Did I just say before I forget everything? Like I might forget all of December? Yes, I have memory issues, compounded by mommy brain and the usual crazy town that is The Holidays in the the United States. But in my defense, I also have two children with December birthdays. Let's just say many things contribute to my crazy.
That's one reason scrapbooking means so much to me. Someday, when I'm in the Home and taking my crazy pills on the regular, I'll be able to look back at the books I've created. And hopefully they will highlight the best parts of being alive, so I can keep it up. ;)
Stampin' Up helped me out a lot this year with their Paper Pumpkin kit. December's kit was a Project Life kit that's all prepped and ready to go, which will be handy for documenting January or The Birthdays or Something, since I'll be so busy doing the complicated process I describe below for my Christmas album.
I love Project Life, like a little bit addicted. I have used a single 6x8 album for two Christmases for the past four years. So this year calls for a new album to start. As you may remember, I already bought my album, pages, and cards - the fancy Hello December 2016 collection from Stampin' Up. I loved it when I very first saw it, just as I have for the past couple of years.
This year, though, I may use the entire album for just one Christmas. That's because I purposely planned activities this December and purposefully photographed them so I would make a memorable holiday season. (!) I know, I'm really improving! It's just, the kids are getting bigger and I want them to have excellent memories of their childhood and having fun. Usually I forget to take pictures of things so we did them but forget instantly and permanently. Then DH mentions it three years later and I have literally no recollection of it happening.
ANYway, another part of that equation is that I am getting really nostalgic because my babies are growing up so fast. 2017 starts Year Four of waiting to have another baby. My oldest just turned 5. It's starting to sink in more that it may never happen - these two might be THE two. So I don't want another moment to go by without keeping some part of it. Is that a little on the neurotic side? Maybe. But consider the source.
There is a point to this post, where I have something to share that is valuable to you, I promise. It's about the first step in this process. You know, Step #1, after buying the album, pages and cards, and planning the activities and taking the pictures. Step #1 - Printing the Photos. So here is a Rachel-like guide to doing that if you're just starting Project Life and wondering what that looks like for someone besides you.
Step 1 - Print photos. My go-to for this is Shutterfly. It used to be Wal-Mart because Hello! and I've also used lots of other services, like the "free for a year after shipping costs" gimmicks. But I've found that I prefer the photo quality of Shutterfly so it's worth the cost.
For me, it's not really as simple as just getting the photos off my phone and printing them all. No, no, no, my friend, I prefer to complicate things a little more than that. Actually I just prefer things to be more perfect, which takes a little extra complication. Nothing terrible - basically just some organization of the digital photos first.
- Put all the December photos in a single folder on my computer.
- Make a sub-folder for each event.
- Put each event folder in order of time, which is the order I want them to be in my album.
- Delete duplicates or pics I don't want. Or more like, put them all in another folder just in case.
Ok so now the basic organization is done and it's time to pull out the physical album. I take a look at the orientation of my photos and determine which ones can be cropped to fit, cut in half using both halves, etc. I end up with a few stragglers, you know the 3 odd portrait orientation photos in a jungle of landscape orientation photos. That's when I do something special. Something so clever and sophisticated, I wish I'd thought of it myself.
I use PicMonkey to place two portrait-orientation 4x6 photos side-by-side together on a single 4x6 landscape orientation 4x6. When those two pictures print (for the price of one print, btw) I just cut the 4x6 in half and end up with two 3x4 photos in the portrait orientation, which is perfect to fit in those pocket pages you use in a 6x8 album. I found a tutorial on how to do this from Becky Higgins HERE and she provides a tutorial using various other services besides PicMonkey as well, if you have some bitter hatred towards them for some reason and don't want to use them. But I highly recommend - she makes it super simple in her tutorial.
It's magical. But you can see it does take some prior planning. What I've done in the past, very much by mistake, was simply print all the photos in a standard 4x6 format, using the cheap, low-quality "free for shipping" services. Then I sorted through them in my hands, throwing away the "bad" photos and playing with them to fit in my album, going back to re-print many of them to fit the album better. I say I did this by mistake because I accidentally re-printed a whole Christmas worth of pictures after I'd already printed them, and it just worked out. Dumb luck just so I could help you by writing a blog post about it! :D
This year I'll do it all on my computer in advance to save the money on printing pictures. And that process starts now with The Sorting on my laptop. I hope I've left you feeling inspired or motivated to start your own Photo Documentation of Life journey this year. I'll update this post with pictures as I can.
Happy creating!
Your demonstrator,
Rachel
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