Working on Week in the Life

This week I have been documenting our week using Ali Edwards’ Week in the Life project as inspiration.

It has been fun, challenging and really enjoyable. Of course, it hasn’t felt like a normal week since Elias had a stomach bug and was home sick 3.5 days. Oh well. I guess that IS life, right?

I started working on piecing together my album last night and thought I would share my process so far.  I don’t even have a completed day yet, but am thrilled with how it is turning out.

All week, I have been saving all my photos to a folder on my external hard drive called Week in the Life 10. Within it, there is a folder for each day. On average, I have been taking 60-120 photos a day, though most of them I throw out because they are blurry, or are duplicative. Because the album uses baseball protectors, I have been taking as many vertical photos as possible.

After deleting the photos I know I won’t use, I collage the rest on a 4×6 canvas in Photoshop- two pictures per canvas. (The photos are 2.5×3.6.) It is the cheapest way I know of to get small pictures.

My large, opening-page photo is 7.5×5. I set it up to be two photos on an 8×10 canvas in photoshop.

After picking up my pictures at Walgreens, I sorted the pictures by day. Then, I trimmed my large photos and inserted each in the daily opener pages. Then, I trimmed all the excess from my 4×6, two up photos, and slipped them chronologically into the baseball page protectors, the front being morning/daytime and the back being late-afternoon/evening. I tried to leave one or two open slots on each side for journaling and decorative cards. Here’s what a spread looks like right now.
 

I inserted all extra small photos and the few 4×6 photos I developed for each day in the last page (not shown). I haven’t set-up my daily first and last pages yet and while I did download Ali’s templates from last year, I am now thinking about just doing my own thing and handwriting all my journaling. That really is more my style.

At the end of the album, I am going to have a few pages with extra bits of this and that – day care notes, receipts, etc.

How are you planning to set-up your album? Are you using the baseball protectors or going a different route? I loved looking at Ali’s archive of how other people did their albums last year. 

I hope to finish my album next week before I leave for the Dominican Republic. I will be sure to share it with you when I do!