Project Life 2015 | Week 01 + 02

I was originally planning on sharing my Project Life spreads by month this year but since we're at the end of February and I still haven't finished the last week of January, I'll just share what I have so far and go on from there.

WEEK 1 : JANUARY 1-3
This was a short week and I spent 48 of its hours re-assembling Lego sets so I kept things super simple.

See? I wasn't kidding.

I used a 6x8 Studio Calico handbook page protector with 4 pockets. One of the pockets was the date card for this week, two used Cathy Zielske's Instagram template, and the last one holds journaling on a Studio Calico card. Done.


WEEK 2 : JANUARY 4-10
This week was slightly busier. It was Andrew's last week off before starting orientation at his new job so we tried to pack in a few extra activities so the boys could spend some extra time with him.

I really liked doing strips of typed text on coloured backgrounds this week. I find it oddly therapeutic piecing the stories together that way. Andrew brought the boys to watch Penguins of Madagascar so I clipped their tickets to a card and cut a slit to tuck them in so we could have space for Andrew's journaling.

You can see the right side of the spread is quite journaling-heavy. For the past few years, I've been including a lot of photos, leaving very little space for journaling so this year I'm trying to shift the focus to recording our stories. This week, we had a lot of different "trying new things" and "being brave" stories that had to be documented.

Something I tried that was a little different on this spread was putting the date in the bottom right corner, as part of another card. When I finished sketching this spread, I realized I didn't leave any space for the date and that card was the only one with extra space left. I kind of like how it looks there, I might try doing it again.

See more of my Project Life 2015 here.

Project Life 2015 | Title Page

Title pages are typically very difficult for me. There's so much pressure to make it look perfect because it's the very first thing you see when you open the album cover, and it's supposed to somehow represent everything that's inside. If it doesn't look fantastic, why would you keep flipping through, right? (I'm totally a person who judges a book by its cover. Can you tell?)

This year, somehow this all changed for me. When I was designing the title page, it came together so quickly and so easily. I kept the design pretty clean and simple. The basic elements I want for all my Project Life title pages are there: something to represent the year, something to represent our family and something to represent where we are geographically. 

In fact, I ended up making a double-sided title page this year. I finally got around to taking individual pictures of each family member this new year's so I used some of those to fill the spaces. I like that there's just enough colour to keep it interesting and that I could include my One Little Word for this year. I liked the idea of that shaker pocket but it's driving me absolutely crazy now because the wood veneers keep stacking on top of each other, making the pocket really thick! How do I make it stop?

As you can see, I went ahead and popped those less-than-perfect photos into the pockets anyway. I might reprint them later on but for now, I like that my title pages are complete.

You can see some of my previous title pages here: 2013 - Album 1, 2013 - Album 2, 2014 - Album 1

Project Life | Plans for 2015

THE FORMAT
When I was planning out how I was going to document this year, I fully intended on using the new Studio Calico Handbook system with the 9x12 pages. I liked the idea of having a slightly smaller canvas to work with, just to change things up and because I knew my hands would be full this year. They weren't available at the beginning of the year so I just planned out my layouts on paper.

Then, I learned that the holes of the new page protectors would not match up with the Project Life page protectors and binders that I previously used (and still have a ton of). So, change of plans! For one more year, I'll be documenting our lives in 12x12 format.

I went back to the 12x12 drawing board, redesigned my title pages and continued on doing the weeks with a twist. Instead of doing only 12x12 spreads, I'll intersperse with different-sized pages depending on how much I want to document for that week.

Things were coming along.

THE CONTENT
I'm trying to focus a little more on documenting stories this year. My previous spreads were very photo-heavy which is fine, but I want to make more space for the words this year. Having less photos makes my process go much quicker. I had photos ready to print and I hadn't really fallen behind yet.

And then my photos came back.

Insert Hulk scream and smash.

So much for staying ahead of the game!

THE PLAN
I try to write down a bit of what we did that each day in my agenda. Quotes from the boys are kept in my Day One app as I hear them and ephemera is tucked into a little plastic pocket in my agenda.

I'll continue working weekly. Some weeks will have bigger pages and take up the full spread while other weeks might have smaller pages or share half a spread. At the end of each week, I'll go through my agenda and plan out the spreads, hopefully doing a majority of the journaling cards as I go.

As for photos, well it looks like it might be time for me to invest in a home photo printer.