I am not exactly sure where the first three months of this year got off to but they were certainly not spent with me writing on my blog !   Snow, moving Dad into a new apartment which entailed multiple trips to ROC, Snow, some cold, basketball, homework, Paris travel album project finished (!),  Hawaii travel album finished except for 2 sets of journal cards my family needs to fill out (!),  sleet, basketball,  all of my Modern HST Sampler blocks DONE!, pussyhat knitted, Women’s March attended, beer sampled, snow, bird feeders finally filled and hung, family, family, family (in the best most everyday way possible) gift quilt project started and top finished, meatballs made, shopped with teenagers, memory keeping projects worked on, business changing conference attended, new friends made, dog walked, sticks collected, moss wreath made (!)

OK, now you are caught up!

My next memory keeping project coming up is “Week in the Life” .  WITL is a memory keeping project conceived by Ali Edwards, you can read more about it on her website here.  It is an in-depth documentation of one ordinary week in our life.  I first participated in 2011, then in 2012 and 2013.   I organized my files in preparation for this year and realized that it looks like I did 2014 but never printed it out (?) I worked pretty much all digitally in 8.5×11 format for 2011-2014.  2015 I took a stab at but didn’t get far.  2016 I purchased Ali’s kit in the 6×8 format, but never really did anything with it…or so I thought !

LOL I decided to use my 2016 kit (I think there are still some available here) to document 2017…and when I pulled it out to get set up, look what I found… all the stuff and writing from 2016… well, all this will just get slotted in to the Project Life spread for that week because I’m only on March 2016 I think and this was from May.  Lemons=Lemonade.

This year, I am starting my documenting on Sunday, the 16th which is Easter.  It will be fun to document as we are hosting dinner and a lot of family will be here.  This will be the first year that I use physical product i/o digital so for me, setting up in advance and having a plan works much much better!  Here is my plan for this year….

 Yes, it’s super high tech..chicken scratch sketched on a piece of scrap paper!  Each day will have 2-6×8 slots for either a large photo, a good amount of writing or a cute 6×8 fill-in insert that I purchased last year in digital form.  4-4×6 slots, one of which will hold the “day” card (or maybe not, might move things around who knows?!)  2-3×8 slots, I have digital templates that I can make up and print out for these, or maybe just pretty paper or ???   7-3×4 slots, at least one of these will be a journal card, the rest depending on what’s going on, we’ll see.     I have set up my album with all the page protectors and cards in place and ready to go (with the full realization that I will most probably be moving things around…

In preparation, I also went in organized all of my digital elements.  I made a folder for WITL 2017 on my desktop and the a sub-folder for all of my digital items.   I copied all of the digital templates, artwork and files I may use into this file with a note to DELETE when done as I have the master copies in a WITL Master File.  I also made up a folder for each day to help organize the photos and what I’m going to print out.

I gathered up all of the kit elements, printed out the daily sheets (available on Ali’s blog), and found a pad of Studio Calico “printshop” paper that goes perfectly with the color scheme, just in case I need background paper for something I don’t want to have to go hunting.  I will most probably not use all of the items in the kit… I can see using the stamp set (need to find my “good” black ink), rubber word embellishments and the word stickers and a few of the round chipboard circles definitely.   Anything I don’t use will go into my soon to be re-arranged stash.

So here we are ready to go!  Baking tins too beat up to bake in make awesome project bins.  I’m really looking forward to this project this year after a few yeas off.  I was going through my past WITL spreads and the girls seemed so little! And we were in a different  house!  And the cats were still with us!  So much fun to look at all those memories now!  I hope you’ll join us next week!