Project Life 2015: Book two cover and title page

These are out of order as to when I created them, but I figured posting them in book order made the most sense.

Here are my cover and title page for book two...

Can I just tell you how excited I am about these?  One of my goals this year was to be more proactive with my cover and title page since that was something I was always scrambling to finish at the very last minute.  This year, I designed a cover and title page at the very beginning.  My plan was to keep the same pages for each book with just some minor modifications.  So far, so good!

First up was a new family photo.  We set the camera up on a stack of side tables and board games, set the timer and hoped for the best for a new family photo.  That's another benefit of this plan, I have motivation to shoot a new family photo more than once a year.  It didn't take too many to get one that we all could agree on.  What else we agreed on, is that I should probably get a tripod and figure out how to work my wireless shutter release.  :-/

Next was to figure out what to do with the resolutions card from the first book.  Since this book encompasses all of our summer travel, I decided to use the "going" card that was also part of the Storyteller Hunter collection and list out our trips.

I love how much I'm learning along the way to make Project Life work me.  Each year I pick up something new that streamlines the process so I can play with other more creative aspects of it.

Project Life 2015: Book One

It's here!!!  It printed and shipped super fast.  I think I've had it for about a week now.  I'm so pleased with how this book turned out.  First of all, I love the cover.  I was really afraid that it was going to be too much white space, but I like it.  I was also afraid that the whites would not match.  I did the cover using white according to photoshop and used the white spine and back cover from the Shutterfly options.  I know it sounds crazy, but there is always that chance that they won't match up (I haven't had that issue with Shutterfly, but have before when trying to do my blog banner).

 Everything printed nice and vibrant again... very pleased with the printing quality.

Even my various non-photo things printed really well.  I took this photo to highlight the image downloads (Die Hard from Google Images and the other two from the Facebook pages of the shows), and then realized the other images I had here as well.  A screenshot from the weather channel app and one from Find My Friends showing how many miles away Jeff was while he was in India.

Speaking of Jeff being in India, the section I did about his trip using Collect App photos turned out really nice...

My only real issue again, was printing too near the edge.  Nothing was cut off, just really, really close to it.  I had this issue last year with a different set of templates.  I reduced everything on the background to 98%.  This year I decided to try 97% with a different set of templates.  Just not quite enough.  Some seem closer than others which makes me wonder if I slipped back into my 98% habit part of the time.

I will leave this year's books alone with reducing to 97% and come up with a new plan for 2016.

I did some inserts again this year...

Alex killed my paper trimmer working on his science fair project, so attempted cutting this one by hand...

Never again.  I just can't cut a straight line... sigh.

Something I did differently this year was add a patterned paper to the back of the insert instead of photos on both sides...

Sometimes I have more photos than will fit on a two page spread, but not enough to do an insert front and back, so this seemed like a fun option.

Here's my other insert...

The trimming will have to wait until I get a new trimmer.

Here's the paper I picked out for the back of that one...

And finally just a shot and some snapchat screen shots....

I'm always surprised at how well they print!

I'm so excited to have one book done already this year.  I was reading some old posts on Facebook last night and found the one where I mentioned that I was considering trying project life.  It's funny to read through the conversation and see that my biggest concern at the time was that I wouldn't actually print my layouts!  I'm so glad that printing didn't really end up being an issue.  I love, love, love my stack of project life books.  It makes me crazy happy to see what all we have documented!

Project Life 2015: Week 18

The last week of my first book of the year!

Week 18...

I keep trying to come up with something to add to this post, but I keep coming up blank!  So, I think I'll just give up and hit post :-)

Supplies (links on pinterest)....

Project Life 2015: Week 17

This is one of my favorite recent weeks.  I just loved Just Jaimee's Color Me Happy sets from the May BYOC at The Lilypad.  I like the light and airy look to it at all (does that make sense?).

Here's our week 17....

 I did a separate insert for Alex's birthday this week....

I didn't have enough photos to do front and back of the insert, so on the back, I just added a sheet of the Color Me Happy patterned paper.  I think I really like how it turned out.  I still have to trim it to make sure, but Alex's science fair board prep was the death of my paper trimmer.  

Supplies (links on pinterest)....

Project Life 2015: Week 16

Time sure flies by fast... it sure doesn't seem like this was over a month ago!

Here's my week 16...

Supplies (links on pinterest)...

Project Life 2015: Alex's Week 15

So my series of posts I mentioned last week didn't kick off quite like I had planned.  We had a full weekend with my in-laws here and Alex's performances.  I'll try to get things caught up again with posting.

Here's a glimpse into what the boy was up to the week he spent in Missouri...

Can I just tell you how excited I am to have four pages worth of photos from that week!  I knew my dad was pretty good with photos, but Alex is terrible about taking any.  But I was completely shocked by both of them!  After Alex was home, I started getting text notifications and emails... my dad was sending me the nearly 40 photos he took that week.  Then Alex airdropped me another 10 or so that he took.  I couldn't believe it!  We had bought my dad a selfie stick for his birthday and Alex gave it to him on his first day there.  They played with it a bit which added to the photo count.  It actually really touched me that my family seems to "get" how important PL is to me.

Supplies (links on pinterest)...

Project Life 2015: Week 15

I spent the last week scrambling to get my first book of the year ready to print.  Shutterfly always does that to me... I get a coupon and I think "I MUST use this NOW, it's the BEST coupon EVER, I CAN'T let it expire without using it" and then I work around the clock to get my book ready to print.  And I send it print within a few hours of the coupon expiring... every. single. time.  Then, the very next day, I get a new coupon which is different, yet similar, to the one that just expired.  Oh well... it motivated me to finish up those last few pages I was avoiding and now, within a week or so, I'll have my first book in hand!

And now begins the series of posts where I try to get caught back up with sharing layouts!

Here is week 15 (the main part of the the week with just Clara and I)...

It was a strange week to scrap.  Week 15 ended up with 10 pages because I had so many photos - Easter, Alex's week in MO, Clara's dance competition and the rest.  The problem was that "the rest" didn't add up to much... but there were too many to leave out, so I did this spread, added lots of filler and hoped for the best!  It turned out better than I expected!

Supplies (links on pinterest)....