enJOY it by Elise Blaha Cripe

week in the life : in the book.

I was NOT super active camera wise last week. Really only Wednesday, did I make a major effort to take a bunch of photos. But that's the beauty of my plan to only include seven photos a day. My favorites got in and I threw the pressure out the window. Below are the full pages.

I printed and saved and documented throughout the week and for that I am grateful. I loved the baseball card pocket pages. LOVED them. Perfect size for little snapshots. Will be remembering that for next year. Love all the color. Love the square corners. Love the result of each page and each spread.

The only text other than some bits and pieces on the photos was the "day in the life" journaling I blogged last week. I printed it on a piece of 5x11 paper and trimmed an 8.5x11 page protector down to fit it. I didn't have enough text to fill both sides of the page so I slipped a piece of American Crafts paper on the back.

Instead of using photos from this week as bookends for "week in the life," I picked ones from our photoshoot in mid-April.

One was cropped up from a big photo and the other side holds just 4x6 and 3x4 snap shots. Good enough. I am planning on making some sort of full album of just those photos, but I also wanted some of my favorites in this Project Life album. I am happy with the result.

Some of the pockets got a business card or an embellishment to talk more about the photo.

Others days were kept pretty simple - just photos.

This week in the life section is actually THE END of volume one of my Project Life album. I decided to break the year into three albums (Jan-Apr, May-Aug & Sep-Dec). Size wise, it's going to work out just about right, I think. To make things official, I stuck an envelope page into the back of the album (into it went a few letters from P I hadn't put anywhere else and our anniversary cards).

I also stamped & stickered a label for the spine.

I am still working on the end page of this first 2012 album (it's SO much harder than a title page!) but I'll share that when I'm done as well as my title page for 2012, volume II.

Embellishments used in these pages came from Elle's Studio, Banana Fish Studio & Ormolu.

how our days roll.

Above are a few more photos I have been able to grab this week, mostly all from yesterday. Our week days are pretty similar right now, so I figured I would just jot down the gist and stick it in the album with the daily photos spreads. This is the gist :

Paul wakes up at 6:15. Shaves (his electric razor wakes me up), brushes his teeth and goes to base for morning PT (physical training). I drift back to sleep. I wake up for real at 8am. Head downstairs, start coffee & clean up the kitchen a bit, then check email and read blog on my iPad on the couch. Paul gets home around 8:15. He showers, gets dressed & comes downstairs. We drink coffee and he eats cereal (recently I have been eating quesadillas for breakfast). We chat a little bit. Paul heads out the door at about 8:50. I refill my coffee and head upstairs to work.

Work for me is emails, emails & emails. I prep orders that came in. I think about the blog and what needs to be happening there. I deal with workshop posts. I print photos & get organized. Work for Paul is usually seeing patients, seeing patients & seeing patients. Depending on the day, it might be a meeting or two.

Based on what my work load looks like, I might go for a run around 11:15. Most days, Paul comes home from work around noon and by that time I am ready for a break. We have lunch - usually it's leftovers from dinner the night before. When we don't have that, it's egg salad or egg scrambles in tortillas. We usually have about 50 minutes together which is enough time to fix lunch and chat a bit.

Sometimes, depending on what needs to be done, I'll drive Paul back to work after lunch so I can have the car (we've been a one car family since we got married) for errands. Other days, I'll stay home to work and Paul will head back to the clinic. Around four I'll start wrapping up and either to go pick up Paul or to go for a quick run (if I didn't in the morning).

We're usually back home together between 4:30 and 5. Paul changes out of his uniform & we settle into the night routine. Which sometimes involves cocktails. We start dinner (sometimes on the grill) around 5:15-5:30 and are ready to eat around 6-6:30. We always watch something with dinner. Right now we're rotating between Game of Thrones (purchased from iTunes) and Friday Night Lights (his first time through). We just finished season 2 of The League.

After an episode or two, things vary. Sometimes we'll just chat. Sometimes we'll go for a walk. Sometimes we'll watch another episode of something. Sometimes I'll work (trim paper, make books, deal with email, upload photos, write blog posts) and Paul will play games on the xbox or computer. I bring my computer downstairs so we're "together" on those work/play nights.

Around 9:30 we head up to bed. He's usually asleep by 10:15 and I am out closer to 11 (I'll read or catch up on blogs in bed).

We're so fortunate right now to have so much time together. It's helpful that we live so close to base so he can go back and forth throughout the day. And I am over the moon to be so busy with work these days. There is good stuff ahead, I can tell.

week in the life : first few days in photos.

documenting a week in the life.

I am so excited to document a week in the life this year. This is a concept created by Ali Edwards (you can read more about it here) that focuses on capturing a detailed account of one week. I did this project for the first time last summer while Paul was away training in Mississippi and I loved it. This year will be different because hey! - Paul is home.

A question you might have is, "what's the point?" I already do Project Life each week and get a decent record of everyday life there. But I think my answer is another question, "what's the point of any of this?" And the answer to that is, "I LOVE the process." Sure, it's rad to have a record of weeks and years past, but much more than that, I love taking photos & I love playing with paper. I love documenting anything and everything and so embarking on this adventure sounds just right. Plus, even though I do document on a weekly basis, this is a much more "intense" project and involves a lot more photos.

I am not making a special album for this project. I am probably not going to take notes on what's going on throughout the day. I will be taking lots of photos (and I've set a ridiculous goal to take 90% them with my big camera - not my phone).

The plan is to add extra inserts to our Project Life album this week and that's it. I've prepped four baseball card pocket pages (I'll be using one side per day) with date numbers cut from my Stendig calendar in the top two pockets. To each side I will be adding seven photos / found papers each day. Not sure how journaling will be added yet. The baseball card pockets are small - 2.5"x3.5" so I'll be cropping my photos accordingly and printing at home.

I will not be doing a "normal" weekly spread this week, but because these pages are in my PL album they will be bookended by the back and front of other week spreads. I am going to use each of those spaces for two giant photo (cut into pieces using this method).

Because there is an odd number of days in a week I was left with an "extra" pocket page side and used that as sort of the title page for the week. It matches pretty well with the album's title page which wasn't intentional. I think I've just learned that black, white, kraft & metallic work with everything. I did something different in each pocket and I love the look.

Top three : covered a card with striped washi tape from Freckled Fawn (something cool : save 15% off the entire Freckled Fawn website with coupon code enJOYit through 4/30) & added number brads and an Ormolu page flap / wrote on a diagonal our names over and over again (love that this looks like a pattern) with black pen on white cardstock / used a pattern piece of Crate Paper and added a circle label with my "THIS" arrow stamp on top.

Middle three : that "cheers" guy came with something I ordered years ago. I've been saving it forever and this seemed like a good spot for it / cut down a piece of Amy Tangerine paper and added a circle journaling spot from Elle's Studio on top with text / cut down a Project Life clementine kit folded journaling card.

Bottom three : added two flair buttons (camera from American Crafts and "we" from ormolu) to white cardstock / added an Amy Tangerine "C" chipboard sticker to gold glitter paper (c/o Scrapbook Circle) / stamped each day with a date stamp and sewed on an Ormolu tag with a zig zag stitch.

I can't believe how much I love playing with paper. Creating this week in the life title page was much more fun than it should have been. :)

So that's the plan! I'll be sharing the complete inserts next week and extra "daily life" photos throughout the week here.

my week in the life album.

It's two months later, but I finally have my Week in the Life album to share. I took a pretty minimalist approach to the documentation process and just focused on taking a lot of photos and writing a blurb about what I did Monday - Friday. (You can see all the posts here : M, T, W, Th, F.) The plan all along was to get the text and images off the computer and into something but I didn't have a plan of attack.

Which is why I was pretty excited to make my second Kolo project a digital album. (You can see the first project I took on with Kolo here.) I uploaded my images to their photo book online program, selected templates, dropped in my photos and copied in my text. I spread the upload/design process out over a couple days (the program saves your progress) and the album shipped in about a week. I was very pleased with the quality of the printing. At the end of this post, there is a 5 minute video which shows how I used the program.

For my title page, I combined a self-portrait from the week and some of the text from this post about my thoughts on the project.

For me, this was definitely a project where the photos were the most important. I chose simple layouts and repeated them throughout the album. Not every photo that was taken each day made it in, but a lot did. I especially liked the template for a row of photos because I thought they told the best chronological story.

As mentioned, the only text in the book was what I jotted down here on the blog. I chose to keep it all in a block and paired it with photos from the appropriate day. Each day ended up with 3-4 two pages spreads depending on how many photos I had.

Overall, I am so pleased with the result. It was nice to upload, arrange and send to print. Because I didn't save any scraps of paper or handwritten thoughts, the digital format worked really well for me and this project. I will definitely be participating in Week in the Life again (hopefully capturing a week Paul is home next time) and may use the same format or experiment with something new. Because the program was so easy to use and the quality was good, I am going to be making another album (topic to be determined!) soon. I am also hoping to work with Kolo to develop more templates for the program. I will be sure to share when they are available.

using mykolo.com from elise blaha on Vimeo.

And as promised, here's the short video that shows how to use the backend of myKolo.com. I am happy to answer any questions in the comments!

disclaimer : the album for this project was provided free of charge by Kolo. Content idea and expressed opinions are all my own.