Life Happens. And I Want to Remember It.

I started a new “project” yesterday. For what it’s worth, this project wasn’t my idea. I first read about it on Ali Edward’s blog. She’s an amazing person (from what I gather) and an amazing scrapbooker (from what I’ve seen). A few week’s ago, she posted about a Week in the Life project, where you document a week in your life. No pressure of Project 365 where you’re committed for a year. No reason to try to be overly creative or impressive. Just recording what a week in your life is like. Take photos for a week, write a bit about them and be done. Seven short days to do it, but something you (and others) can look back on for the rest of your lives and smile, cry, reflect, etc.

So I decided yesterday to give it a whirl, and I have to say, I’m having a blast with it. I took photos yesterday and today and spent the majority of today deciding what I wanted my finished book to look like, what I wanted to do (and not do) with the whole thing, etc. I decided from the get go that this wasn’t going to be crazy ADHD about the photos (like I normally am). Sure, they’re an important part of the whole thing. But I wasn’t going to spend hours (like I usually do) touching up photos, trying to make them perfect, etc. For me, this is just about getting the details down. I’ve made myself shoot in Auto mode on my camera, just because I don’t want to get all “artistic” with these photos. I’m adjusting exposure, contrast, and white balance in the photos, but that’s where it ends. No fancy post-processing… no touch ups… no  cool effects… no mind-blowing conversions. Just the photos and the story behind them.

I think it will be so cool to look back later on and browse through the book I intend to get printed out. In fact, I’m loving it so much, that I think I’m going to do it once a month. One week out of each month, I’ll do this, so that at the end of a year, I’ll have 12 photo books with each one documenting one week during each month of the year. I just think it will be cool to read back through them later.

So I decided to make these fairly simple. No fancy scrapbook elements and drop-shadows, no spending hours making sure all of my colors match, etc. Just a basic template, my photos, and my thoughts.

Here’s what the first page will look like.

Obviously, there’s a second page with the remaining days of the week. I’m just pulling in 4 photos from each day, as a brief “summary” at the beginning of the book.

Then, I’ll have 2 pages for each day of the week. The left side will have one (or two) photos with half a page of journaling just talking about what we did that day, what happened, what kind of day it was, my thoughts, etc. The right side will concentrate on just the photos.

Here are some close ups of the pages.

 

If you think this might be something you’d like to do, you can go to Ali’s blog and see a whole list of the posts relating to the project. There are so many approaches you can take with this. You can do it digitally like I am. Or you could just print out the photos, crop them, and handwrite the story behind them. In my opinion, the appearance of the end result isn’t nearly as important as the process and the idea behind the end result. I just think it’s a cool concept, and one that I think the kids (and Steve and I) will really enjoy as they get older and can look back on our lives.

So who’s joining me? Anyone? If you decide to give it whirl, drop me a line and let me see your project. I LOVE look at everyone else’s. :)