My Process

So now that I'm a few weeks into sharing my Project Life I thought it would be a good idea to give you a look into how I go about creating my weekly layouts. I jumped into this project without a clear plan in mind, and when I say clear, I mean specific with all the details written out, pre-planned, anything. I knew what I wanted it to be, which is a complete story of what spending 1 entire year with me would look like at this point in my life, I knew that I had FAILED EPICALLY at every other project I have tried to start that entailed and entire years worth of photos, in one album that didn't include tons of negative space and lots of embellishment. So I wanted to give myself so freedom, without giving myself the ability to fail. Less rules = more capability, for me. So in the beginning, I felt like I needed my photos to at least kind of go in order by date. Today, I don't even think about it.

First off I should probably warn you, I'm slightly obsessive when it comes to the organization that works for me, in all of the areas of my life. So my photo organization works perfect for me. I create yearly folders inside of my main photos folder that came standard on my PC, inside of the yearly folder, there is a folder for each month, labeled like this: 01 January, 02 February, etc. This keeps them in order of month. Inside of my monthly folder, I have a dated folder, labeled like this: 01-01-2012, 01-08-2012, etc. That way if I know I need a specific day I can go straight to that folder. After I've moved my photos off of my camera into their rightful folders, I see which days I have "camera" photos for, if I don't have a photo on my camera for a specific day I reference my Momento App, I have all of my social networking feeding into it, this usually gives me an idea of what I did that day if I can't remember, and it will give me my other mobile photos such as my instagrams. If I don't have a camera photo I usually have an instagram. 

While I'm checking which photos I have for the days of the week, I am working out a general plan for my weekly layout. I usually draw my page protectors out on grid paper (Marcy Penner just shared some planning pages on her blog which I will probably be using from now on), with pen, then use a pencil to layout my photos, so I can erase as much as I need (which is usually quite a lot). After I layout my photos and journaling on my hand drawn plan I write exactly which photos I NEED to have printed for that weeks layout underneath, if I have instagrams I create 4x6 canvas, using the same technique I did here & place 2 2.5x2.5 or 1 3x3 photo on a 4x6 canvas, then I move them back to my memory card to take to my local lab. At this point I will usually get my photos printed within the next few days and I just put my PL on the back burner until after the photos are printed. Then if I NEED to make any changes to the layout I haven't written my journaling landscape & it turns out I need it to be portrait. So I wait to put everything together at once. 

I hope this gave you some insight into how I complete my weekly layouts. Everyone is different, but sometimes hearing, or in this case reading, how someone else does it, can help you decide if you need to make some changes to your process to make it fit your creative style more. I would love to hear back from anyone on how they approach their weekly layouts. :)

Next on my list to share is my tiny Project Life Bin, well to me its huge, but compared to what I've seen out there as far as PL stations, my is TINY.