For the first time in four years, I have successfully finished my Week in the Life project, and I'd love to share it with you! Our life has significantly changed over the last year with my husband on a 28-day rotation, so it was very important to me to finish this project this year. I wanted to see things through my lens, most importantly, see the POSITIVE parts of our life, because to be honest, when my husband is gone, I sometimes feel sorry for myself. This week happened to fall during a week when he was away, so it documents the daily lives of my daughter, dog and I, and as I expected, it was eye-opening. When not in the daily grind, I can see just how blessed we are; to have each other, to have technology to speak and see each other, and to have the means to do fun things and eat great food. This week was also special because it fell on my 34th birthday, and on our March for Babies walk with the March of Dimes, a cause we greatly support raising a former micro-preemie.
I attribute my success in finishing this project to a few things:
- I mainly used products that I only had on hand: my working monthly pocket page album, pocket page protectors that I already had, and some supplies already in my stash. I find that when I order supplies and wait for them to arrive, I've lost interest in the project by the time it arrives.
- I didn't pressure myself to use my DSLR outside of the house. I feel completely uncomfortable with snapping photos with my BIG camera at Costco or Target on daily errands. So I told myself that photos taken with my iPhone were going to be just fine.
- Every night before bed, I used my Notes app to document an hour-by-hour breakdown of what happened during the day. When creating the project, I simply emailed those notes to myself and copied and pasted them into my Photoshop page, elaborating slightly from what I had written on the day.
- I kept to only one pocket page, front and back, per day.
- I kept my supplies simple. (Supplies with an * are affiliate links. You don't pay any extra, but I get a small percentage of your sale! Thanks for your support!)
To begin, I created a small cover page to delineate the beginning of WITL in my monthly pocket page spread album. I downloaded the PNG "my story matters" file from the Week in the Life Community page, adding it to the left column of an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet in Photoshop Elements. I then "cut" the multicolor stripe pattern from one of the tags in the Week in the Life Digital Bundle into 1/2" strips and placed them along the left margin. I printed the page, cut it in half and adhered the right side to the back to make it thicker before I punched the holes. For this alone, I'm glad that I purchased the digital bundle, especially since I didn't want a stand-alone album for this project.