Project Life 2014- Weeks 31 through 34

Now we are entering the era of my Project Life pages where I was not taking many photos. I was sad and uninspired. Then I got The Plague. It was all downhill from there. That’s why I wasn’t too worried about falling farther and farther behind. I knew the catching up process would be much faster with less photos, and less to say in general. I combined weeks 33 and 34 into two pages because week 33 wouldn’t have made a whole page.

While I’m much happier now, I still don’t feel like I have my photo mojo back yet. I’m looking forward to Week in the Life next week to give me a little spark. I’m sure I’ll get it back eventually 🙂

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project 52: Week 36

For this week, I told the story of my first Blurb book. I had mixed feelings about it initially, but Jason’s enthusiasm for it has won me over.

Journaling reads- This week I got my first Blurb book in the mail. I’ve decided to do PL in three volumes for 2014, and this was the first book. It was pretty exciting because I hadn’t gotten a book printed in years. I was a little disappointed in the size and quality of the paper. But surprisingly Jason really likd it! He likes that it’s easier to flip through than my regular scrapbooks. I’ve seen him look through it a few times on his own, which he doesn’t do with my other books. That makes me pretty happy 🙂

Credits: Project 2013 October by Connie Prince
Template by Fiddle Dee Dee

Library of Memories album: All About Jen

*Project 52 is my attempt to do one page every week about a “current event”. These LO’s will tell longer stories about an event or theme, and be placed in my Library of Memories system. They are separate from my Project Life pages, which are more of an overview of our week. Here are more of my P52 pages.

Project Life 2014- Week 30

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 29

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 28

I’m skipping ahead to work on more current weeks of my Project Life. I’ll still be working on my summer pages at the same time, hopefully to be shared on Thursdays. I want to stay relatively on top of PL, while taking the time to savor my summer photos at the same time. I won’t be posting them on the blog chronologically, but you can always see what I’ve finished so far on my Project Life 2014 page.

I’ve taken a lot of time the past few weeks thinking about where I want to go with PL for the rest of the year. I have a love/ hate relationship with this planning stage. (Jason would probably tell you it’s all hate because he has to listen to me complain about it all the time) There are things I absolutely loved about the way I did the first volume of 2014- clean, simple, white space, and better photo editing.The photos stood out and I just really really love those pages. I loved that I could spend as much or as little time on a week as I wanted on each week. Some had one page, a couple had six or seven. It felt very freeing to not have to constrain myself to two pages per week.

But I felt like one important thing was missing- words. I mostly stuck to a week in review card, with a few photo captions thrown in. When I compared my older pages with 2014’s, I missed the stories. Little stories like what we were watching on TV or reading. Longer stories from blog posts. I was missing out on words. Then I read this post by Aaron Morris on the Pocket Source blog. The last paragraph really grabbed me. In his PL, he’s attempting to give equal room to photos AND words. Hey, I want to do that too!

I’m going to be adding more words in a few different ways- more captions, more quotes, and more small everyday stories. I want to start adding more current events and blog posts every once in awhile. I’m taking the Hello Story class by Ali Edwards, and I’ll be adding things from that. I love Kristin’s “Currently” cards, so I’ll be adding those sometimes too.

I’ll need extra room for all those extra words. I’m using the PSE actions by Mommyish to make my own templates. They’ll be very similar to Becky’s PL designs, but with squared corners.

I’m in love with Tracey Larsen’s photo templates and will be using those a lot. That will give me more space to write, and give more white space to rest the eyes.  I love how my pages look with her templates.

Now, on to week 28…

This week was four pages. I took a lot of pictures and had lots to say, so I’m ok with that. I was doing a lot of experimenting and trying to get things “just right”. Also, lots of words= lots of opportunities for typos. I’ve already had to fix and re-upload a couple of these pages.

I was loving Fat Mum Slim’s new photo-a-day app this week so a few of the photos used those filters. The rest were edited in RadLab.

More photos, goals for the month, and a quote I found on Pinterest.

Fun stuff going on here- a quote made with the Word Swag app, a Currently card, and one of the downloads from Hello Story.

For the last page, I just copied and pasted text from this post. It was technically written the week before, but I thought it would be more appropriate in this week.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Weeks 21 and 22 (the end of Book One!)

I decided at some point earlier this year to divide my Project Life 2014 into three books. One for January through May, one for our five weeks with the Little Man, and one for the rest of the year. These pages will mark the end of my first book!

The first two pages are a mix of everyday photos.

Journaling reads- This week I hung up pictures and decorated our bedroom. We ate out a lot- Joe’s for pizza, Crocante for dessert, D’Apple for breakfast, and Larry’s for ice cream. We also checked out Barnes and Noble and bought new tires for the car. On Friday night we stayed up late and snuck into the park to try and catch the Camelopardalids meteor shower. We saw “something”, but not sure what it was. It was fun to sit outside and look at stars though! On Sunday we went to the RC track for the first time.

I took a ton of pictures of Miss Kitty the night we stayed up late to watch the meteor shower, so I added them all in a page.

But those pictures don’t compare to the sheer number I took at the RC track. Maybe 200? So yeah, those needed their own page too.

The last page for my book was a partial week, the last couple of days before we went to North Dakota. I relied heavily on my Momento app to remember things I didn’t have pictures for. The blurred out square is a picture of my sister’s new apartment complex we took from their website.

Journaling reads- This was our last few days before going to pick up [Little Man] for the summer. The most exciting thing that happened this week was that Jamie and Ryan got approved for an apartment! So happy for them! C sent us some silly pictures, we went for walks, and my seedlings grew. I finished Gone Girl. Maya Angelou passed away. The #yesallwomen hashtag blew up in response to the shootings in Santa Barbara last weekend. These few days were filled with cleaning, packing and planning for Summer of Awesome 2014!

And that wraps up my first book! I feel very accomplished! I probably won’t get it printed for a long time, but it’s a great feeling to see them all together on my PL2014 page. Tonight I’m going to sit down with Jason and force him to scroll through them all. He’s super psyched of course 😛

I’ve already started working on our summer book. I had initially thought of doing a “summer daily” book, similar to everyone’s December Daily. But I take way too many pictures and have written way too many words for that to be feasible. (Some days will probably have five pages). I can’t wait to start sharing them next week!

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 20

Journaling reads- This week I ruined gnocci, but discovered a new way to cook eggs. Jason came home from lunch and we saw a double rainbow. There were excellent season finales, snails, and the World Lens app. [Little Man] got cool new shades. We tried another new taco place a possible campsite, and went to the library. Jason used his mad mechanical skills and fixed the RC car. A new obsession was born! We checked out the RC racetrack and saw a few fun races.

Very rough week for me emotionally. Usually I feel better once Mother’s Day is finally over, but this year it took awhile longer.

This is another one of those weeks that I struggled a bit to know what to say. If you just read the first paragraph, you’d think that it was a nice, average week. I don’t like to dwell on bad things in my scrapbooking, especially when they involve other people. But I also wanted to acknowledge that this was a tough week without going into details.

Also, the blurred image is of something Jason was working on at the office. I’m sure he took it to show someone at work, and not for my Project Life. But I love getting bits like that, and I love that he thinks to share them with me.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 19

I decided to do a one page LO for this week. With Day in the Life being this week, I was kind of on photo overload. I’m ready to get May wrapped up so I can start sharing my Summer Daily pages!

Journaling reads- This was an exciting week. I was on the Paperclipping Roundtable podcast to talk about scrapping relationships. I was so nervous, but had a great time! Jason scored some fancy chocolates from grateful salespeople. Duing the weekend we tried a new Mexican restaurant, went to Costco, and about three office supply stores. We bought new desks and chairs, which Jason put together. Mothers Day was pretty rough, as usual. But I made it through. A week of very high highs and very low lows.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Day in the Life

 

I decided to put the “official” Day in the Life into Project Life as a series of pages with photos and words from my blog post last month. Super simple. It resembles my regular pages, except for the last one. I used the same CZ templates (some altered), and the same fonts (CK Ali’s Hand, Bebas, and Bariol).

By the time I got to the last page I realized that I had WAY too many words. But I wanted to use them all, so I took a template that I’d made a couple weeks ago for some panorama shots and moved things around to fit everything I wanted to say.

These pages make me happy. I like having a little more personal writing about our days, as opposed to the “just the facts” tone I have in the rest of the book.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.

Project Life 2014- Week 18

Remember when I used to make a page or two for each week? Yeah, me neither. It’s been 3+ pages per week for awhile now. And weirdly that is not stressing me out one bit! I think I have my routine for these pages pretty down pat at this point. And it still stresses me out way more to narrow down my favorite photos than it does to make a few extra pages, so whatever works.

Journaling reads- This week we were in Orlando for Jason’s work. It was fun to meet more of his colleagues and to get to see him doing what he does best. The weather was crummy, but we managed to go for a few walks around the resort. While he was working, I did a lot of writing and scrapbooking in our room.

And a side note here to explain the sparse journaling. I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way…. we are not big Disney people. I know, I know. Sacrilege! So here’s the deal, we’ve been to Orlando at least a dozen times over the years we’ve been married and the luster has worn off. We just like Busch Gardens a lot more than the Disney parks. Unless it involves Harry Potter or food festivals, I’m not going to get overly excited about a trip to Orlando. Plus we actually were there for work, so there’s that.

I have to say though, the resort was gorgeous. I took some of my very favorite photos all year during some of our walks.

A couple of the photos above were blurred for privacy. Jason was able to snap a bunch of pictures during the conference, which was awesome. I love getting bits of his work life in Project Life.

Some pictures of our hotel. I always try to get at least a few from our room, and since this is where I spent the majority of the week I took a lot. It was really nice to have some quiet time alone to write and play with pictures. See what a homebody I am, even in one of the biggest tourist destinations in the country? 😛

And finally, a few last random pics- rain, head-sized cookies, waiting on more rain, my drink of choice this trip (Old Fashioned), making lists, and our go-to travel munchies on the way back home.

*Project Life was invented by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it here. My Project Life pages can be found here.