Monday, April 15, 2013

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.



Project Life @ The Mom Creative

14 comments:

  1. I like this spread alot Anandi! I am a big fan of color myself anyway. But, it doesn't look too overwhelming or anything. It's on theme with spring anyway and variety is a good thing in an album this big. Great shot you captured of T and her friend hugging. Girls are so sweet :)

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  2. I am a fan of this week too. Sorry you were not terribly inspired by the Sc kit or KPs one. I missed out on KP as I decided to sleep on it and my April kit is still on its way.

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    1. The KP kit was ok, but not at all worth the $. I was disappointed enough to send feedback to Simon Says Stamp about it. I'm not the only one, apparently - there were a bunch of folks on Facebook discussing it as well.

      Most people loved this month's SC kit. I like some of the cards VERY much, but am not as excited about the colors overall. And nearly all the 3x4s are portrait orientation, which I couldn't use this week.

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  3. Great pages! Fabulous photos. Love that you made it all work!

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  4. I love the photos and the colors of this. Great Job.

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  5. Your photos are FABULOUS! I love the way you captured the relationships

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  6. Great PL pages, love the photos and colors :)

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  7. Those photos are fantastic!!

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  8. I really like your pages! I think everything goes together really well :) The colours are all so bright and cheery :) I love the slide with your previous pages!

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  9. Great pages. I too subscribe to SC and to be honest as liking them less and less each month. With $19 shipping to UK on top it is working out quite expensive for what it is. Really thinking about stopping my subscription. As for the KP kits I have not seen them but off for a look now

    Enjoy your week

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  10. I missed out on the KP kit as I waited to think about it and they were gone. I hope they improve before putting out the next installment....that is a bummer. Love your pages, the N20 photo is hilarious!

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  11. Some really cute photos this week. I totally agree that getting the photos and words documented is the most important thing. The rest is just for fun & doesn't always turn out perfect. 52 weeks is a long project! It is hard to be inspired every time.

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  12. Love the bright colours and i do thinkit does come together in some way.

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  13. Please feel free to send any notes on what you'd like to see in the future Project Kits directly to me - I would love to hear how we can improve! kpurkey at gmail

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