first week, done! | project life

Is everyone staying on track? I will admit that getting all of my photos in order, typing my journaling, getting things laid out for printing and creating a digital copy to share here is a wee bit time consuming but so far, I’m still in the “I’m excited!” phase so I was really pleased to see Week 1 finished!

Here is the left side:

Here is the right:

And here is the first week spread side by side:

I’m so happy with it! What really helped me was 1) labeling my photos as I went and 2) creating a little sketched blueprint that’s been sitting on my desk. It was easier to arrange my digital mock-up if I knew where my pictures and journaling cards were going to go. I highly recommend the digital mock-up if you have time because otherwise it would be hit or miss as far as adding embellishments that color complimented one another. But hey, that could just be me.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I completed Project 365 in 2009 and again in 2010. I have digital albums stored with each photo in chronological order plus the coordinating text. However, that’s as far as I ever got and online albums are just not a realistic way to share these pictures with my kids, kids who really enjoy looking back on older photos of themselves. I really wanted physical albums to hold and go through but I never settled on an easy way to accomplish that. It took me nearly 3 years but finally, I had an “Ah ha!” moment last night. I would create simple, clean, streamlined 12×12 digital pages in a Project Life fashion. I would create four layouts per month which would essentially give me room to show-off 24 photos. I liked this idea because not every daily photo I took during the month was worth scrapping or even remembering for that matter. Some were filler pics. By selecting the best of the bunch, I felt I could really concentrate on the fun, important memories.

I finished June 2009 last night (Yes, I completely picked this month at random. I will go back and tackle to the first half of 2009 at some point). The pages honestly came together rather quickly because I have those digital P365 albums working in my favor. I also referred back to older, private Blog entries to fill in small memory gaps. Here are my four layouts. I really had fun looking back on the younger pictures of the kids. :)

Enjoy the rest of the weekend and don’t forget to make sure you like my Gina Miller Designs FB page so you can help yourself to these digital journaling cards!