Project 365, Weeks 9 & 10

As always, click on the photos to see them larger and read the journaling.




Thanks for looking!

Project 365, Week 8

This year is flying by; I can't believe we just finished week 8!


We had a great time at the crop this past weekend, and I did finish some pages. I'll share those later, since the day after I get back from a trip (which is today) is always "Introvert Recovery Day" around here. I'm holed up, unpacking and decompressing and generally hiding out and trying to recharge my emotional/psychological batteries.

Thanks for looking!
[As always, click on the photo if you'd like to see it BIGGER to read the journaling.]

Project 365, Weeks 6 & 7

This whole snow-snow-snow thing has put me into a kind of holding pattern--I'm losing track of days and falling even further behind than I usually do! We had just an inch or so more last night and I'm really hoping that is the last snow we see this winter. Well, the last fresh snow, anyway; the rest of it will be around for months, piled up 10 feet high as it is in every parking lot around! I'm really glad I decided to take this year off of the Avon Walk, considering all the sidewalks are buried from the snow plows and 10 miles on a treadmill is not fun.

Anyway. Back to catching up. Here are Weeks 6 and 7 of my Project 365:




I didn't plan it this way, but it's kind of funny to have these two in the same post. Week 6 was FULL of snow and cold, and by Week 7 (even though it was still snowing) I was craving COLOR, obviously!

I'm still having a lot of fun doing these, and I still work on them every day or every other day. I'm a lot faster at it now. I also think it won't be too many more weeks until I start making my own, new template designs (that still coordinate with the other ones).

And I had a thought--if you like this project and want to play along but you didn't start on January 1st and (like me) like to start at the beginning of things, not partway through, then how about you start on the first day of Spring? You could do just a Days of Spring project, or you could keep doing Days of Summer, Days of Fall, Days of Winter. Mark your calendar to start taking photos on March 20th!

Project 365, Week 5

Remember how last week I mentioned that the template I used wasn't even? Well, I looked at the rest of the templates and none of them are even. All the photo sizes are completely different; sure, everything lines up in a grid, but why aren't they even and balanced? Totally annoying. Do not ask me how my house can be a disaster but this uneven grid thing makes me crazy, because I don't know. What I do know is that when I used to run track and cross country, I'd make up math problems to do while I ran. Who does that? Apparently my OCD hit the part of my brain that's in charge of math, and missed the part of my brain that's in charge of housekeeping. Alas!

Anyway, once I realized that all the templates were wrong, of course I had to go in and fix them. The crazy part is that I LOVE that stuff. Meticulous work with numbers? Oh, so awesome! I can totally zone out. So last Thursday I fixed all four double-page spread templates.

This is the fifth template (counting the single page I did as a title page), so now I'll just rotate back through them unless/until I get bored and decide to make my own templates from scratch.


Helpful Blogger Hint: If you ever want to scroll through all the posts about a particular topic, click on the corresponding label at the bottom of the post. This post is labeled Project 365 and Scrapbooking, so if you click on Project 365 then you'll see all my posts with that label. Same for my Favorite {Photo} Friday posts, etc.

I'm really impressed that I made it through an entire month without forgetting to take a photo even a single day! I'm really glad I'm doing this, it's so fun and I know it will be great to look back on at the end of the year. Are you playing along yet?

Project 365, Week 4

I'm still totally loving this whole Project 365 thing! (As always, click on the photo if you want to see it much larger and read the journaling. Then click back to this post, please!)


This project is definitely teaching me some things. This week I learned that I need to get out more, and that I eat a lot of fruit and like photographing it. :) I also learned that just because you design and sell Photoshop templates online, that doesn't mean you know how to do math. I'm sure you can't notice it on here, but the two middle photos and journaling spots (the coffee mug and the dead rose) are slightly thinner than the others. In fact, all of the strips are slightly different widths. This kind of thing totally annoys me; I mean, can't you do the math and make all the strips the same? It would be really easy to do! So easy, in fact, that I'm considering redoing this template before I use it again, just so all the strips are even. Yes, I know, I'm a tad anal detail-oriented; it's quite charming once you get to know me. :)

In case you're wondering, I usually upload photos and add them to the template every day or at least every other day; I don't want to ever feel like I have to "catch up" because then I will just say, "Aw, screw it!" and I'll stop doing the whole thing and just have some random unfinished album with a few weeks of these layouts, hanging over my head as yet another sign that I don't finish everything I start. And we don't want that! :) It usually takes me about ten minutes per day to upload photos, fix them if need be, add them to the template, and write out my journaling. Towards the end of the week I start choosing the colors for the journaling spots based on the colors in the photos, and that can take ten minutes or an hour depending on how I'm feeling and how much free time I have and whether or not Jason is watching football. Then when I'm all done with each week, it takes me about ten minutes to save the file as a jpg, upload it to Costco, order two prints, and then re-size the original image for posting here. So, all told, it takes me about an hour and a half per week I guess. That sounds like a lot! I think I could do it faster, but I enjoy the process so I like to take my time.

Thanks for looking, and let me know if you have any questions!

Project 365, Week 3 & a How-To

I'm really loving this Project 365 thing! Here's Week 3 (click on any of the photos to see them larger):


This week I did what I did for Week 1, pulling the colors out of the photos to use as the journaling and title spots. This layout had an extra spot for journaling so I used a little clip art that says Brrrrrr (I think I got it from Scrap-N-Fonts). I also used a "dingbat" font called CK Where It's At to do the little arrows pointing to which photo goes with the journaling. Other than that I stuck with the same font and basic pattern as with the previous two weeks.

I'm also loving how easy it is to upload these to Costco and get prints! I thought I'd quickly show how I'm doing it and why. Costco offers many prints sizes, two of which are 12x12" and 12x18", and both of these two sizes are $2.99 each. I want this big photo, shown above, to be 12x24" overall, or two 12x12" pages, so that it will fit into my scrapbook. But when printers print photos, a little bit of the outside edge is cut off. Since I have such a skinny little white strip in the middle of these two pages, if I had them printed just as two 12x12s, that little white strip would probably be cut off from the edges of both sides and it would look odd when I put the two pages together. So I have them printed as 12x18s and cut them myself; it's the same price and I know what I'll be getting! I just upload the complete "page spread" to Costco.com, and then I order a 12x18" print twice... once cropped all the way over to the left, and once cropped all the way over to the right. So I end up with this:


You can see that I end up with 6" of overlap on both sides. Now I just need to cut them down to fit into my album. Using my trusty Fiskars trimmer, first I line up the top so that the cutting blade is in the middle of that white strip.


Then I move the trimmer blade (without cutting!) down to the bottom of the page to double-check the alignment to make sure that it will cut through the middle of the white line all the way from top to bottom.


Once I get it aligned then I just trim right through it and end up with a 12x12" page and a 6x12" scrap.


Do the same thing for the other piece. Make sure you line up the line where you want to cut, don't trust the ruler.


Measure twice, cut once. :) Double-check the bottom, too--I always have to rearrange the photo to make sure it's lined up properly.


Then cut!


Now I have two 12x12" pages that look just like my original 12x24" page spread!


Slide them into the album's page protectors and voilà!


Then I cut up my scraps and put the photos into my scrapbooking photo storage, in case I want to scrap about any of the individual photos.


Here's the Title Page/Week 1 in the album:


And here's Week 2.


Thanks for looking! :) And it's never too late if you want to start doing a photo-a-day project, nobody says you had to start on January 1! :)

If you don't have the time or the inclination to do digital or traditional scrapbook photos, check out Project Life from Becky Higgins (now distributed by Amazon!). It comes with everything you need to make an album, including page protectors with slots so you just have to slide in a photo, write on one of the including journaling cards, and slide that into the next slot. Perfect for busy moms who want to remember those little moments and funny things your kids say and do but don't have a lot of time. I got it for my sister for Christmas! You don't have to use it to do Project 365 or photo-a-day, you can just use it for any photos you happen to take and want to jot down a little note about! No, I'm not a paid spokesperson, just an advocate for documenting your memories! :)

Project 365, Weeks 1 and 2

Now that I have a camera that I'm friends with, I decided to join in the Project 365 craze that's been going around the interwebs for a whole bunch of years now. The basic idea is to take a photo every day for 365 days, and at the end of the year you'll have an interesting portrait of your life, in 365 individual moments.

Some people put these into Flickr streams, or have blogs dedicated to their 365 Projects. But because I'm a scrapbooker, of course I decided to do weekly layouts with the photos! Since I'm also becoming friends with Photoshop, I decided to make these digital pages for now; I can do everything on the computer so I can get them done no matter how much of a giant mess my scrap area is. :) I bought a few templates and as the year goes on and I learn more, I may make things fancier with other elements, or make my own templates. Or I may switch and do some physical paper layouts. Or a hybrid of both. Or I might miss a few days or a week and then just give up on the whole thing altogether. :) But for now, it's digital. I want to keep it simple-simple so that it's easy and I keep doing it! :)

I decided to do my weeks from Monday-Sunday. Every Monday I'll work on the previous weeks' layout and then post it here on Tuesdays. That's the goal, anyway! Click on either of the photos to see them BIG (and then use the back button on your browser to come back here).

I wasn't sure what I was going to do for the first week since it was only three days, plus I wanted a title page... but the template set I bought came with a fifth template that isn't listed, and that worked perfectly! I just flipped it on its side and voilà, title page + three days.


I actually did this page after doing the page(s) below. Since it's also the title page for the whole album I didn't want to use just blues for cold January, so I just pulled the colors from the photos. The top teal was picked from the peppermint tea wrappers, the yellow journaling spot from the other tea wrapper, the blue from the speakerphone bar on the phone, and the green from part of the Brussels sprouts. I like this so I'll probably do it more throughout the year.

On the layout for the first full week of January I decided to change all the colors to blues because it's been coooold here. I just randomly chose blues in the color picker in Photoshop; if I did it over again I would choose differently, but hey, it's done! :)


I chose a messy typewriter font because... well, because I like it, basically, and I can imagine using it throughout the entire year. It's called Traveling Typewriter and you can find it here for free.

I also decided to not try to journal about each day in its entirety and just to do a sentence or so about the photo; again, keeping it easy! That way if I get to the end of a crazy week there's no pressure to remember every detail, just something about the photo and its significance (if there is any!).

I'm having these printed at Costco because they print 12x12 for $2.99 and it's very convenient for me (again, EASY), then I'll slide them into a 12x12 album. It's also convenient because I don't have to digitally split the pages on the above 12 x 24" spread... I just upload the original jpg and then order one print cropped all the way to the left, and one print cropped all the way to the right. My first order is actually waiting for me so I'll let you know how they turn out when I pick them up!