Project Life 2013: A Riot of Color

I don't usually comment on current events, but if you and/or yours were in Boston today, hope everyone is safe.

This Project Life layout was a bit uninspired. I was excited to have time and space to work on it, but couldn't settle on a color scheme. I was underwhelmed by the Kelly Purkey kit I bought for Project Life, and also not that thrilled with the April Studio Calico kit. Not a good month for new supplies, I guess. 

I knew I wanted to use the yellow "Springtime" card since we've finally had some decent weather! So I built the color scheme around it, which is not my favorite, but at least it's bright and fun. I used cards from the April SC kit, my new Jade Project Life kit, and the new Me and My Big Ideas line at Michael's, along with some of that fabulous American Crafts glitter tape.

I also used a lot of sequins, and after some experimentation, found that Scotch 2-way scrapbooking glue is the best for adhering individual ones, because it has a nice small tip on the bottle.

This isn't one of my favorite layouts - it just ended up being a bit too eclectic and not cohesive enough.  But with 52+ pages in the year, I can't expect to love all of them. Imperfection is acceptable, and what's important to me is that I have photos I love and wrote down the highlights of our weeks.

(Click each photo to see a bigger version.)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Favorite restaurant, friends, activities ;)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Food & sleep!

Glitter tape, sequins and SC kit cards, oh my!

One really cool thing I learned this week was how to use Lightroom to simplify my photo selection and printing process.  I used their 'Smart Collections' feature to filter on the date range for this spread, which quickly gave me the set of photos from which to choose.  I then used a color label to mark the ones I wanted to print, which made it easy to review my selections and swap things in/out.

I then used Lightroom itself to print (instead of the Canon EZ Print app), and taught myself how to save templates to get multiple photos on a page. Now I've got a few standard templates for my PL photos, which will really streamline the process for me. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to fix the fact that my photos print much darker from Lightroom than from the Canon app.  I'm sure it's some horribly complex issue about screen brightness and ICC color profiles, neither of which I care to understand in great depth.  I'll be searching online for a quick and easy solution.

And in good news, I've commandeered BabyM's bedroom to be my temporary craft room until we figure out a solution for the leak. Since she sleeps in our room and will until she's no longer eating at night, we've been using her room for miscellaneous storage and the occasional guest. I'm so excited to have a dedicated space again.

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.