a week in MY life…putting it together

So I started putting it all together. A week in MY life.

I took a good amount of pictures…no where near the amount that I’ve seen others do. And that is okay. Remember…I just wanted to document the week however much or little I could. And I did.

So now I’m going through the photos, weeding out the horrible ones, putting aside the ones that I don’t need for this project and cropping them all to fit the baseball card protectors I have on hand.

There are several ways to do this. You could just order wallet sized photos from your favorite printer. I use Costco mostly, but scapbookpictures.com is a good source for lots of fun sizes to scrap with. I’ve used them before and their quality is great. I’m just too impatient to wait for them to come to me so I choose Costco because it’s right down the street from my house.

I don’t like to order the wallets there because I don’t know what to do with four of the same picture. (But if you’re good at multiple uses for photos…go for it!) So…I crop my photos to size in Photoshop Elements and then drag them onto a new canvas and depending how many there are, that dictates the size of the canvas. Sounds complicated? Ali posted a little video tutorial…once you know how to do it, it goes really quick!

So…last week I actually got Sun-Tues all cropped and printed so could get a head start. Last night I started sliding them in and figuring out how the journaling cards would look and what extras I wanted to add.

This is the front page for the week. You can see that there are still some pictures I want to take or pull from recent file folders.

Remember that transparency I had in my stash…I used it to lead off the page. Of course, the next page will show through that…but I kind of like it being a peek into the next day. From the back you can see the reverse of the stickers…I’m okay with that.

You can see while the front page was more black and white tidbits with little pieces of red and turquoise, this one has more greens and blues. I just stacked up my October Afternoon journaling cards according to colors and started pulling them. I don’t care this year if the whole project doesn’t have the same colors. There are so many pictures thrown in there that it doesn’t stick out wildly. I’m just trying to keep coordinating colors on facing pages and calling it good.

(By the way…the October Afternoon journaling cards are perfect size…just a bit tall, so I decided that rather than have them overlap the picture above them, I trimmed them a bit and re-did the corner rounding. Super quick and easy, but I liked the fit better this way.

   I’m trying to decide if I need to put a backing piece of cardstock on receipts and stuff. For now…I’m just going with it the way it is. I don’t want this to turn into a big huge scrapbook project.

I’m still deciding how detailed I want the journaling and labeling. I’ve got an idea to create custom labels for the pictures (so 5 years from now I’ll know why I threw that picture of them on the couch in there). They would be one word or a couple of words description…but I haven’t quite decided yet. I’ve also thought about doing the same thing with the little letter stickers…but that might take forever.

Did you notice that I included an email? It came from my oldest’s teacher as dictated by him celebrating a victory he had at school. It was so fun to get a mid-day report straight from his mouth!

 

And this is as far as I’ve gotten. I’ve got to spend some time today weeding through the rest of the week and crop, upload and print up the pictures.

I’m going to keep working on this and check in next week with the final project and my final thoughts.

Stay tuned the rest of this week for our regularly scheduled bits of life and scrapbooking…

Kristen