December Daily Planning - Before I See Ali's Wonderful Ideas

If you read stalk Ali Edward's blog like I do then it will come as no surprise that she is about to reveal a little bit about her 2010 December Daily foundation today. Because I know that as soon as I see her album all my own ideas will fly out the window I thought it best to record them and here is a good place to do it.

Hints, ideas and tips for my own album:

• Loving the current vintage trend but this year would love to make the storybook cutouts I use more personal. Intend on colour copying some pages from The Honeybears' Christmas Surprise, a book I've had since I was about 2 and one I intend on reading Brian many times this December.
• Trying to approach the project from more of a "If I was to read this in 30 years time what would I want to see" view. Yesterday I was looking through some photos from last December and loved a lot of what I unintentionally captured in each photo. Last year I thought they needed cropping.
• Wont go bigger than an 8 x 8" page. Mostly as I'm not much of a scrapbooker and need a smaller page size to fill but also because I can get a 6 x 8" photo printed at Big W for next to nothing (giving that illusion of a whole page photo).
• Need to remember to stick within my skillset. Last year I wanted to do more but didn't have the experience so a lot of my time was wasted trying to teach myself the skills to make my ideas happen.
• Remember it's about the documentation. I didn't finish last year's album, but I did do better than the year before, and I'm ever so grateful for the documentation I do have from last year's Christmas.
• Journal daily, no excuses. Design my layout on paper (hopefully daily) so that once the photo is printed I need not do any thinking. I plan to have a sort of DD resource book that I use each night to keep all this info together.
• Ali has said that she's sticking with consistent page sizes this year. I'm happy to continue to mix it up, because I know this will be less pressure for me.
• I contacted Ali back in August to get a little heads up on what she was planning for this year's December Daily and I'm so thankful I did. She gave me a hint at the album she was considering and I must admit I've been trying to track it down ever since. But in all reality it's too big for me. It is a fantastic album and I love the options it provides but I did mention about sticking to my skillset. I guess the best advantage about early planning (and stalking) is that you get the time to really consider what will work best for you.
• This is the only time of year that I shop for scrapbook supplies, generally. Scrapbooking doesn't really fit into our budget, more specifically it doesn't raid a mention on Kevin's ever-changing (tight but fantastic) spreadsheet (probably because it contains only necessities). So for this reason it's become the time to purchase a couple of the latest trends, the ones I've wanted for the last year but are yet to touch. This year I'm hoping for some baker's twine, doilies (although happy to pick some up at the local op shop), cute and fun papers, glitter paper, glossy accents and buttons. I'm also hoping to finally find a white Sharpie marker.

A crying child means this is as far as I can go with this post today. Maybe next week I'll share with you a few ideas on the subject matter I hope to cover in my album.