Document December Album

Our brand new Christmas designs are now ready to pre-order. We have also launched a Document December kit for the first time. Our wonderful guest Designer, Nikki Rowland has used the kit in her new December Album class. Nikki shares how she created her album with us...

Hi Bramble Fox Friends, Niki Rowland here today. I’m delighted to be back with Bramble fox Guest Designing today.

Every year I make a December Album and instead of following any prompts or a format devised by others, I do my own thing. I use a 6x8 sized album and I make a layout for each day in December from day 1 through to day 31. I always pre-make all my base pages. I find that this works really well for me. I tried making each layout as I went along but I found that I never completed my album. Making all the base pages in November has been my go-to formula for several years now and I always complete my album on New Years Day.

Bramble Fox are making this absolutely wonderful set of numbers perfect for a December Album. The set contains numbers 1-31 and there are a few other Perspextives in the set too: ‘December 2018’ title, the word ‘December’ and a snowflake. The whole set comes in a pretty bag (which may also end up in my album itself too) tied with some gold twine and a bonus Bramble Fox tag. I haven’t used the tag yet…I have plans to make a larger tag to hang outside my album and it will cluster with that.

I love that every number in the set is different. Some are ornaments/baubles, some are tags, some are circles, some are the stand-alone number, some are the number as a word. Each is different and this is wonderful as it adds interest and variety to the pages in my album. I backed some of the numbers onto plain card to ensure the negatives stood out. Some I backed on glitter for extra sparkle.

The format of the album itself is one white page facing one patterned paper page. This year I have a coordinating strip of patterned paper on the white side too. I’ve embellished each page using Merry Days by Crate Paper. I keep my embellishments to clusters and usually leave lots of space to add my photo and my journaling. I don’t usually add in specific sized photo mounts at this point – after all I don’t know what photos I’m going to take on which days yet.

People always ask me how I go about adding my photos and completing the layouts. Well, approximately every week or 10 days in December, I simply print my photos. I usually print them pretty small (four on a 6x4 sheet) and then I add what I’ve got to my album. I tend to pick one or two photos from each day to print. Most of my photos I take on my iphone so the orientation of them is usually portrait. This works well in a 6x8 album as the pages themselves are also portrait orientation.

I think it’s important to remember that a December Album is only a snapshot of each day. If I’ve been out for the day and taken 100 photos, it’s safe to say I won’t be able to fit all the photos onto my one 6x8 page.

So I pick one or two, journal about what we did that day, and then save all the other photos for regular scrapbooking layouts. I don’t only do my December Album to record the events that took place in December, I do it alongside my regular scrapbooking, so there will be several 12x12 layouts about December events too.

I hope you enjoyed my December Album base pages today. I’ll be back in January with the finished layouts and another flip through of the completed album. Happy scrapping and Merry Christmas Niki xx

Thank you so much Nikki - your work is amazing and your album is certainly one to be inspired by. You can check out all our new goodies in the Christmas Shop.

Thanks for stopping by.