Past December Daily Albums

I finally finished up December Daily for last year this week. I had all the pictures ordered, I just needed to cut down & sew some page protectors, write a little bit of journaling for one page and do something with the cover. December Daily is a mini album project that Ali Edwards created (or at least made popular). I actually still need to punch holes in four pages and put them in, but I can't find my cropadile. It was on my desk...but now it is MIA.



2011 was my 4th year of December Daily. Each one is a different size. Different binding. None of them were actually done in December (of their respective years). In fact, when I was working on the cover for 2011, I also finally put together a cover image for 2009. 2008 was a 4x6 book with metal rings for binding. 2009 was a little larger (maybe 5x7) using my binding machine. 2010 I used embroidery floss to bind it and it was a little bit bigger than 2009's book. 2011 I used an actual scrapbook with lots of randomly sized page protectors.



Why do I do December Daily? It really makes me think about all of the traditions that we have and new ones that we might start. I like how I was able to find the same events in all of my different books and seeing how we have changed. For example, our advent velcro & felt tree, visiting Santa, decorating the tree & baking cookies. 2008 was when I was pregnant with Claire, so in addition to the Christmas events, I also have some pictures about my pregnancy. That was also before I started Project Life, so a lot more everyday stuff made it into that album.



However, I'm not entirely convinced that I should do it this year actually. Since I'm doing Project Life and I don't like to include the same pictures/stories in December Daily & Project Life that leaves Project Life rather lite on Christmas stuff. I noticed that last year and I didn't like it. In fact, I've been thinking about going back and adding to Project Life. If I do it this year, I am going to do it as a Blurb book...maybe.

Finishing 2011's DD was one of the things on my 31 before 31 list, so YAY!

Craft Olympics: Use of Paper

So...nothing like getting things in at the last minute.

Alexandra Rae is hosting the Craft Olympics this year. See more details about all the different challenges over here. I had been meaning to participate in a couple of them, but then life got in the way and I finally finished up challenge one tonight (which is the deadline)! Hopefully it's not too late.

This is for the event: best use of paper. I made a star album out of cardstock. The inside pages are completely decorated yet because I don't have the pictures yet and I have found it easier to do the pages & pictures together.

Toddler Summer Nightdress

This is actually my second attempt at making a dress for Claire out of one of my old tee-shirts. This one turned out much better. I learned from the mistakes of my first dress...

Here is my first attempt:



The first thing I did wrong was sew straight up the sides without leaving arm holes - whoops. Which turned it into a tube dress so I cut the original neck line off and added the braided straps to keep it up - I need to shorten them a little bit still. I was also intending to make an A-line dress...but this is not an A-line at all. But I learned! And Claire gets to wear this as a swim cover up.

This time when I cut up my old tee-shirt, I used part of the side seams for the sides of the dress. Then I angled it in a little bit and made kind of half-oval arm holes. Ta-da!



The white line is approximately how I ended up sewing this. As I was doing it I realized that I really wanted the dress to go in slower, so I sewed farther down the dress side than I had actually cut. I did the side seam first, from the bottom of the arm-hole to the original side seam of the shirt. After both sides were finished, I hemmed the arm holes. I just folded about 1/4" of fabric in and stitched as closely to the fold as I could. I could probably do the arm holes a little better, but for a first attempt at making my own arm-holes, it's not bad. It would've been better to have a 1/2" to fold in so that I could've folded the edge under to keep it from fraying...oh well, it's just a nightdress!



After I took pictures of the finished product, I wanted to put it on Claire for a couple of pictures. She REFUSED to have anything to do with it. When I would attempt to put it on her, she would push it back up off of her. When I got it over her head, she had it off of her head before I could get an arm in it. Ended up taking bribery to get her to wear it - ice cream & some little balloons to pop. Now she's wearing it to bed because once it was on her, she figured out that it wasn't so bad after all.



However, there was no getting her to hold still for a picture.