Project Life Tuesday: May Link-Up

Welcome to Project Life Tuesday 2014 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 five-year-old, and Adeline, a spunky two-year-old. I’m also a marketing professional, savvy deal finder, photo lover and memory keeper trying to juggle it all. The first Tuesday of every month, I share my most recent spread as well as host a linky for readers to link up their pictures/layouts. Some links are affiliate links.

I had fallen off the Project Life train in February, but I got back on last week and I am going full steam ahead. (Wow that was cheesy, but accurate!)

When I started working on Project Life that week, I had only done through the middle of February, so I was a solid two and a half months behind. (You might remember that last month, I worked on Adeline’s baby album. Because of that work, I didn’t touch our regular family album. Also, speaking of the baby kit, the Gender Neutral Baby Core Kit is still on sale for $14.99. If you haven’t purchased this and have any baby photos you want to get in an album, I would snatch it up!)

I decided to make it my goal to get through our trip to Disney (the beginning of April), knowing that I have SO many pictures from our trip that if I could at least get through Disney, I would be in good shape.

It is interesting to me how much my process has evolved this year. For those of you that have followed my Project Life albums for awhile, you know that I used to do weekly spreads, and was pretty diligent about my weeks. I would edit photos to fit in pockets, have lots of inserts, etc. This year, mostly because of time, I have REALLY streamlined that process. To get more than a month’s worth of pictures in my album, this is what I did:

• Did not resize (hardly) any photos, and developed all of them at once (I typically develop my photos at Walgreens, but this month I used Shutterfly. This makes things go SO much faster because you have to work with what you have. (And if a couple photos don’t work and need to be resized to 3×4, I do this on the back end. This happened with just two of the 100 photos I got developed.) I did included two 6x12s and four 6x6s this month, but I printed them last time I worked on Project Life. I just knew that when I got to that point, I would want them big.
• Developed all my Instagrams straight to Walgreens at 4×4. Yes, this is way more costly than developing them at home (Instagrams run 39 cents a picture, but you can usually find a coupon to bring them to about 20 cents a piece), but the efficiency of not dropping them in photoshop is huge!

• Organized the 4×6 photos chronologically and then put them all in my inserts. I didn’t get hung up on one spread a week or everything fitting just perfectly. Some weeks it all worked out, some weeks the photos spilled on to two spreads. It doesn’t matter to me this year. I am just happy to be printing photos, having them in an album and telling our family’s story.
• Then went in and added all the Instagrams.
• Then I did my journaling. I still have several weeks of journaling to complete, but still have plenty of pages to share today!

I used a ton of these pages with the nine 4×4 slots. The 4×4 cards are all from the limited edition Just Add Color Project Life kit. I wish Becky would release more 4×4 cards. They are so handy!

I love occasionally using a “date” card for a graphic element and some journaling on a page (like the Life is an Adventure card.)

Here I used a 6×9 journaling card insert to write about telling the kids about our Disneyland trip. (You can read more about how we told them and see the video of their reactions here.)

On the back of the card, I wrote about all the Instagrams.

I love to add stickers to photos every once in awhile.

This spread was completely dedicated to the kids’ Dr. Seuss week at school. I love how it turned out.

6×12 photos always pop in a Project Life album. I print them on my home photo printer and use 6 x 12 page protectors in my album.

I am thrilled that I got so many pages done. Now I just need to tackle Disney.

Your turn to link up. Also, just a friendly reminder to please remember to link back to The Mom Creative in your posts. Thank you!