Project Life: Week 2

here i am with Project Life: Week 2. i'm chugging along, bringing up the rear.

if you find yourself behind, like me, what i have found to be super helpful is Post It notes and a small journal. any time i hear my family say something funny, i can quickly jot it down with the date and stick it right on the page protector for that week and forget about it until i find time to work on it.

(sidenote: you can click on any of the photos in this post to view them larger)

as i sat down to put week 2 together, i kept thinking to myself........how boring. all of these everyday mundane things that we do getting rehashed and recorded in a play-by-play.

kinda like i used to do here on the blog, eh, telling about every new thing the girls did. somehow blogging about it didn't seem so boring. LOL.

but after i finished up the week, and saw it all pulled together, i realized how special these photos and stories will be years from now, whether they seem boring now, or not.

so, for those of you doing Project Life or those of you on the fence about doing Project Life, my general thoughts are: do it!

it'll be worth it. no need to wait until January 2013 to get started. start today.

here's a look at the left side of my two-page spread for week 2. i used a mix of cards from both the Cobalt Core Kit and the Clementine Core Kit.

here's an idea: if you have one Core Kit or the other, find someone who has a different Core Kit from you and ask them to swap cards. i did that with someone this last week---i'm excited at how well they work together!

this journaling card here was from the Clementine kit. it's meant to be folded up and tucked inside a 3x4 slot holding hidden journaling, but it works just as well completely open and slightly embellished. i love how the graphics on these cards aren't directional allowing the card to work with the patterned stripe along the left or the right. when open it's slightly smaller than 4x6, but that doesn't bother me.

this particular week was one where i didn't have my camera with me on a few occassions that had stories needing told. so to tell the story i dug back into some older photos. that's where i found the Target logo photo.

the dolls are ones that ashlyn saw while shopping and wanted on her birthday list. instead of trudging back to the store, i opted to do a google search for stock images of the dolls. usually these types of images are of poor quality, so i printed them small and used a Round N Round Fiskars Squeeze Punch to get them into a crisp circle shape. the clarity at this smaller size is perfect.

then i just adhered them right on top of the photo. the stickers used to embellish it a little further were sent to me for a Fiskars project by Bella Blvd.--part of their new Spring and Sophisticates collection. love.love.love. (i quickly pulled a few things out for Project Life. they are all perfect for it, by the way!)

this week i included a 6x12 American Crafts insert to tell a few stories. i typed up the journaling for the back side of the insert, adjusted the margins to fit (top, bottom and left set at 0.5" and right set at 3"), and sent it through the printer.

once that was done, i rounded the corners, flipped it over, and adhered a photo to the top and bottom. then used one of the 4x6 weekly date cards from the Clementine Core Kit to type my notes regarding the two photos.

for my typewritten notes i've been using a 1980s Brother electronic hand-me-down typewriter. it's a little finicky about holding these smaller cards in straight as you get to the bottom of the card. to solve that, i just use a temporary adhesive and adhere the card to a full sheet of printer paper, feed the printer paper through the typewriter, then type away. problem solved.

you can do the same thing with your computer printer. here's how:

1. first, type your journaling and adjust your margins to fit within the measurement of the card you're wanting to print on.
2. print onto a piece of printer paper.
3. using temporary adhesive, adhere the card over the journaling you just printed.
4. feed back into your printer and print again.
   

to add a little more color to the whole thing, i added several border stickers, also from Bella Blvd, along with a kraft heart cut with my Silhouette.

once you flip the insert, you see a longer story from the day we had to take spidergirl to the hospital twice in a 13 hour time span due to asthma attacks. no fun.

the bottom embellishment is simply one of her hospital bracelets with some stickers layered on top. (again, Bella Blvd products. thank you Bella!)

and here's the right spread. it's a mix of crappy phone photos, a free download from the Dolphin Tale movie official website, and regular photos.

journaling card here is from the Clementine Core Kit with a heart border sticker from an older Doodlebug sticker sheet....and my own handwriting for the first time in my album. i'm doing a mix of handwritten, typewritten and computer generated notes.

after downloading crappy phone photos, i put them through a small little edit process using Picnik (so sad they are closing!). they usually need a lot of brightening and color pop added. but every once in a while i get one that no matter what i do it just doesn't look right. that happened this week---the one of spidergirl holding her teddy bear. in that case, turning it to black & white helped a ton!

so, that's Week 2. done.

Confused about Project Life? Start here.