Yay! I'm really doing it! Here's my spread for week 2:
I was away from home for most of this week. So it's especially "my life" heavy. Luckily, I had taken a photo of my son doing homework Monday before I left, and also lucky that I saw my daughter while away, so she's included too. After getting home and starting to work on it, I realized that the boys' story of the week was missing, so I had my husband email me a schedule of what they did while I was away. I put it on the cute mason jar Eileen Hull gave me (from her Picket Fence collection with Sizzix - coming soon). I also included my son's side of a phone conversation we had while I was away.
Since the reason I was away from home was a teaching event at French General, I used one of their business cards as the week header card (or whatever they're called). {Side note: did you know that French General is now open 5 days a week?!?}
As before, I'm pretty much using either hand-me-down products, the Studio Calico Project Life kit, or things I have already, like the Martha Stewart labels from her line at Staples. Still hoping I'm not going overboard on the extras, that I won't tire of it and wish I hadn't embellished the photos so much later on...still figuring that out, and reminding myself that it's ok to not really know my style of this yet. It's fun and I'm focused on getting it done and enjoying the process far more than the result. It'll be interesting to me to see how I approach it later.
I do love this pen for writing directly on photos (I've been using semi gloss photo paper that I had already).
Doing things like hand cutting out letters from paper I have at home (and then machine stitching onto the photo) gives my book a personal touch, which is part of my story as well. Still love using the scraps from the playing cards that I cut up too ;).
Pretty crazy about the Studio Calico Make Some Thing Today transparency. You can see a piece of Hambly (no long in business, sigh) transparency behind it as part of the next week.
Used a close up photo of one of my journal pages as a different way of relaying my story, vs. photos or text (Martha file labels again).
So, here are some of current thoughts after just beginning this year long project:
1. I want to learn how to use my camera better for low light situations.
2. I need to find a way to have my family participate more- or how to include them more. It's a bit tricky with a daughter away at college and 2 boys that don't care to be photographed. I know the project is through my eyes, but I do want it to be about the whole family, not just me.
3. I need to find a way to organize the supplies that I'd like to use and do a purge of those I won't.
4. I want to really work consistantly so that I don't fall more than a week behind because I don't seem to be able to remember much from weeks past.
5. I need to develop a little note keeping system, be it an app like momentum, or a little notebook.
6. I want to learn to be able to digitally add to my elements, create my own, so need to learn more photoshop and illustrator. For example, I really would like to re-do the phone conversation with my son digitally somehow...but probably won't at this point. I assume by the end of the year I will do that type of thing when first making the card. And that's ok, I'm growing, I know I will like the end of the year's spreads more than these, but this is an authentic telling of our story right now.
7. I'm using a lot more color than I thought I would overall, especially red. It's funny when I suprise myself from what I thought I would do,no right or wrong, just noticing.
8. I think I do want my whole spread to have a somewhat cohesive look. I think. So far, I have kept in mind a sort of color scheme as I make my choices, and have tried to balance out photos/text/misc inserts throughout the week. That was pretty easy to do, because this spread was done all at once (late), we'll see if this 4th week, that is in progress, will have any "look" as a whole or not, as I've been tucking things in as the week has gone along. Just kind of fun things for me to think about as I develop my own voice/approach to this project.
9. So far, I think it's a fun project and am really happy I'm doing it!
