#9 MAY-be I'll Spend a Few Days...

...finishing my A Week In The Life project.

Ali Edwards, who is one of my memory-keeper-gurus, has a project she does every year called A Week In The Life. You can learn about it here. She scheduled this year's week for April 19-25. The purpose is to capture the extraordinary ordinariness of our lives through words and photos. It is too easy to spend time documenting the big or important things of our lives and we sometimes skip over the regular things which really make up our lives.

So the challenge is to capture our good 'ol ordinary lives.

My challenge was that we were planning on being in France for part of that time, so I was going to choose a different week. Because you know, there just wasn't going to be anything ordinary about being in France with my family. (I wish that were ordinary.)

When there was a volcano in Iceland and we were no longer going to France, but taking a consolation trip to St. George instead, I decided to go ahead and capture the week. Just so I can always remember the stress of not knowing what was going on. ha.

So while it wasn't an ordinary week, it ended up being a pretty fun week. I'll capture an honest ordinary week another time.

The challenge now was to pull it all together, and that has taken quite a few hours here and there because I decided to do most of it digitally. And because I do want to finish this, and not let it be yet another unfinished project lurking in the corners, I really pushed through yesterday and today to git 'er dun.

The process, you ask?

I open up the layered template I want (I'm using Photoshop Elements)

Then I start dragging my chosen photos into the space on the template and resize and adjust as needed. As you see below, I turned off the yellow "paper" and grey tab because I'm going to put some of my actual paper on when these come back from the printer. That is known as a hybrid page: part digital, part paper and glue.

This is my finished page with an overlay added on the bottom. This particular day was Friday, April 23 and it involved Sam making breakfast and a game of Farkle (Whale Fight) and Mexican food, among other activities.

This is a layered template for misc. shots of the day...

which, when filled in, looked like this:

And then I upload all my pages to a printing site and now I can get them all ordered.

And sometime next week I'll have 28 pages delivered to me and I'll add a few things here and there to the pages and slip them into page protectors and then we'll have a little book about a (not ordinary) week in our life.

I am a memory keeper and I'm proud of it.

Except that I try not to be proud.

But if I were, then I would be.

Or something like that.

The point is: my work on this project at this stage is DONE.