Documenting December: Story 23 of my 2024 December Daily Album

Welcome back to Documenting December—my Christmas in July blog series where I’m sharing one story a day from my completed 2024 December Daily album. Each post offers a peek at my digital pages created in Affinity Publisher for iPad, along with tips, techniques, and creative encouragement for finishing your own album.

I’ve also included a link to the corresponding post(s) on Ali Edwards’ blog. I encourage you to open it in a separate window so you can see how my digital pages were inspired by the physical versions she shared.

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December Daily Story 23: December Gratitudes

Here is a link to the post on Ali's blog that inspired this spread:

Ali's Story 23

I absolutely loved the layout idea from Ali’s Story 23—what a clever way to include a handful of random photos taken throughout the month. It was the perfect solution for adding in some fun, tiny details that didn’t make it into earlier stories. I’ll definitely be repeating this concept in my 2025 album, especially as a final page so I can incorporate photos from December 26–31.

For the base of my layout, I used the “December Details” paper from the Paper Prompt Pack. It’s originally 10x8, but because I wanted to pair it with a 4x8 area of paper on the left, I removed one column of boxes. It was an easy fix and allows for one of the colums of photos to appear on the left side of the page.

The number “23” comes from the 2023 Small Plastic Numbers set. I added a white outline and a drop shadow, then “attached” it with my go-to digital staple.

You’ll also see three hearts with word art on the page—those were extracted from the 3x8 transparency card. (Ali trimmed them from the physical card with scissors.) I mimicked that same look digitally by adding a soft white outline set to 65% opacity and lowering the transparency of the entire layer to 70%. Of course, I stapled those down too!

All the photos in this spread have an 8pt inside stroke effect applied for a clean, framed look.

Now let’s talk about that left side—I had so much fun with it!

While I was studying Ali’s layout, I noticed her color wheel had words wrapped around it. I knew the vellum color wheel die cut in the Main Digital Kit didn’t have text, so I went on a little hunt. Turns out a reader asked the same question in the comments of her blog post—and the answer? It came from the 2024 Advent Calendar!

Lucky for me, I had purchased that calendar too. After digging through all the little envelopes, I found it—Day 7! It’s actually a puffy sticker, not a die cut.

Here’s where things get fun and nerdy: I used my Epson ET-8500 EcoTank printer/scanner (which I’ve owned for two years and never used for scanning until now!) to scan the color wheel. I saved it as a PNG, opened it in Affinity Photo on my desktop, and applied a filter to remove the white background. I was pretty impressed with the results!

Once the scanned image was dropped into my layout, I layered a white circle with a drop shadow over it, followed by a gold-colored circle. Then I used another circle as a clipping mask and clipped the “grateful” specialty journal card to it. It turned out even better than I imagined.

This page was such a joy to work on!

What do you think about the idea of including a “random moments” page in your album to round out the month?

Thanks for reading—only two more stories to go!

Products used:

• December Daily 2024 Digital Main Kit

• December Daily 2024 Digital Paper Prompt Pack

• December Daily 2024 Digital Specialty Card Set

• December Daily 2023 Digital Small Plastic Numbers

• December Daily 2024 Digital 3x8 Transparency and Journal Card Set

• December Daily 2024 Advent Calendar (this is not digital)

• Remington Noiseless Font

• Affinity Publisher for iPad

• Affinity Photo for desktop (to remove the backround of the scanned color wheel)