Yea, there was a little bit of a hiatus there. I cant promise I will keep this blog updated but I can promise I am doing my best to keep up with our Project life album. And that is the conclusion I came to – Id rather be using the time that would be spent updating the blog on actually working on our album instead. Besides, that means when I do have the time to update here…Ill have plenty to share! There’s always a mountain where there lies a valley.
But first…I wanted to give a little shout out to all of the wonderful people who have been leaving lovely comments here – it truly means so much that you let me know that you stopped by! I also wanted to thank Jamaica and Leena who were so sweet to mention me on their blogs and link back here. I am thrilled that this blog is doing its job at inspiring others in addition to allowing me to share our life with my Nana. who has been like my mom and just moved away from me for the first time in my entire life. She’s in Biloxi, MS…I’m in Florida. its been tough.
But I digress.
SO, here it is…week 3 of our brilliantly mundane life
Gym routines, Filing sales taxes, installing a new pur filter (which we’ve relied on heavily for over 5 years), modern love notes, #1000, rainy day love, movie watching class at USF, one of our isms as a couple and Mom’s birthday! A normal week for us…might be boring to most but I love it. I simply ADORE documenting our everyday life – this will never get old.
If you havent noticed yet, I am missing the dates on most of these. I am loving the clear day of the week stickers that came with the core kit but I am waiting on a date stamp that just came out. It isnt available for purchase yet but I will be going back to add date stamps to the past weeks once I get it in.
I LOVE that I was able to document one of my sweet texts that Nick sent me and the fact that he does this often. I would melt instantly if I saw something like this from my great grandparents when they were our age. The fact that its written down and kept in a safe place just gives me joy. That, paired with simple details about what we enjoy and what we do…accidentally documenting how different things will be compared to 20, 40, 60 years from now. This is our legacy.
I am unbelievably grateful to have found this project and that I have chosen to invest the time to do it. There’s no question I will be thanking my past self for keeping it up.
Our Project Life so far: Week 1, Week 2
I’m linking up with The Mom Creative and her Project Life Tuesday. Check it out for more inspiration…TONS of people are doing this insanely awesome project.
Not Familiar with Project Life? Learn more here.
Here we go with week 2 of our project life album!
Up to here it has been easy keeping up. This week I actually had a lot to include and almost had another insert. I managed to work it out without the insert, which Is my goal for the year. I don’t want the album filling up too fast and needing three volumes for the day to day of this year. I know I will have a full album of just our personal photos and ephemera from our wedding and honeymoon in Italy and that will be something to factor in for albums to look at for one year. (one awesome year)
Here is the whole spread:
This was a fun week! A new semester at USF, capturing the sweet relationship of a man and his little girl, a random act of kindness, Beauty and the Beast in 3D with the girl I grew up with, and purging/selling at a yard sale.
I love that I was able to include the parking permit that is on Nick’s car for the semester. I love even more that he wrote about starting a new semester.
The moustache card I made and may be offering it as a freebie download in the near future. Also, those who are familiar with Project Life products can tell that I am loving the cobalt edition cards very very much. : )
I took a close up photo of my weekly calendar spots so you could see it a little better. I made the calendar in Photoshop so I could have it start from Monday to Sunday, then added a grid background and Ali Edwards days + months digital brushes. I just printed it out on copy paper then cut and stapled it to Kraft Cardstock. I did 6 months in advance so they are ready to go each week! I really do love being able to see on a calendar which week’s story is being told. Date ranges and “week 25″ does nothing for me in this case.
This week I added an extra photo to that calendar card that I didnt have room for and I love how it fits perfectly there in its little home. I just stuck it on with Washi tape so it is easily removable if we need to borrow it for something else. (my mentality on all of my photos in this project, I try not to adhere any of them down so that they may be removed.)
This was a little something new and fun that I did. I ran out of space and like I said before, I wanted to avoid the need for an insert. So I just cut a pocket from a baseball card sleeve and sewed it onto the spread with clear thread. It created a little flap and allowed me to include journaling for the photo underneath as well as including another photo behind the flap! It takes very little time and I think I will pre sew a few on ahead of time so they are ready to go if I should ever need to do this again.
That adorable little heart is a a foam cut out and is adhered on top of the page protector. I LOVE the layered texture and again, Im not in the business of making any alterations to our photographs. I definitely think this is something I will continue doing throughout our book. I am just tickled by the fact that you can run your finger over it and feel the love. ha! yes I am aware that I am a dork.
I was looking forward to Friday and Saturday and that is basically the whole right side (below). This is where including a photo a day doesnt always work, I would have needed that insert I was talking about and the stories can be told another time since they were daily happenings.
The 4×6 Beauty and the beast card was given to us when we purchased our ticket. It is a “commemorative lithograph.” I think it really was just an excuse to advertise to us but I don’t care, I was as giddy as a 10 year old when I saw it and knew that I had the perfect place to keep it safe! Project life for the win.
I forgot to take a photo of it but the journaling for the Beauty and the beast movie is a folded card that can be pulled out. Love it. And I still cant get over how incredible it is to have a place for all of our ticket stubs and a story to go with it. I also kept the flap from my movie snack from that day and then the other two things are a parking garage stub and the business card from the scrapbook store in St. Pete that hosted the yard sale.
Stay tuned for week 3…Ill try to get that up by the end of this week.
I am absolutely LOVING all of your comments! Make sure to say hi and let me know how you are doing on your Project life or ask me any questions you have. I’ve been doing pretty good at responding so ask away!
I’m linking up with The Mom Creative and her Project Life Tuesday. If you are looking for more inspiration check out the people who link up their project life pages with her there. Its really fun to see how other people are using project life and it really helps me to see the basic ones to remind myself to keep it simple.
Not Familiar with Project Life? Learn more here.
Posted in Project life
| Tags: 2012, extras, including pieces of life, iphone screen captures, moustache, movies, project life, puppy dog, self portrait, tips, USF
Hello 2012!!
I am in denial that its the middle of the month already. This is going to be an incredible year and I am BEYOND excited to document all of the little moments along with the big, life changing ones. such as our wedding abroad!
I am still continuing to work on our 2011 album but Id like to stay caught up on 2012 first. Im going to do my best to update with the weekly spreads for 2012, to keep myself held accountable and make sure I am making time to DO them. We will just see what happens as far as the 2011 album updates go.
I am pleased as punch with this album already and it’s only the first week! Here is the whole spread with an insert. The insert is one of the design D pages cut to fit what I needed. I will almost always cut my inserts, for some reason I don’t like them to be the same size as the rest of the week. If I don’t cut it then I fold it.
 
I learned from our 2011 album that my weeks just flow better with the date range card on the right side rather than on the left like the traditional project life layout. I am trying to make this as easy as possible so that I can get the weeks finished in the least amount of time so I can keep up with this project. Somehow there is just something lovely about being able to see which week this is at a glance. And that is why I chose to do the calendars with the current week circled like I did for 2011. These, however are more basic than my 2011 ones and were much faster to do. I had to create my own though, because most calendars go Sunday to Saturday. I just see my weeks as starting on Monday with the weekend together. I pre-made the first four months and went ahead and put them in each spread so that I’m all set.
I haven’t decided how I want to do the dates yet, I’m still stuck in whether or not I’ll use a date stamp.
I really love that Nicholas isnt putting up much of a fight with participating in our album. He actually took that photo of the ice on his car and I absolutely adore his handwritten stories in our book! His handwriting is something I already cherish so much, always have.
On the right, there are pull tabs for additional photos and journaling. I was trying not to over think how to fit it all into the spread and I really love things that are interactive. I’m trying to keep the inserts to a minimum so that I only have two volumes for the year since we’ll have our wedding book. Not our heirloom wedding photo album just the extra stuff and our honeymoon in a project life format. I figure that extras stuffed in the outside pockets will be okay since the albums are always big from the middle/inside.
So there it is, it’s not perfect but it’s done. I’m trying to keep my perfectionist habits locked up and far away from this album. I just want to get it done because anything I do is better than not doing anything at all. The ONLY reason why Im even using stuff other than the basic kit is because I have so much of it left from when I used to make scrapbooks. After its all gone – Ill most likely be using just the basic Project Life Kit.
I’ll be sharing my title page here soon and why its only temporary plus I’ll be talking a little bit about my plan for keeping up with the project and how Im organizing everything, etc. so stay tuned! : )
Are you doing project life? Tell me what your goals are for your album and show me yours, I’d love to see it!
Base supplies: project life clementine core kit, design A page protectors, design D page protectors, smash products, other misc stash.
If you have a question about anything I used, leave a comment and Ill reply!
Not Familiar with Project Life? Learn more here.
On this 2011 album, I’ve been working between the current weeks and the past months. I’m making progress and now February is finished! It’s SO exciting seeing our year come together, I love that this is basically a time capsule and though all of this stuff seems so mundane right now, 20 years from now we will cherish these bits and pieces of our lives from the past.
Here is the full spread for February in review.
I am relying heavily on twitter and facebook updates to help me put these past months together. Its not too difficult, except for the fact that we didnt take many, if any photos at all. But thats okay, the stories matter too. Im so thankful for this project, looking at this photo-less month is really putting into perspective just how important this is. I feel like our lives would continue passing us by without any record or documentation.
Im also able to use up my ridiculous stash of random supplies. They are helping with the visual aspect of these photoless months.
This pocket has an email conversation that Nicholas and I had over facebook. It is really sweet and depicts just how crazy we are about each other so I had to save it. I was able to just click> File:Print to get a perfectly sized print out. I just trimmed it and put it in a pocket.
Check this out! There is no good way of saving status updates from twitter or Facebook on the web by simply copy and pasting. And when you screen capture, it is so very small that you can’t read it when printed out. Then if you stretch it to make it bigger, it gets pixelated of course. SO, when you have something you want to save, zoom into your screen! You can do this on any computer, there should be an option in the menu of your browser, something like > View:Zoom in. On my mac I just press command and + to zoom in. Then I take a screen capture with a relly neat app called “skitch” and print it right out.
On my January spread I included twitter statuses that reminded me of how I started 2011 off with a serious cold. In the picture below, I am showing an example of the different size results in inches. The top set is how big they would be if I just screen captured and printed them out. The result is not very easy to read, we’ll especially have difficulty trying to read it when we are old and gray! The set on the bottom is how big they are after Ive zoomed in on my web browser 4x. (meaning I clicked zoom in 4 times on my web browser.) Try it out! Unfortunately I didn’t realize this until after I had already printed these out for January. But now you know! : )
My timeline for project life 2011 was a little screwy:
- I learned about project life in early May
- decided to just start my album with the second week of June. (expecting to have two volumes per year)
- kept it up for only two weeks (had a long term houseguest that sort of threw me off) but still managed to keep record of my days and photos in an iPhone app for each day/week until August.
- got so behind in August that I felt defeated (because i wanted to keep up with the weekly entries) and would make it a priority in 2012.
- in mid November I heard some wise words and decided to not only fill in the weeks I did keep track of but to fill in the empties with a spread or even a half spread for each month in 2011!
Highlights from the missing months is how I’m filling in my album. I read this on Lisa Truesdell’s blog on falling behind/catching up: “i have unfinished weeks. more than i’d like. but i said when i started this that even if it was “project every other week” i’d still have more recorded than if i didn’t do it at all.” I think it was this realization that made me feel better about my blank spots in my project life album and that it wouldnt ALL be weekly spreads. I just adore that freedom we have with this project! It doesn’t have to be perfect or a certain way for the whole year. Document as much as you can when you can- as long as the stories are being told, both little and big, that’s all that matters!
This is my spread for the month of January 2011
The insert in the middle of the spread is a printout from an article I shared on Twitter about there being snow in all of the states in the US except for ours, Florida! Stapled on the right of the article is my twitter update about it. Notice how tiny the twitter status updates are on the first spread…and even that was stretched out in Photoshop to be bigger which resulted in a bit of pixellation. Next week I will be sharing a tutorial on how to get a better larger version to use in your album! (that unfortunately, I didn’t think about until after this spread was done, ha!)
Card is blurred out for privacy.
Below: Spread without the insert. The “this is why I love him” space has a file card that pulls out with a story of how my fiance rescued me one night. I love little pull tabs and interactivity and this was perfect for all of the space I needed to tell the story properly!
Ali Edwards has been such a huge source of inspiration for me doing project life. (if you havent checked out her project life album progress then seriously, go now. You are missing out!) I am in love with the whole idea of mixing pen sizes (bold and fine) and journaling down the middle of the card. SO of course I had to implement that right away. Its the only way I could figure out how to actually like my handwriting on the cards. It would get real boring for me quick if all of the cards looked like the one on the far right. So…thanks for that, Ali!
Also, the month title is from the Days + months hand drawn brushes set from Ali Edwards on Designer digitals. love them!
One of the very few photos I took during this month and it was taken with my old iPhone 3G…SO sad! (this is where project life will come to my rescue!)
The second 3×4 slot is holding a handful of the promo cards I got from the SYNC conference as part of my welcome kit. No idea why I kept them but now they have a home! The bottom right 4×6 slot is holding a magnet from the conference. I would have never put it on my fridge but it was perfect for the album.
Like I mentioned before, I didnt take many photos this month…so I needed some filler. I also wanted a little opener for the year since its a month in review spread so I whipped up this little new years art in photoshop. I saw something like this somewhere, may have been a card. I just printed it onto some white Bazzill cardstock and I LOVE how it came out!
Come back again next week for that tutorial! : )
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