Week in the Life

The documenting of Week In The Life officially ended last night, and now the real challenge (for me) begins. The actual making of the album.

I’m not very good with finite albums, I’ll freely admit that. I don’t really like making mini books. The fact that they are fun, small and can be fast are all great things about mini/small albums. What I have issues with is the finite nature of them. How everything needs to fit into a pre-defined space. I don’t scrap chronologically. I make layouts, I fill albums, and when an album gets filled I start a new one. Mini albums don’t work like that. And I won’t even start on how it drives me nuts when everything in an album coordinates. (Yes. I know. I have issues. I refuse to wear matching accessories, too.)

However, having stated all of that, I love the idea of WITL. And because of that I really want to make this work. Our family has seen so many changes in the last few years, and sometimes the everyday gets lost. People move, grow, and change. Taking the opportunity to document those little things can be significant.

I ended my week with 404 photos after purging, or an average of 57 photos per day. I took a lot of photos of the interior of the house which are not day specific. I’m thinking that I’ll pull all of those photos and make a separate spread for them within WITL. It’ll be a nice way to look back and see what everything looked like and what things will change (or not change) during the duration of our stay.

After removing the house photos, the average day has around 20 photos and that seems to be a magic number. Monday had the least at 15, and Friday has the most at 36. Apparently, I took a lot of photos on Friday. Having had a quick look at the photos, I might compensate for this amount of photos by adding in an extra page for that day.

I am planning to do this in 8.5×11 since I’m completely in love with that size. I don’t have an album yet, but I’ll likely stick with the American Crafts Modern albums which I use to house my other layouts. I’m dithering between picking a special colour for WITL, or using brown (which is the colour of our ‘Thing We Do’ section). I’m leaning towards the latter. No matter which I choose, I know that I’ll need to order more page protectors. I simply don’t have enough on hand.

I’m also planning on doing this as a traditional scrapbook. I don’t have the ability to print at home, and 8.5×11 isn’t exactly an easy size to come by in Europe. The closest I could come would be to print 8×10 photos of a digital page then mount it on card stock to bring it up to the full size. Traditional it is. However, since I am going to preplan my pages, I’m also going to take this opportunity to use some digital elements on my photos. I have a small collection on hand that I’ve downloaded or received at part of a class. In fact, I think the elements from Ali’s class ‘Yesterday and Today’ will work perfectly.

My big task now is to pick, edit, and upload whatever photos I want to have printed. I’m hoping to have them done in the next couple of days so I can have them back soon. Since we have a holiday on Friday I’m not holding my breath that I’ll get them before the weekend.

Speaking of the weekend, Saturday is National Scrapbook Day. Many sites will be holding special events and challenges that day and I plan to be hanging out at Big Picture Classes for their NSD Creative Crop. Whatever you are planning, I hope you have a great day. :)