Week in the life

How cool is that? I am editing my very first post for this blog entitled "mon p'tit quotidien" ( "my little everyday life") with a project bragging about a full week of my everyday life. It is the very first time that I go through this process but certainly not the last. For those of you who are not familiar with this project, please visit the blog of Ali Edwards (http://aliedwards.typepad.com/).
Before showing the result, a short intro on my objectives before starting this album:
1) I wanted to be done with it in maximum 3 weeks (otherwise I would not have finished it)
2) I wanted to talk about both the things from a particular day AND things in our lives right now. For example, although it did not show up in the course of the week I used one smaller page of journaling talking about how we are renovating the house and how I feel about living in this "under construction" environment, because it is a big part of our life (with Laurent working very hard to progress and me longing for getting out of boxes one day.)
3) I did not buy any supply for this. I wanted to work with what I already had and mix-match older pieces and scraps. For several reasons that I hope to share in a later post, I am in a "Make it simple" phase, including buying less and making the most of what I have. (Call it the new home owner syndrome!)


The layout was created the week before the "shooting" session. As you can see bellow, every day has the same layout: two big pages (20cmx20cm) with 4 smaller pages in between with in this order: paper/journaling, picture/picture, paper/journaling, picture/description of pictures on the photo montage.




The picture is probably too small, but I am pointing at my son's mismatching socks... I was probably still sleeping when I dressed him up that day!


You can tell by these pictures that the project was certainly not about making it fancy with a lot of techniques, but to focus on the words. As a full time working mum my scrap has shifted from "state of the art- oh I so would like to be published" types of layouts to "tell the story-NOW" layouts. I am fine with that these days. It will certainly change in the years to come again...
I used some overlays from Ali Edwards (did I say I was a big fan?) available @ Designer Digitals for the first page and made my own photo grid in Photoshop for the last page.
Some little though I would like to share with you:
1) While embarking on this journey, I was very sceptical about designing the album layout before taking the pictures as done by Ali, because I though it would limit my creativity. Somehow, I always hope that the pictures I want to showcase will spark a fire of inspiration that will lead me to design my "best layout ever", but let's be honest, my pictures are not that good! ;o). So this time I decided to play along and prepared the layout before. Well, I must admit that this was some creative boost for my pictures (just the other way around than I expected). By knowing what I wanted as final result, I knew what type of pictures I was looking for (portrait or landscape, from close or far...
2) Do you notice the blue ribbon on the side of the photo montage? This was not in my original plans... The day I prepared all my pages for binding, I did put one page in the wrong position in my Bind-it-All ending up with holes on the opposite side of the binding. Arrrrrghhhhhh. But then while thinking on how to cover up, I decided to not cover up at all. So I did punch all my photo montage pages and inserted a ribbon. Et voilà!
3) A lot of my pictures are blurry. To tell the truth, most were taken with my smart phone and hiding from people around. I am not in a very creative environment and I do not think that my colleagues (engineers) would have understood why I was taking a picture of my salad, my car tag or my computer screen... At the end I had a lot of fun! In addition, these blurry pictures are as close as it can be to my life right now where we seem to be always rushing.

Thanks for having a look. I hope this will inspire you to document a week, a day or simply an hour of your own life. People around you care about these stories. What is routine for you now will not be in your life in 5 or 10 years (for me, cooking a purée from scratch every day for my 18 month old boy is all but interesting, but in a couple of years I hope he will see much more than cooking in this daily task. I hope he will see love).
A few more... just for fun! A bientôt.