Project Life: Weeks 23 & 24

Hello! Welcome to this month's creative team share. Today Becky showed you a peek at my Weeks 23 and 24 and I'll be showing you the rest. For both weeks I used Marcy Penner's planning sheets. I'm not usually a planner for Project Life but I'm spending so much time on inserts lately and I need to find a way to make this a quicker process so I can actually keep moving forward once I go back to work.

The verdict? Definitely the way to go. By forcing myself to plan I was able to really choose what pictures I wanted to include and what stories I wanted to tell. Also, by pre planning I was able to print some collages and even print a picture larger than normal. When I don't plan I print too many pictures and spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to narrow them down and work in the different inserts. I really loved having my planning pages as a guide. When I had my pictures in hand there was no pondering and I was able to move on to filling in the journaling.

Here is the full version of Week 23 which was full of baseball, brothers, snuggles and our first trip to the Splash Pad for the summer.

 

I wanted to tell longer stories for both the "balancing" card and the "read" card so they both have hidden journaling. I like having the options of a fold out card and simply writing on the back of the card to tell the full story. In both of these cases it wasn't that the journaling was private, I just ran out of room. :)

 

I really love Design E for these mini layouts. This shot of Owen at the baseball field is a favorite of me & my husbands. So, I decided to print it larger (4x4) than I normally do (2.5x2.5) so that it wouldn't get lost in the week.  

I also really like that on Design E I can easily fit 4 instagram pictures printed at 2.5x2.5. I had all these snuggle pictures from the week and really wanted to have them as a collection to tell a stronger story.

 

Here I used Design D, minus a column to showcase a group of pictures. I love how the 4x3 pockets show a series of shots but I'm also able to highlight a few 4x6s.

 

Here is Week 24 where the big event was Travis hitting the two month mark. Time is going way too fast.

This was a low week for me where I was just beat down. Because I want this album to tell our full story I wanted to include that here. I took a selfie to capture what this Mama of three was looking like this week, spit up and all. In this case the journaling was private so I cut out a piece of patterned paper to 8x6 so that I could fold it over and have plenty of space to write inside.

The written journaling card is taken from a blog post I wrote in this week. I wanted to include both the high and low from the week. I decided not to include the post as originally written because I wrote the longer version of my low in the hidden journaling.

I used Cathy Zielske's Labeled Photo Sets No. 2 to include more of the bird feeder pictures without needing to add an insert.

For the Baseball pocket I printed my Instagram pictures at 2x2 so that I could include all 3 in one 4x6 pocket.

I decided to include Travis' montly snapshots in our family project life. I'm saving all the digital files so if I decide at the end of the year to pull them into a digital book to be printed I can have that option. Realistically all I have time and energy for right now is Project Life. I would be setting myself up for failure if I tried to create another project to document Travis' first year. So, I decided to make this a very simple formula that I can repeat each month. I'm using half of the Design E page protector and will include: a title page, a focal picture, a little write up and a collage of pictures. For my pictures I'm using Blueprints No.1 by Paislee Press.

I've had a few questions about how I print my Instagram pictures. Earlier in the year I walked through my process in this post. Hope that helps!

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for stopping by!

Monica