12 days of Christmas - Post 2

So onto post 2 for the 12 days of Christmas challenge. Actually I am not sure that Fiona intended it to be a challenge, but it certainly is one for me, as blogging is something I have let slip over the months. There are many, many blogs that I follow, professional ones, as well as hobby ones (what they are and how I organise them may be tomorrow's post?) and I am always amazed at how they manage to find the time to blog, and blog something that can be quite deep.

Maybe I have been a little too focused on only having this blog relate to professional posts - I intend to relax this, at least for this challenge, and see what I can come up with. Today's post is about a photographic project I am doing to document our lives from December 1 to December 25. The Christmas tradition is led by Ali Edwards and is aptly named December Daily. I wanted to do this project last year but found out about it too late. Sometimes something has to give :) I filed the idea away for 2010.

December Daily is a photographic project that documents, with words and photos, the 25 days leading up to Christmas. According to Ali, many people start their documentation earlier and many people go longer. I decided that 25 days would be as long as I would document things we did during that time.

One of the keys to success in this project is getting an album structure together prior to December, the idea being that you can then enjoy the lead up to Christmas. I wanted to get my foundation pages (as Ali calls them) together ahead of time for 2 reasons - one being that if I didn't, it would mean that I would need to, after the event, get photos ready, organise them, journal AND create an album for them to go into as well - the project would be more daunting. The second reason is that I was due to have a baby quite close to when the project would end, which meant that the more I had organised ahead of time, the better for me.

One of the challenges I set myself was to use items from my stash as much as possible, the idea being that my stash would drastically reduce (can I say that this did not happen - I swear this stuff breeds!) I made the album quite similar to Ali's, size 6 inches by 8 inches, with a transparency between each page (each page made from white card). Again, rather than buy preprinted transparencies, I made my own by cutting old overhead projector transparencies down to 6x8 and decorating them with various Christmas items from my stash. Some of the items I used included Christmas shapes, stickers, paper, flocking, design adhesives, tapes and glitter.

My friend Rebecca was over from Tasmania to spend a week with me crafting prior to me having the baby and we managed to get the album done, in between a lot of talking and me having to continually elevate my legs.

I took many, many photos and have used Photoshop to make a collage out of some that I will print out as a 6x8. I am going to try and use three 6x4 photos per day - 2 will go down one page (the album is portrait) and one will go on the page with the date on it. As this page has a 2 inch strip of patterned paper on the bottom, meaning I can't put 2 photos there due to space constraints, I plan to put one photo there and journal in the remaining space.

I had better get more photos organised....