Project Life 2014 - Week 1

Week 1: January 1-5


This is the first week of the year. Ryder wasn't born yet, both of the girls were still on break from school and Anaya spent most of the week at our house. It snowed a few inches and it was REALLY REALLY cold.

This year, instead of using date cards, I'm picking a picture for the upper left corner that I can put a date on. I really love this look. I have completed 7 weeks so far using this "date overlay" and I love the look of it. I'm also switching to mostly using the plain colored journaling cards that came with the Seafoam kit. I like them a lot and wish that I had more colors of them - I may end up making some of my own.

And this is why I try so hard to keep up with my Project Life albums. There is a not a week that goes by that Claire doesn't ask to look at picture books. She specifically asked to look at the ones of her as a "Big Girl" and Hudson (her cousin).

Project Life : 2014 Cover Page

This year, I am not buying a core kit. At least I am not currently planning to buy a core kit. I have so many bits and pieces of my other 4 core kits, plus a mini kit and I bought some baby boy things (not PL, but a different company) that I just can't bring myself to buy ANOTHER core kit just so I can have the title page cards and the page title/date cards. I figure if I decide I need the ones to go on each page, I can buy the digital set of just those cards and print them for less than a core kit.

I ended up using Cathy Zielsky's free 2013 title cards. I just opened them up in Photoshop and downloaded a font (Multicolore) that was similar to the one she used and changed them to be for 2014 & the colors to be more to my liking. I'm not entirely sure about the "You Are Here" card. I made that one myself and I like it in theory, but I'm not loving it in the spread. I made it before I downloaded Cathy's stuff, so maybe if I redo it to look more like her kit I will like it better. I stamped our address on it (blurred out) using my return address stamp that I bought myself for Christmas. I love that thing.


I ended up using two pictures that I took about part way through January in order to include Ryder. I was having a hard time deciding what to do about the list of family members too. Because, technically, on January 1st, Ryder wasn't born yet. But he was born on January 15th which is close enough that the album will include many (many many many) pictures of him. I changed them to black and white in Photoshop because I liked it better that way for the title page.

Projects 2014

Hey look, it's already the 9th day of the New Year and yeah, life has already gotten away from me. Why? 1) I started watching a new TV show. Well, new to me. USA's Suits. It's on Amazon Instant and I just signed up for a Prime Trial right before Christmas so I have to watch it all now before my trial is over. 2) I'm so overwhelmed with everything that has to be done before the boy's arrival + normal life stuff that I just kind of shut down for a few days. Seriously, I got a Silhouette for Christmas and it is still in it's box from Amazon.

Portrait Project

I've seen this basic idea online for quite a while: take a weeky/monthly/whatever portrait of your child (or yourself/spouse/etc).

I'm not even attempting for weekly...that would just be setting myself up for failure. I would like to try for monthly. I'm planning that anyways for the new baby, the trick would just be getting one of Claire and one of Anaya. I would also like to get at least quarterly portraits of Justin & I. I'm also not sure how...professional-ish...I want the portraits to be. For example, I got some pretty good shots of Claire playing in the snow last week, those could count as her "portrait", but they weren't planned. This is definitely still an idea in progress.

Operation: Clean House

Our house needs some help. Mostly because Justin & I seemed to have missed the memo about how to take care of it and clean it. And we can't agree on who's responsibility anything is, so everything just piles up until it either annoys someone (usually me) or someone that cares is coming over (like my parents) and then we do a fast pick up and do whatever amount of cleaning can be accomplished before they arrive. (Yes, my mom reads this, and I'm pretty sure she already knows that about us). But there are some parts of our house, like the master bedroom & bath that no one but us EVER see and so with everything else going on they just get pushed farther and farther down the list of places to clean. We've lived here EIGHT years, you'd think we would've figured this out by now. But we haven't.

Project Life 2014

Another year, another project life album (or two). I've already bought one album, I went with a yellow stripe one. I probably should've bought two because they were 40% off, but I didn't and it will really annoy me if I end up with a different album for the second part of the year. I'm still working on making my title page, mostly my album is still empty except for a few blank page protectors.