and the patterns and the different materials used to make this collection of mixed media ornaments. Seriously so fun. 

SUPPLIES
December Daily® Stencils

December Daily® Paints

December Daily® Silkscreens December Daily® Stamps Watercolor Paper (originally offered with One Little Word®) Watercolor Paper from a notebook (140lb) Dylusions Star Flurry Stencil (this is the one I called a poinsettia) Tim Holtz Rub Ons (similar) Tim Holtz Christmas Sticker Book (similar to the one from my stash) Tim Holtz Label Stickers Embossing Powders Versamark Embossing Ink We R Memory Keepers Hole Punch Texture Paste Deli Sheets Paint Brushes Matte Medium or Gel Medium (use either as an adhesive) POSCA Paint Pens  Gold Eyelets Crop A Dile Eyelet Setter Embroidery Floss Sewing Machine Sequin Mixes Felt Plastic Pots for Paints