December Daily - Day 6 - Christmas Tree + Parade

Day 6 - Double Stories again!  The big story was putting up our tree.  I had a lot of trouble with these pages, This is probably because I decided to do multiple pages and then swirled with the photo editing software.  Hopefully I learned my lesson. (The right page is the first of day 6, the left is the back of Day 5)

My favorite part of this page is seriously this little star tab I added at the bottom.  The angled words are actually printed masking tape from the kit. 

Here is the full sized image of the front page. (Yes, I do wish I had put away the vacuum before taking all these photos....)

The next two pages are also part of page six - one big photo enlargement (aka source of all the photo editing angst) and a smaller second page with all three kids deocrating. 

 M + Daddy - I did manage to add text and a frame.  I played a lot with Gimp (free photo editing software).  I learned a lot, but still not my favorite part of the process.

 Super simple kids + washi tape added to a page that was mostly preplanned.

On the back (yes, four sides) is a photo from the Edmond Parade of Lights.  Brent was at the OU football game and Audra was working so Zach and I co-parented our five children.  They were a little rough and tumble, but ultimately had a great time and Ro even touched a dog (conquering his fears!)  It was drizzly, but not too cold.  It is one of my favorite December family traditions and went really well this year, save that there were no bands in the parade!

My favorite part of this layout is definitely the gold glittered embossing on the six and how it lands on on the photo behind it.  Definitely didn't plan that, but very cool.

My thoughts on photo editing - I primarily use the free, downloadable version of Picasa.  It has all the basic things I need daily (crop, up the light, etc).  I had to use Gimp in this project because printing unusual sizes like a 6x8 in picasa isn't really feasible at least as far as I could tell.  I then got sucked in to all the other cool stuff that is possible in Gimp and added another layer with the frame and day of the week (parts of a digital file from Ali, but I erased the other boxes).  The crazy amount of time spent fiddling with Gimp did not fit into my keeping it simple plan, but as it was the weekend I had a bit more time and learning new things is good, right?