Happy New Year Scrappy Canaries! It's Lauren here - I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you are ready to jump into 2015 full of creativity! I am so excited to be continuing on as a member of the 2015 Creative Team - so get ready to see a lot of more of me this year!

As I mentioned in my last two posts - this year was my first year doing a December album. In my first post I showed you how I was setting up my album and getting started, in the next post I walked you through my pages and today I wanted to do a round up of the journey!

In my album I exclusively used the Scrappy Canary Document December kit - the only additional items were the album, adhesives, paint for the cover, card stock and the photos themselves.

Throughout the album I have used a lot of different techniques and embellishments and I thought I'd take you through some highlights. I had never used a 6x8 album before so this was my first foray into this size and I have to say I loved it. It was very manageable and it also gave me a chance to try new things, such as using a single full page photo and then embellishing on the photo.

Hiya Canaries!

Tis the season for documenting all our favourite parts of this crazy time of year, and today I'm sharing with you, a video that shows how I've set up my Document December Album.

Of course, I'm using the DD kit from Scrappy Canary (why the heck wouldn't I?! It's GORGEOUS!), and I've added a few little extras to the mix, to make the colour palette more aquas and yellows with hints of the traditional red and green.

Check it out:




I've kept the layout very easy to move around, and I'm sure, as I add photos in, I'll be switching things up, but for now I'm so happy to have managed to get this much done!

Now it's time to get those photos taken and printed out!

Back with more soon.

Merry Merry!

 Linda xx

Good morning Polly peeps, it is Ruth here with a confession! Until recently I felt like a December Daily failure! After doing my album for 3 years on time and loving it, this last december it just didnt happen.

• I had a fabulous kit to use
• I had prepared some pages beforehand
• December was very busy and I took photos almost every day and of all our adventures

It seems like the recipe for success right? Somehow, though, it just didnt happen for me.

I think I had a few reasons for this, they might sound familiar to you:

• I was busier than usual for various reasons at both work and home
• I found it hard to work with half created pages this time, perhaps because I was using a new-to-me album size (6x12 pocket pages)
• My printer had technical issues and so I was not printing from home
• I was tired at the end of each day and that is generally unmotivating.

I know DD is not compulsory, I could just leave it undone but I do love my DD albums. I feel they are an annual snapshot of our family, looking back at each year is a capsule of the change over time, from babies to toddlers to little kids. It is a bit magical to look at them all together.

I took heaps of photos through the month, but as the days slipped away from me I felt disappointed with myself for "failing" at December Daily. January is here and some things are slightly quieter, so I paused to think how I could take the ingredients I had and make it into something manageable? I thought about it and finally decided on a course of action.

Step 1: Decide my minimum parameters: I want to see the month of December captured in a mini album with photos and words included, I would like to use some of my Polly kit. Anything else is bonus.

Knowing what I really want from this helps me to challenge myself to reconsider anything I considered essential that isnt in my minimum parameters.

• Does it need to be in the album I have started? NO
• Does it need to be pocket pages? NO
• Does it need to show every day for 31 days? NO
• Does it need to use every christmas product I have bought in 2013 with this album in mind? NO
• Does it need to be a work of art? NO
• Can I just skip the events with poor photos? Absolutely.

Step 2: Choose a size and format to make it as simple as possible:
Album: I decided to use on of Amy Tangerine's daybooks so that I had a predetermined size and could quickly and simply build on top of it. The one I had handy was her recent Cut and Paste daybook, which is quite small and was a good match for the Polly kit goodies.
Embellishments: I used the Polly December Memories Kit for everything else
Photos: I decided to go with 3x4 size. I reduced my expectations to only December 1st - December 25th and tried to choose only one photo per day, but as you see, some I had more (twinkling lights) and some days I skipped.
Step 3: Identify biggest obstacles and try to solve them: One of the things that was making it hard for me was keeping it as a strictly daily format, so for this year I decided that I would not stress about the "daily" part of december daily. I had chosen approximately the right number of photos and they were all ones I really liked, so I just sorted them into approximate order and that decided the page count.
Step 4: Make it in batches to speed it up. I didnt have time to carefully and lovingly craft each page, so I did this album in three batches.
Batch Crafting One: After I had printed the 3x4 photos and knew how many pages I would need, I decontructed my previous album which was made from the kit to reuse the supplies. From those I chose and hole punched 4x6 journalling cards or 4x6 sheets of patterned paper as additonal pages. Some had been embellished in my previous attempt preparing pages ahead of time, but most were not.

Batch Crafting Two: I glued in all the photos in the order I planned to use them.

Batch Crafting Three: Leaving room for words I added any of the embellishments from the kit that I really wanted to include and filled any weird gaps on the pages. I tried not to spend too long on this as it is typically the slowest part for me. I really loved many of the things in this kit and wanted to include them in the album, so glued them in where-ever they seemed to fit. I tried to embellish it as a whole album rather than as each individual page. This helps the album have a sense of continuity. Some pages are very simple, just a journalling card or just a photo, perhaps with one tab. That is OK, this project is all the pages combined, so some can be simpler and some more complex. The photo and the words are what will matter in the long run.

Batch Crafting Four: I added the words, they are simple and hand-written as I did all of this album in front of the TV one night on the coffee table. This was what I could really get done, expecting too much can sometimes just mean that it never happens. I used the pens in reach and just wrote a few words about each photo. Keeping it manageable means getting it done now and not later.


Step 5 Stop and enjoy what you made: At this point I could have continued to work on the project, adding interest and detail, improving the spots where my handwriting is messy by printing a neatly typed version or all sorts of other options. Instead I stopped! It was enough.

I will add this small and simple december daily album to my growing pile. Some years are more experimental or ornamental than others, it is nice to have variety and it is great to have it completed.

There are still December Memories Kits in store as well as our bargain priced $10 Christmas grab bags which each include some exclusives that were in the DM kit, so if you want to try to make a december daily comeback too, then head over and grab some goodies to help the process.

Heeellloooo there..

Bernii here again to share with you another instalment of my not so December Daily album...

If you have not started or thinking of perhaps creating a mini album for your Christmas day festivities then there are still a few  December Daily kits available here if you wanted to do some Christmas scrapping. 

These are the next few pages and you can see the album cover HERE and the first few pages HERE .




 I loved making this little confetti pocket and it was so easy to do! I simply popped a heap of sequins from the kit and a couple of Heidi Swapp snow flakes and sewed around the pocket to secure it all. 

Hello everyone

Hello

Happy Boxing Day! I hope you all made merry yesterday too. Christmas marks the half way point in what is a very busy time for us. The 23rd was our first wedding anniversary, the 30th is hubby's birthday and then of course there is New Years! I love scrapping and I do my best to fit it in where I can, but spare time is at a minimum right now - so I am aiming for simple but well put together pages. Today I'm sharing days 10 to 15... kinda.

This was a hard page to make for various reasons. For starters it isn't easy to admit the rate of which we are consuming candy canes. In past years we hung them on the tree but since the did not fit the colour scheme they have lived in a vase on our dining room table. Right where I scrap. *sigh* Second problem was a lack of photos taken on the 10th. This photo was the best of a bad bunch. It took a heavy crop, a filter and a light leak to bring it up to a standard I could use. Matching the papers was actually the easy part. The stripes to match the candy canes the pink dots to match the filter. The rest was just odds and ends I had lying around.

Day 11 is another really simple page. It documents our tradition of making our own christmas pudding. I die cut a scrap of pink, red and white rsvp paper from Basic Grey and layered it over white cardstock. I fussy cut a matching ornament from the Basic Grey paper in the kit and used a liberal amount of embellishments I found on my table. 10 minutes tops.

Day 12 is on hold. It was Mog's Christmas Concert. The photos on my iphone weren't up to much so I'm trying to track down a few from the other parents.


Day 13. I'm such a tech junkie. I was so stoked when I discovered my favorite iphone game had got a christmas facelift. It even snows in the background. I confess that this page has absolutely nothing from the kit, but at this point in time I was on a roll. I had very little time, but I was determined to make the most of it and pump out as many pages as possible. Did I mention I got a sewing machine for christmas?

 Day 14. I know it seems a little strange to have full length PJ pants and hot chocolate in an Australian Christmas album but the weather here in victoria has been crazy and... well... I eat marshmallows all year round. This page celebrates these awesome marshmallows we found at aldi and CJ's early gift of new PJ pants. Both these things make me insanely happy. Hence the beautiful Heidi Swapp word stickers. The black star paper and the music paper are actually B sides to some of the kit paper. Don't you hate it when you have to choose?


Day 15. This photo was taken by hubby. I was having a conversation with our cat about upcoming events as I wrote them in my diary. A little embarrassing I know, but I did say I would included more of myself in DD. I'm still looking at new and exciting ways to include my number motif. Cutting Velum in the cameo was a new experience for me along way sewing on plastic. I have got to say the Cameo is so much easier to use than the blasted sewing machine. I keep forgetting to put down the foot thingy and from there things go down hill rapidly. I like the effect of my embellishments organized in little pockets, but in future I will put the glitter in the last pocket I stitch because its near impossible to wipe it out of the other two after pouring it in.

And that about wraps it up for today. I'll be back on the 31st to show you how it all works out in the end.

Aimee xx