Week in the Life 2011 Comes Together

Wow. It is awesome to look back on a full week of photos. I captured the ordinary and the extraordinary. The routine and the unusual. I see lives intertwined. I see relationships. I see {love}. Each picture holds many stories. There are the stories that are obvious, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get story. There are stories that are subtle, the behind-the-scenes story. There are probably stories that will even go untold in this particular album because time and space create limitations. For those stories, I'll print doubles, make notes and tell them another time. Right now, I'm focusing on pulling together the photos and words that will tell the story of our life from July 25-31, 2011. And I'm happy as can be with that.

My 2011 album is in progress. I decided not to go with Ali's templates this time around. While I loved having those last time and loved, loved, loved the way the 2010 album came together, it was also somewhat of a hindrance for me. It was partly why I didn't get the 2010 album finally clued up until 2011. I first had to learn to use the digital templates, as I'm more of a traditional scrapbooker - I like my paper and scissors and tape. So that took some time. Though, part of why I went with the templates last year was to learn more about using digital templates and that was a success. {Thank you Ali for your tutorials} Then, I wanted to use similar supplies, not all of which were available here in my corner of the world. So I had to wait for them to arrive by mail by which time other projects and priorities crept in. By which time my motivation was waning. So, this year, I decided to do my own thing, keep it simple and get those stories told.

Right now, my craft space looks a little like a tornado of paper and photos blew through:

of course no scrapbooking is complete without some dark chocolate, assuming you can find it amongst the mess!

Right now I'm working with one larger photo, the day/date and overall story on the left hand side of the page, something like this:

And then, on the right hand side of the page, I'm using a simple grid design to hold a few other fave photos and paper, something like this:

These pages still need some embellishments and such to finish them up. In between each of these daily spreads there will also be a baseball card protector holding more photos, ephemera, shorter stories, paper scraps and so on. I don't have any of those pulled together yet, but they will look like what you saw in the 2010 album.

My hope is that the use of white space, repeated design and a limited few papers and embellishments will create unity, make this easy and stress free. Hopefully next week, I'll have more to share.