Project Life 2014: Week 52

So, I got a little carried away with my "house cleaning" here on my computer and deleted my folder for Project Life 2014 with all of my files in it.  My thinking was that I had already uploaded my pages to Shutterfly and my book was ordered, so why not free up some space.  Then I went to finish up my posts on my 2014 pages and realized that I no longer had the files to complete my posts!  Thankfully everything is backed up to our personal cloud here at home, so they weren't gone forever, just more inconvenient to access.  Oh well.  I got them back and here they are...

With everything that we had going on, week 52 ended up 8 pages long.

First up, my parents' visit...

Then the 23rd and 24th...

And then Christmas Day (with a tiny bit about the 26th)...

And then our day trip to Jeff's parents' house for their Christmas celebration...

One more post about 2014 (until my book gets here) and then it's on to my 2015 pages.  I'm totally in love with week one's pages and can't wait to share them!

Project Life 2014: Week 50 & 51

 I'm getting pretty anxious to start with posting 2015, so I'm doubling up on weeks now!

 This is an insert for week 51.  After printing the blank portion will be trimmed off.

If you're looking for a way to entertain middle school aged girls for a long time with minimal effort, set up a photo booth with props!!  I couldn't believe how much time they spent with it... taking pictures, planning pictures and trying on props.  So much fun!

Project Life 2014: Week 49

Week 49 marked the start of all of our Christmas traditions at home.

Project Life 2014: Week 48

 Week 48 was a four pager with a distinct division between the two sets of pages.

The first set is fall/Thanksgiving...

And then by Thursday (Thanksgiving) evening, it makes the distinct shift to Christmas...

But honestly, that's how are Thanksgiving weekend goes every year.  Our first tradition of Christmas each year is watching Elf on Thanksgiving night, followed by putting up the tree the next day.

Project Life 2014: Week 47

 Totally did not love how my week 47 pages came together... but they're done!

Project Life 2014: Backtracking

While trying to finish up 2014, I'm bouncing around a little bit.  Since I was finished with all of my end of the year pages, I decided it was finally time to go back and do the pages I had skipped.

First up was Alex's trip to Haiti.  I had been putting this off, because at one time we were told that we would be getting a CD with all of the pictures taken during the trip (individuals were not allowed to have cameras on this particular trip, just one designated photographer for the group).  I still don't have the CD, but since I want to get my book done before the printing coupon expires tomorrow, I downloaded the photos I wanted from the trip's flickr site.

 If I do get the CD someday, I'll try to make a more complete album with Alex helping me with the journaling.  But for now, this will do for my PL book.

And then there's week 37...

This one plagued me for a while... to the point that I just skipped it and kept going.  I did a bad job with photos that week and then couldn't find a kit that I liked to use with the photos.  I got bogged down with it, and decided to just move on.  Thankfully I had put the photos on a template already, I just had to find filler cards and fake the journaling the best I could.  This is why I HAVE to stay current... it's amazing how much you forget!

After this little jaunt back in time, I'll get back to posting my end of the year pages and then I'll have a fresh start with 2015!!  So glad that I'm still very much in love with this project!  It feels so good to get so much documented and printed.

Project Life 2015: The plan and cover page

Happy New Year!!!

It's hard to believe that it's already 2015!  I'm still plugging away on finishing up 2014, but I thought I would start off 2015 with a post about my plans for this year's project life book.

First up is our cover page...

I'm being proactive and got this done early.

I'm not making any huge changes with my PL book this year.  I'm pretty happy with how things went and as the year was ending, I was really hitting a stride that I liked.  I want to continue with that.  At the beginning of 2014 I was trying to duplicate a style I really admired, but one that didn't come naturally to me.  I just couldn't do it.  Every spread became a battle between this style and my natural style.   My style is definitely different than when I started... but now it has "evolved" versus an abrupt change I tried to force.

One thing that I am changing is my template set.  I really liked using Traci Reed's stitched plastic grids last year, so this year I'm using her stitched grids sets (I bought this bundle and set 7)....

I did a trial run with them when I did our big trip album this summer.  Lots of options with lots of different/unusual sized photo spots.  Even though I'm doing a lot of things the same, I think some of these templates will give a distinctly different look to my 2015 book.  I like the stitching too.  There are two options, white and black.  I think I'll use the white stitching most of the time.

I am going to stick with my plan from last year of making as many pages as it takes to tell the story.  I did debate a bit on this.  My first year I did one two page spread for each week with just a couple of exceptions.  That was much truer to the original project life concept (now called project 52).  I really like that and itched just a bit to get back to that simpler idea.  But, in the end, I decided to keep with doing as many pages as necessary.  With the exception of a couple of specific albums, project life is the only scrapping that I do.  I got more photos out into the world and in a printed form this year than I had ever done!  I printed a bunch when the kids were little, but those are all still crammed in a box somewhere, they never made it to albums.

A change I'm considering is printing three times a year. In 2014 and 2013 I printed (will print) twice.  I split the year in half and printed Jan-June and July - December.  That worked great... until the book for the second half of 2014.  I really can't believe it, but I am dangerously close to the max number of pages allowed in a book!!  110 pages!!  Maybe this was an usual year and this won't ever happen again, but I'm going to plan for it just in case.  Jeff and I talked about it.  I thought about just splitting the year in thirds, but during our brainstorming session, we decided to follow the school year.  Book one - January through the last day of school, book two - summer break and book three - start of school through the end of the year.  Summer 2014 was about 45ish pages, so it will be a smaller album, but I think the split makes sense.

I'm going to try to keep taking a photo a month of the kids in the same spot.  I did it in 2014 and I'm really happy that I did.  I missed two months.  I'm not pleased about that, but I'm trying to let it go.  I really liked adding the photo to my weekly spread, but I decided that I wanted to see them all lined up in order.  So, I'm adding a spread to the back of my book...

This was a photo from a couple of months ago, so I managed to get one more photo taken before the end of the year (I missed August and December).  I thought about changing spots, but I'm going to keep it the same... it's easy and I think it'll be neat to keep adding photos to this collection.

The other changes aren't really changes... just small goals.  And pretty much the same goals I had a year ago... use my big camera more and be in more photos.  I want to try to take at least one family photo a month.  It doesn't have to be a posed formal shot... just one shot a month with all of us in it.  We'll see what happens with that one.  Hopefully I can get my wireless shutter release to work so it will be easier.

I think that's it!!  That was a whole lot of rambling for what isn't going to be a huge amount of change. :-)

Here's the link to my new pinterest board with my 2015 supplies... Project Life Supplies 2015 (digital).

This is the collection I used for my cover page, it's linked on the pinterest board.

Happy Project Life 2015!!  What are our plans??

EDITED TO ADD:  I forgot my biggest plan of all... I'm going to attempt to do a previous year at the same time!!  Not sure how this will go, but I'm going to give it a try.

Merry (really late) Christmas!!

I don't know what happened this year!  I always post my Christmas card to my blog on Christmas day... but this year I totally, completely forgot to do it.  And since I usually always post it, five days post Christmas, I had just assumed that I had already.  Anyway... here it is, just a few days late.  But it's still getting to you before the actual cards are getting delivered.  Besides the few we hand delivered, the cards are still sitting in a box on our table.  Oh well.  Some years are like that.  They just get away from you!

Soon I'll get caught up with posting my PL pages from 2014 (working on my Christmas day pages now) and then I'll do my post about my plan for 2015.  I'm still very much in love with project life and can't wait to tackle another year!

Project Life 2014: Week 46

Week 46 was a bit of a tough week in regards to PL, so there are some photos on these pages that are a real stretch in regards to their importance.  I'm actually not sure why I even took a couple of them.  After doing a week in the life, I forgot that I still needed to take photos for regular project life.  During AWITL I took photos of everything, every step of the way throughout the day... afterward, I had the attitude that "I don't need to take that photo, there will be more worthy things later".  Well... then I kind of forgot to take any.  Add to that, AWITL runs Sunday to Sunday, so my week 46 was already a day short.  Oh well... it's done and here it is...

Project Life 2014: Clara's b-day party

Part of the reason I haven't posted many PL pages lately is because I've been debating about what to do with my a week in the life pages.  I'm really super proud of them, but they just had too much daily routine info for me to feel comfortable with posting publicly.  I thought about blurring out the journaling, but as that week ended up being 12 pages long, I just didn't have the motivation to do it.  So, I'll post the last two pages of that week... Clara's 13th birthday party....

Clara was so excited to finally have a big birthday party again.  Last year her birthday was about two weeks before we moved, the year before she was about a month into a new school... so it was fourth grade (10th b-day) when she last had a real party.  She invited all of the upper middle school girls and they had a blast!  I am so glad we were able to pull it off this year for her.

Project Life 2014: Last of week 44

 I can't believe how quickly time has flown!  It seems like this was just a couple of weeks ago, but it was over a month ago!  The girls were even invited back to perform the piece with the red costumes again and it's already been about three weeks since that performance!  I have a ton of pages to post here that I need to get caught up on.  And... sadly, I'm nearly four weeks behind on PL.  I'm not quite sure how that happened.  I blame a string of illnesses for the girl and Thanksgiving.  Plus I was pretty wrapped in completing some Christmas gift projects.  Those are done and printed, so I'm trying to catch back up again.

26 Things: 1-4

My first printed pages for my album arrived!  It is so much fun to see them printed already.  I'm used to doing digital albums that I print all at once as a Shutterfly book once everything is done.  It's kind of neat to actually be able to touch the work in progress.

I'm still not showing the title page yet, since it's basically the same as our Christmas card.  But the cards have been ordered!

Here are my pages so far...

Thing one... this is our first official event of Christmas each year.  Thanksgiving night we watch the movie Elf.

Thing two is putting up our tree at Bearski and I made sure to document all of our new ornaments.  It's a little hard to see, but on the top row is one of my favorite new ornaments... an ornament of bears with skis that we found in Cheyenne, WY this summer!  It's perfect for our tree!

Thing three is the Holiday Trail.  It was the same day that we put up the tree, but I wanted to document it separately.  For the past few years, this is the one and only time my kids will pose with Santa for a photo.  It's the same guy every year and I'm sure it's someone we "know" from around the resort.  I can't figure it out though!  I may need to ask :-)

And thing four had us back in Chicago, putting up our tree here.  The kids weren't into this year... maybe because we had just put up the Christmas tree at Bearski, maybe because Clara was still not feeling well (she had come down with the flu two days before Thanksgiving), maybe it was because they both had homework... who knows.  It was basically just Jeff and I, except when we called Alex up to see if he could figure out why the lights on a third of the tree wouldn't work :-/

Now I've got to get busy on more pages so I can send those off to print!

Here are my supplies that I've used so far, you can find the links on my pinterest board...

26 Things: My plan for December Daily 2014

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been planning.  It seems like the more I do with scrapbooking/documenting the more I want to add to it with more projects.  It's a lot of fun, but I'm getting a bit backlogged at the moment.

Anyway... on to my newest project... 26 things.  Last year I attempted a December Daily album.  It didn't go so well.  I started strong, but didn't finish.  I learned from the experience though and I'm hoping that will help me be successful this year.

Here's what I learned:

1. Doing DD doesn't capture all that I want to include.  Our Christmas traditions start on Thanksgiving night, so it I needed something that extended beyond December.
2. The daily thing just didn't work for me.  Maybe someday it will... but last year it nearly sent me over the edge.  We don't do something Christmas-y every day in December and I found myself trying to create events that shouldn't have been attempted just to have something for that day.

So now on to what I'm doing differently this year.

1. My working theme for this book is 26 things.  The actual subtitle on my title page says "26 days, events, details, moments and traditions of Christmas 2014".  Why 26?  Because I wanted some of the numbers to coordinate with the actual date.  I wanted #25 to be Christmas Day and since we celebrate with my in-laws after Christmas, I needed another number which brought us to 26.  This theme helps address my two major issues from last year.  I can go outside of December for "things" to include, which then helps out with issue #2 above.  It is no longer daily, no pressure to create things out of thin air for my book.  It's just 12/2 and I already have five "days" worth of things to include in my book and all of those happened in November.  We did nothing Christmas-y yesterday and have no plans for today.. I already would have been freaking out with last year's theme.  
2. I'm attempting a hybrid album.  I've been wanting to try one.  It's not truly going to be hybrid as I doubt that I'll be using any physical scrapbooking products, just designing with digital stuff and printing it out.  I really loved doing our travel journals this summer, so I thought I wanted to add some "smash book" to my project.  I want to include brochures, playbills, cards, etc. as I come across them.  I decided to go for it one day and bought a Sn@p album and some (possibly entirely too many) inserts...

Those are the high points of this year's project.  I'm excited to get started!  I have my title page and four "things" done so far!  They're all off being printed at the moment.  I have to decide how to share them... as the digital file or printed out and in the album.  We'll have to see.  The title page won't be shared for a while, as it is basically our Christmas card and I want to get those mailed out first.

Oh... and since the December Daily idea still intrigues me and I can't totally drop it... I'm attempting a photo a day for the month.  Not following any prompts, just a single photo a day.  I'm posting them to instagram, but I'm also organizing and labeling them in the Collect app.  I'll print them as 3x4's from Persnickety and add them to a section in the back of my album.  I know it's just day two, but it's kind of fun when there's no pressure... just one photo of something Christmas-y, no further story needed.

Project Life 2014: Week 44, part two

I had so many fun photos from Halloween day, that I had to make it it's own spread...

Sadly, you will notice that Alex is missing from the festivities.  He declared himself too old to dress up and trick or treat this year.  He and his friend were going to decorate the back as kind of a haunted house and pass out candy, but the weather did not cooperate.  They ended up down in Alex's gaming room, playing computer games instead.

Project Life 2014: Week 44, part one

Week 44 was another week that exploded into multiple pages.  Here's part one of that week...

Project Life 2014: Week 43 insert

Perhaps it's time to post again!  :-)  Last week I was busy with other project life things and forgot about posting.  First of all, week 44 ended up with SIX pages, so I was doing a bit of scrapping.  And second, I decided to make another attempt at Ali Edwards' A Week in the Life.  The week that it was supposed to be was the week before (week 44), but I just didn't have my act together, so I started fresh on week 45.  In addition to scrapping six pages, my downtime was filled with taking and organizing a ton of photos.  I did okay with it.  I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked, but I took a ton more (capturing our everyday life) than I would have otherwise.  I truly love the photos I got.  In the end, I decided not to make a separate book, but to include the photos in my regular PL book.  I have them all laid out already.  Week 45 will be TWELVE pages!  I'm debating on this still, but I will probably not post them here.  Although I post a lot about our day to day here with my PL pages, these are just a little too detailed in with our current EXACT schedule.  I might cover part of the journaling and still post them... I have to think on it still.

So, back to week 43!

My baby girl turned 13!!!  I did a little insert for just the actual day of her birthday since so much went on...

Like with my other inserts, the blank portion will be trimmed off after I get my printed book back.