Document2010: pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

_{Includes Paper Girl collection from The Girls’ Paperie, Craft Fair collection from American Crafts, canvas flowers from Jillibean Soup, Dear Lizzy flair from American Crafts and vellum butterfly from Jenni Bowlin Studio.}

So where were we? You’ve printed or ordered your photos by now, right? Which means we’re ready to move on in our quest to get caught up with Document:2010. I certainly am, anyway!

The next step you can actually do without your photos to hand, so if you’re still waiting for them, you can go ahead and join in. This step focuses on the evidence pages – one page per month that includes an envelope or pocket to hold all the bits and pieces from life that month.

_{Includes Cherry Delicious collection by Sassafras, Wander collection by BasicGrey, scallop circle punch by EK Success, butterfly punch by Martha Stewart Crafts.}

I followed a similar plan for each of the five evidence pages I needed to create, but I think they look sufficiently different so it won’t necessarily be obvious that I made them all in one scrapping session. For each page I selected two patterned papers to be my primary focus, then built around that to create the page.

The trick at this stage isn’t to create finished layouts, but a near-finished state that can be easily completed with a photo or two, the evidence in your envelope and then maybe a bit of further embellishment if you fancy – or leave it just as it is.

_{Includes Seaside Retreat collection from Webster’s Pages, Amy Butler collection from K&Company, calendar die-cut from Jenni Bowlin Studio.}

Every evidence page needs an envelope or pocket that will hold ticket stubs, receipts, printed emails and anything else that might wind up at the bottom of your handbag. I kept it simple with an envelope from my stationery drawer on each page. August’s is the smallest, but I’m okay with folding papers to fit if they are too big (and I checked and I don’t have tons of things to keep from August).

_{Includes papers from Scenic Route and Anna Griffin, Thickers from American Crafts, Handmade collection by K&Company and an Artbox envelope.}

For May, June and July, I cut the titles with the Silhouette die-cutter. For August and September, I used letter stickers. Perhaps I should have mixed that up a bit, but I’m okay with it like this.

At the end of this process, I’ll come back to each of these monthly pages to finish them off and make each set of monthly pages have a feeling that they fit together, so I didn’t even tidy the offcuts away yet — I’ll want the papers I used for May’s evidence page handy as I put together the highlights of everything that month.

_{Includes papers from American Crafts and Love, Elsie by KI Memories, calendar die-cut from Jenni Bowlin Studio and die-cut cardstock by Bazzill Basics.}

I do have to admit I was quite tempted to go ahead and make pages for October, November and December as I was working on these, because it’s easy to just keep going once you have a system sorted. I didn’t in the end, but if you feel like that might help you keep up for the rest of the year, I would go for it!

If you’re catching up with me, feel free to use these pages as a basic sketch for your evidence pages – or to ignore them completely and create your own designs, of course.

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_{Includes border stamps and birdcage stamps by Banana Frog, Letterbox collection from American Crafts, Nutmeg collection from Cosmo Crickets, digital photo frame by Rhonna Farrer.}

And just as a little extra, here’s a page I made for Banana Frog last week with some bits and pieces left on my desk + two lovely sets of Banana Frog stamps!

xlovesx

Comment [10]

Document:2010 is a year-long project I’ve worked on with UK Scrappers. It’s free to follow along and includes a PDF download each month with notes and a page of printable journaling boxes. The idea is very simple: scrapbook the year by creating four pages for each month. One evidence page includes an envelope of things you have collected that month. Two divided pages (one page or page protector, front and back) highlight up to a dozen things from your calendar. One highlight page shows a key event in more detail. Nice and simple, right?

Except somewhere in late spring, my personal album derailed. Now you know why my online classes are normally four to six weeks! That’s the length of time I can keep a project in working mode. Longer than that becomes a real challenge to keep up with something as other projects need to be on the table. It’s always there in the back of my mind, creating a huge amount of guilt and this feeling that there must be a way to get caught up, but life keeps steaming ahead with new deadlines and events and so it goes.

So here we go and you can mark my words: this week I am getting up to date with Document:2010, and I’m going to share the entire process with you over the next four days. If you’re behind, you can join in. If you never started but think it sounds like a cool idea, this is a great time to get started. If you’re totally up to date and have been cursing my name for not being able to keep up, well then I salute you and hope by the end of this week we can be friends again. Sound like a plan?

Today we’re going to start with the photos to get this big catch-up session rolling. I need to complete my pages for May, June, July, August and September. Why yes, I did just admit that in view of the entire internet. And now I exhale. I haven’t kept photos aside especially for this project, so I’m using iPhoto for this part of the process. If you’re a PC rather than a Mac, you could use Picasa or ACDSee — both are photo management tools that will help you navigate your photo library with ease. If you don’t use any sort of photo manager and instead keep all your photos in separate folders as you upload, I would highly suggest checking out these options, as they will save you a million headaches as a scrapbooker. I use iPhoto and I seriously would hate to go without it.

Once you’ve opened your photo library, give yourself some structure so you’ll be able to select and sort your photos easily even though we’re working on more than one month at a time. I created a folder called Document:2010 and within that folder made a new album for each month I needed to complete.

Now view your photos by date. I normally use my library to view by event, but clicking on ‘Photos’ at the top left gets rid of the events and lets you sort your images by date, file name, keyword and so forth. Sort by date and scroll to the first month you need to scrap. As you look through those images, you’ll start to get a picture of what you did that month. In May, I taught two scrapbooking workshops, spent a lot of time at the park while the cherry blossoms and tulips were in bloom, spent a few days in Dublin (then got stuck there when the airlines were all grounded), spent a day with SJ thrift shopping in Hastings, printed about twelve million (okay, two hundred) Hipstamatic photos, went to a concert, tried to find elephants in London, snapped a family photo shoot for a scrapbooker and went to the Southend Air Show with The Boy’s family. Some of those things I could tell by looking back at my calendar but others I wouldn’t have noted – and when I review the photos it’s all pretty obvious. The trick at this point is to take one to four photos from each event that month and drag them to the album for May. (By the way, in iPhoto, when you’re dragging the pictures to that album, you aren’t removing them from anywhere else — the album is essentially a collection of bookmarks, so you can add and delete with no worry about losing something from your full photo library.)

Repeat this process for each month. Don’t pay all that much attention to the number of photos you’re dragging to the folder, but keep that rough idea of one to four photos per event in mind. When you finish your first pass, go look at your monthly collections and see how many pictures you have selected. At first, I was okay for May through July but I had forty for September and only half a dozen for August. We want a happy medium in between those two, so I removed some of the September images and added to the August collection. This left me with 28 photos for May, 13 for June, 13 for July, 13 for August and 21 for September. (Apparently I like the number 13?!) I know this sounds like a ton of photos to scrapbook, and with the regular process of making pages, it would be. But for Document:2010 or similar ideas of scrapping a month over a few pages, this number is totally achievable.

Now there’s an optional editing step if you like to mix up things like colour and black and white or the size of the images in your albums. I altered two or three images per month to black and white, mostly chosen by just picking the images that didn’t have the truest colour or the highest quality, because black and white is a lovely instant fix to that. It’s far more forgiving than colour! I also made a note of some images that I wanted to print at a smaller size than my standard 4×6 format.

Which leads us to printing time! You can print your images at home or upload them to an online printer – whichever you prefer! I love my at-home printer, but it is more economical for me to order prints from Photobox, so it’s a decision I make with every project about whether I can wait the extra day to get my prints in the post. Some stores also offer an in-between option that lets you upload your photos to their website but pick them up in-store, like using the one-hour photo with the first step still being at home. I used this option a few times while I was visiting the States because there was a Walgreens just around the corner, but in my little corner of London there’s nowhere nearby that offers this service. It’s worth checking though! You could always put these images on a memory card or a CD and print them in store through a kiosk too. Anyway, I’m off the topic now — print those pictures. That’s what I’m saying.

Once you have them printed, stack them up by month and label them so you’re good to go, and tomorrow we’ll pick up from there!

If you’re new to this project, you can find the monthly downloads for Document:2010 on the UKS homepage and there is a forum to chat about the project too.

xlovesx

Comment [15]

Funny how you can start the new year with such good intentions and then it gets harder each month, right? But with Document:2010, I am really trying to remember that idea of living first, scrapbooking second. And so far, I am still getting the pages created, so it seems to be working, even if I can’t really get them done on the first day of each new month.

This month most of my supplies came from the Poppyseed collection by K&Company, with two sheets of letter stickers – green from October Afternoon and a great new bold pink from My Little Shoebox. I love how the sizes of those two alphabets work together in the 4×6 spaces.

So far I’ve finished the divided pages for April and I just have the finishing touches to add on the two remaining layouts that finish the monthly summary. So I’ll post those very soon! These divided pages include lunch with Leanne, Maxwell & Laura, a celebration of blue springtime skies, painted eggs for Easter, a day at the pub for the Grand National, a fleeting visit to the Eden Project, time at the seaside, a work trip to Germany, my love of the Hipstamatic iPhone app, the shimelle.com scrapbook party weekend and a sunny day spent hiking at Cheddar Gorge. (By the way, I didn’t forget about that scrapping with Hipstamatic post – I’ll get it online this week!)

If you’re documenting this year, chat and share the process here at UKScrappers!

If you happen to finish your pages for April by the end of this Thursday, they would also fit this week’s challenge to scrapbook a month in review! (And one participant in each week’s challenge wins a gift certificate there so that’s a little extra push to finish and post your pages.)

So tell me: what one word summed up your April 2010?

xlovesx

Comment [14]

Document:2010 is a free year-long project at UKScrappers where we make four pages each month. One holds a collection of things from every day life – cards, receipts, ticket stubs. Two are divided pages where you can break down little things onto their own 4×6 block, making them easier to record than having to create a full page for each thing you want to remember and the final page focuses on one thing you want to highlight with a bit more detail.

It took me longer than normal to finish my March pages, but now they are all finished and at home in the album along with January and February — so that’s one quarter of the year scrapped! (Is it just me or was it the first of January like two weeks ago?) This month I used mostly the Handmade collection from K & Company, along with some American Crafts and Cosmo Cricket.

If you’re interested in this project, you can check everything out here.

And if you’re ready to party…you’ve come to the right place! We’re kicking off the weekend-long scrapbook party right here at 6pm UK time. It might even be more fun than a goat in a party hat! See you soon!

xlovesx

Comment [11]

For several years now, we’ve come up with a free year-long class or challenge as a joint project between UKScrappers and shimelle.com. And Document:2010 is that class for the new year.

All you need for this month is an envelope and a camera. You can read about this free class and join in the discussion right here at UKScrappers. And you don’t have to be from the UK to join in and participate.

So that’s one announcement for the new year…more to come though!

xlovesx

Comment [62]