Project Life Tuesday

Welcome to Project Life Tuesday 2012! If you are new to The Mom Creative, welcome. I hope you will stay awhile. I’m Jessica – wife to Matthew, mom to Elias, a silly and spirited three-year-old, and Adeline, a delicious, growing baby. I’m also a marketing professional, savvy deal finder, photo lover and memory keeper trying to juggle it all.

I started Project Life Tuesday in 2010 because:

• I needed to keep myself accountable and on top of my photos each week.
• My family loved being able to count on a weekly post with pics of the kids.
• I thought others might want to keep themselves accountable too.

It was a huge blessing and so I am excited to be kicking off my third year of this series.

Each Tuesday, I will share my spread from the previous week, as well as host a linky for readers to link up their pictures/layouts. This year, Epson is sponsoring Project Life Tuesday, and they provided me with their Epson Stylus R2880 Large Format Photo Printer (C11CA16201) for many of my album’s photos. Printing photos at home is keeping me on track!

For week 20, I decided to start a new album. It was the first full week of May and I loved the idea of starting with our beach vacation. For the cover page, I printed my favorite family picture from the trip to 12×12. I have never printed a 12×12 photo and man, I love it! I decided not to put a title on it for the time being.

For the week itself, I had a 12×12 page, a 6×12 page, a 6×12 with 6×4 pockets and a Design A.

Instead of using the colbalt kit elements, I was really excited to use the brand new Webster’s Pages Palm Beach collection. The kind folks at Webster’s sent it to me before we left for Hilton Head and I must say, it is some of the prettiest beach/vacation paper I have ever seen. It was sitting on the table and Matthew picked it up and said, “wow, this is really pretty.” Yes, yes it is.  🙂

Here is spread one.

Since I had the 12×12 page protector, I created a 12×12 collage using a few of my favorite photos from the week. I then added thickers to spell out Hilton Head on the top, as well as for small embellishments next to each of the journaling words. I wrote directly on the photo using a sharpie.

I then created a 6×12 jouranaling panel using the Webster’s Pages Palm Beach collection. I wrote about what we did each day on the panels. I inked the sides of the paper using the edge of a stamp pad, and I stamped “cherish” on the vacation tag that came with the beach kit.

On the bottom of the back of the panel, I added a 6×6 photo of the kids.

I used another 6×12 insert, this time with slots for 6×4 photos, to showcase more photos from the week. I trimmed another piece of paper from the Webster’s Pages Palm Beach collection to make my date card for the week. I love the turtles! I simply added the dates to the bottom of the card, just like I have on all the colbalt cards in my album to date. I also used the jewel stickers from the Palm Beach kit.

Then I just went crazy with the stamps.

I wanted everything to be very unified, so I got out a few journaling stamps and stamped them on a scrap piece of paper from the collection. I then wrote my words on the spots, ensuring everything fit.

Rather than cutting each spot and using a glue stick on them, I ran the whole card through my Xyron 5″ creative machine. This put adhesive on the whole thing, turning it into one big sticker. This machine is one of my favorite tools.

I then trimmed the spots and put them on the photos – easy peasy – and I LOVE how they look.

You can see a lot of these journaling spots on the final spread

I actually stamped right on the photo of Elias – “treasure today”. I used StazOn ink for everything because it is very permanent and is my favorite. You can get it at any craft store.

Your turn! Please remember to link your specific post and to include a link to The Mom Creative.