Project Life January 2013

Project Life 2013, a set on Flickr.

Finally getting to sharing my January Project Life pages. It was kind of a work in progress, a little test to see if it would actually work for me. I have a history of starting projects and then completely falling off the wagon pretty quickly. Yes, it's true. (See my 2011 and 2012 Project Life.)

Still, I knew that there had to be a way to make it work for me. I really felt inspired by the weekly documentation, but also know that is tough for me if I want to be creative with it, different sized photos, etc etc. I take a lot of photos too, and it's hard to go through all of those, edit, etc. Too much for me to keep up.

So I started thinking I would do it monthly and then weekly spreads within the month. That way if it ends up being just a two page spread of the month, then that is better than nothing.

What I ended up finding was an app on my iPhone called Collect. I thought I would use it for a self portrait project, or for pictures of Maggie. What I ended up doing was creating albums for these as well as one titled Project Life 2013. It is just awesome! I can add more than one photo for each day, add a little title and even an expanded story which goes on the back of the card.

What is cool is that you can export the card to your camera roll. Was thrilled to discover it creates little cards that reminded me of Tracy Larsen's cards. It prints pretty good as is on a 4x6 photo. However, it's a little trickier to get it to the 3x4 size for the Design F page protectors I'm using. I usually bring them in to Photoshop Elements and crop them to 2.875x4 at 300 dpi. I just eyeball the crop and save two on a 4x6 photo to print at home. Currently I'm working with Persnickety Prints to see if we can get these to print easily without having to do cropping on our own. I may also contact the app builders to see if they can add a function to export it at 4x6 or at 3x4. Not sure that would work but it would be cool. However, I love that when I crop them this way they look like little Polaroids so I may just keeping doing it this way. Will be sure to update when I figure it out.

So without further rambling, hello January!

Monthly intro page

Bonus layout: All about Maggie and her love of her candy cane pj's. Love that I have room for bonus layouts or for just favorite photos not necessarily in a weekly format.

Week 1

Am using these Week in Review and Month in Review cards from Cathy Zielske at Designer Digital to round out the stories.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4: a One Little Word challenge to myself to get moving each day.

Weeks 4 & 5: combined the rest of January into "weeks 4 & 5"  Honestly this was my biggest hang-up whether to go this approach or not. How would I handle weeks that only had a few days to the end of the month? Hello letting it go. So happy to combine when it makes sense. Plus, we do most of our "activities" on weekends so it makes sense to me. There's no Project Life police to come and take my book away because I combined weeks. :) Just making it work and turns out I love it!

I added this photo so you could see "the rest of the story" stamp and the arrow. I printed out a few of the back of the Collect cards as an extra photo. I just slipped them behind the photo and the little arrow to note it. I also might add a tab or something extra to make it easy to see.

On the back of this page I have a memorabilia page going that I haven't finished yet and a right side of a Design A that will be just another "wrap up" place for stories that maybe I didn't include or want to expand on. I also have some inserts. Yes, it's getting huge already! (hope to keep it to 2 binders)

Another thing to note that is helping me stay up to date with this is that I'm using 99% iPhone only photos for my weekly spreads. The big camera comes out, but I'm just planning on using those for inserts and the intro/closing/bonus spreads. Simple is quick. Simple is done. Simple is good.

Also just want to note I'm using these free quote cards from Elise Blaha Cripe. She made them last year for her Project Life and made them available as s free download. Absolutely love them. Thank you Elise!

I am also using the digital version of the Seafoam edition for Project Life. You can find it here. I also have the physical kit. You can get it here. The difference is the corners. When I found the Collect app and discovered I liked the squared corners, I found that printing the Seafoam cards just a bit big and trimming them to squared corners made my heart sing. I love either way--think they both look awesome--but just depends on the page. So I'm planning to use the physical kit to help finish 2011 and 2012 and even share with my niece if she is interested. :)

Also using quite a bit of Liz Tamanaha's digital products. (the calendars, other filler cards, etc.) You can find them here. Also looking forward to adding in the Midnight edition when it comes out.

The flair badges with my One Little Word and the months are from Ormolu. The days of the week cards are from Ali Edwards with Technique Tuesday. The everyday flair badge is from A Flair for Buttons.

So there it is! Thanks for taking the time to look! Let me know if you have any questions!