2012 December Daily Album

I finished putting together my December Daily album this week, and I'm pretty happy with it! I'm especially happy that it's D.O.N.E.! I changed up my approach a little bit this year and used all Instagram photos. It has evolved through the years:

2010

I did this project for the first time in 2010. I chose one photo for each day of December (1-25) and wrote what happened that day on a 4x6 lined index card. I took all the photos with my "big" camera (Nikon D40), got the photos printed at Walgreens once a week, and then inserted them into the photo album.

2011

My goal for 2011 was to do the same thing I did in 2010, but I was also trying to blog the photo and story each day, and I got bogged down. Ha - I could have written "blogged" down. Hahaha. OK, that was probably only funny in my head. Anyway, I got behind and didn't finish putting it together until THIS December. I had a Word document with my journal for each day, and I had all the photos, but they were just sitting in my computer. When I was trying to get it done this year, I got tired of writing by hand, and decided to type the stories and print them on the 4x6 index cards. I just turned the cards over and printed on the blank side. It worked perfectly (love my new printer!). :) I used my big camera and sent the photos to Walgreens again for printing. I did use my iPhone when I was putting the album together this year (I didn't have an iPhone last year). I imported some of the photos from my computer and used an app to make a collage (see the photo on the left below).

2012

For 2012, I used Instagram photos and created a little mini-scrapbook layout for each day that included the photo and the story on one 4x6. I journaled a little bit in Instagram, but I also wrote about each day in the weekly Word document I keep for my Project Life journaling. I combined what I had and typed up the stories. I edited things out and thought of more stuff to add when necessary so that each day's story was about the same length and took up the same space on each 4x6.

I ordered the 4x6s from Persnickety Prints this year. I don't think the print quality is that much better than Walgreens (gasp!), BUT the cropping is perfect. That was important to me this year because the text and photo mats are so close to the edges.

I counted out the pages left in my photo album, and using only one slot per day will allow me to get 2013 in this same album before it's full. I really like doing this project, and my boys enjoy looking at it, so I hope to keep it up! :)

Click here or the picture below to see all the pages I did for December Daily this year.



Check out Ali Edwards for lots of inspiration. December is really far away now that it's January, but you could easily adapt this project to a different month of the year. Or even just a week!