December Daily 2021 | My Reason Why And Day 01

 

Hi everyone and a very Merry December to you! I am so excited to dive right into my December Daily album this year, and today is the day! I will be sharing my Reason Why page along with Day 01 for you today. If you’d like to see more of this project, check out the link: December Daily Album 2021. Let’s get started!

 

 

The Reason Why page is always a time to reflect on why I participate in this project each year. It changes a bit from year to year, but the basic idea always remains. This project helps me to recognize what is most important, to capture important, every day moments, and to create a little bit of love and joy right here. This year’s Reason Why page really turned out fantastic! I started with a blank canvas in Photoshop CC and added in the 4×8 shipping tags. The top ones I turned upside down so they would sort of meet in the middle. The journaling tags gave space for my words, and the grid tag was perfect for The Reason Why word art. The tags are from the Ali Edwards 2021 release, and the Reason Why word art is older, from 2014. I also added one of the word art digital stamps from 2021 in black over top of those tags. This is what my page looked like once it was created in Photoshop:

 

 

I printed these tags and cut them out on vellum (I just use regular office supply vellum or stationary). I then chose a Felicity Jane red card stock to back them with. I lightly adhered each tag down and then went over it with the sewing machine to tack them down permanently. Once they were adhered to the page, it was so easy to add a few physical embellishments. All from Ali Edwards 2021. I also added a few ribbons and twine for texture, the red is from Felicity Jane, green twine from Martha Stewart at Home Goods, and the others are from my stash. Just look at all these luscious layers.

 

 

The back side of the Reason Why page was blank, so I added in a fun filler page using some American Crafts larger alphabets layered on top of one of the Ali Edwards patterned papers. Right now this ended up next to my calendar page, but truth be told I am not quite settled on the order of these pages. I may end up moving the calendar to the front of the album so this Making Merry page can be with my Day 01.

 

 

For my Day 01, I had already created the transparency using the speech bubbles from the Ali Edwards Main Kit. During Thanksgiving we took some family photos so I could use them here! They turned out great, I cropped them to fit inside the bubbles and adhered them right onto the page. Everything is on top of the quote transparency, which is from a Studio Calico and Ali Edwards collab kit called The Good Ole Days. I had space for two extra bubbles which were perfect for the year and a stitched star. I also added the number 1 at the bottom, this was one of the numbers I from the digital numbers set from Ali Edwards. Before December began, I added all of those numbers into Word, sized them down to 2″ and re-colored them, and then printed and cut them using my Silhouette.

 

 

For the back side of this transparency, I created circles and rectangles to tell a little bit about each of us. Some of them are tongue in cheek! I used a 1 3/4″ circle punch for the circles, and the rectangles are 2 1/4″x 1 1/4″ and 1 3/4″ square. Check out the little layered stars (also from the Main Kit). They peek out a bit on the front side!

 

 

We are off to a great start! What a great bunch of people, I am so thankful for them and so thankful for this project. Thank you for following along! My plan is to share the next few days in a batch on Saturday. See you then!

~Theresa