Day in the Life – June 2017

I have a confession. When Day in the Life rolls around, I’m pretty good at getting lots of photos, sort of okay and making lots of notes, and TERRIBLE at actually getting the project completed, on paper, into an album. THIS IS NOT A DIFFICULT THING TO DO!! But when it comes to pulling a project like this together, I’m totally guilty of overthinking how I’m going to do it, to the point where nothing actually gets done.

Not this time. Ta da!!

I can’t tell you how happy I am to have finally got one in the books!! Here’s what made it work for me:

The documentation structure. This was the first of 3 “Day in the Life” projects hosted by Ali Edwards, that are planned to occur this year. Each time it’s scheduled, there’s a kit available (digital and physical version, not required but always awesome!!) to go along with it that usually helps focus on a new technique for how to capture your day. This first one was based on time. The idea was that each hour, you would take a photo and write just one related story. I was happy to take the suggestion of setting an alarm on my phone each hour to remind me to do it. This structure made it easy, and I really enjoyed following along!

2. Bringing it together. This is the part that I usually get stuck. The DITL kit (both the digital and physical format) included 3×4 cards with colourful numbers in the upper left hand corner and lots of white space to write your story. Lots of people simply used them to fill in the pockets of a divided page protector alongside their photos. As easy and beautiful as that was, I’m not really in love with the 12×12 size at the moment. I played around with 9×12 formats but I just wasn’t feeling it. And the idea of “designing” a layout seemed like a loooot of work in that moment. Here was my “aha’ moment. I took a look back at the templates from this year’s Week in the Life collection and found one that I thought might work really well. I used the 8.5x 11 version and played around with different orientations for it in PSE. I then decided that I’d punch the times from the journaling cards into circles and use them in place of the existing word art elements that were included with the template. There was plenty of white space in the design to fit in my journaling. Once I started laying it out, I knew it was going to work and I was really excited to get it done!! The final product is 3-8.5 x 11 pages that capture one day in our (my) life.