A Week in Our Life 2010

Happy Mother's Day!!!
Hello again everyone, I am finally back and getting down to business. I have a lot to share with you so those of you who have been waiting awhile for some new stuff, this is for you!

This is a week in the life - it is a project inspired by Ali Edwards and probably one of my favorites. About 2 weeks ago I spent the whole week taking lots & lots of photos, jotting down notes of bits & pieces that happened throughout our week, and keeping anything & everything that came to me via mail or other means.




I collected everything from receipts, to do lists, grocery lists, couple of e-mails, things from the snail mail; it was quite an under taking and I did a mini version of the album. Maybe next time I do this one, I'll do it bigger, then again, maybe not.


For this album I took a leap of faith and tried a hybrid attempt - final result - one really cool album! The pages that have the pockets full of stuff are traditional scrapbook pages, and the photo collage pages are all done totally digital using Photoshop Elements. I got a bit frustrated when on the second day Photoshop decided it wasn't going to play nice {had to uninstall the program & then reinstall it} but finally I fixed the problem and cruised right through the rest of the pages.


The hardest part of digital comes in the same manner as traditional scrapbooking; which is - figuring out what papers to use, what products will help tell a more complete story {as products is no longer my main concern anymore} and then how to pull it all together on the page - the overall design. I think for me design is still my weakest area, yes I could use a sketch, but to me that kinda takes all the fun out of it {so I save sketches for when I get really frustrated}.


You may notice that each of my days have 4 pages to them all 6x6 in size. Two of the pages have the photo collage or one large photo, then the other two pocket pages is where I have stored all the stuff.

As for 'what' to store? There really wasn't much to think about, if it came in the mail or by other means and applied to our everyday life, then in it went. So above in the pocket page I have an e-mail that I printed right from my desktop, I have a 4T clothing tag {that is what Liberty is wearing right now}, there is the bar code from a 100% recycled package that I had purchased {it went in on Thursday - which was earth day}, then I even put in a handwritten note about Justice.


Somethings I collected were to large for the pockets but I still wanted to work them into the book so I tucked them in between the photo collage pages that were done digitally. The paper that I used to print those photos on {HP Premium Presentation Paper}, is very smooth paper & takes the ink very well giving the photos rich colors, but it is not very heavy so the addition of the other stuff in between actually helps give those pages some stability, solving two problems @ once.


So on the last two pages, for the photo collage, I used the grid in Photoshop so that I could have several photos between the two pages and still have them all spaced right, by no means is it exact but it worked well enough. In this collage I purposely chose photos with no one in them and only used the photos that had places or things. Throughout the week I used several photos that had one or a couple of us in them but still wanted to incorporate other things & places that have meaning to us right now, so that is why I chose to use only those photos for the last day.
For the last page, as of right now it is blank. My plan is to do a page of journaling to recap our whole week and then include it in that spot, but then again I like the idea of just doing one large photo maybe of the girls together. Had I thought about it during that week, I would've used my camera timer and taken a family portrait, but such is life - maybe next time!

Okay well that's all I have for you today, hope you have enjoyed taking a peek into our life. More importantly though I hope you find your own lives full of life & love.

Thanks for letting me share... just B

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