It’s done! I scrapped my last pictures of 2012 and can now catch up with the first two weeks of 2013. As this is my first time doing Project Life, it was also the first I had to tackle scrapping the holidays in that format. Unless you belong to these people, who amazingly did a whole December Daily album and have already enthusiaticly scrapped all chrismas photos, then holiday scrapping is a bit of a challenge. Work and/or school are over and we usually take more pictures and there are lots of activities going on. Today I will show you, how I did my christmas PL pages and share the way I approached this. Be warned, this is going to be a long post!
We were not in Germany over the holidays. Instead we visited my fiance’s family in Nothern Ireland and travelled around quite a bit. However, as my man got pretty sick, we stayed in the hotels a lot, too, and I took less photos than I thought. Coming back he passed that *beep* cold onto me and again I did take pictures occasionally, but failed to do to in other situations.
Right. So I definitely had way too many photos for a normal two page spread, yet they were all over the place with huge chunks missing. I could have attempted to use tiny photo templates and load each card with several of them. But I also had too many little stories I wanted to tell.
Next idea was to do a normal spread plus an insert. Hmpf! My pictures as explained were a collection of a few events, but for those I each had several nice photos. Somehow I couldn’t see that working either. Enter my final solution: Doing themed pages. As many as I needed. To date them in the PL album, I decided to add the following line of text to every title card: Documenting the holidays 24.12.2012-01.01.2013
This helped me to bring them into the chronological context of my album. Then I went through the images and planned what pages I wanted to do. In the beginning of the holidays we spent one night at the coast in Warrenpoint, because we didn’t get a hotel room nearer to Newry. We were both still happy and healthy and I remembered to take pictures. So first up was a double page spread about this experience.
Seriously, isn’t that hotel suite gorgeous? Btw, see that QR code? It links to a youtube video I posted. It shows the birds flying low over the sea that morning. I got this idea to incorporate videos that way from an awesome tutorial by Traci Reed. You can read all about it here on her blog.
Next in the timeline were they days we spent in Belfast. Only I was really bad at photographing those. I had a panorama about the beautiful waterfront at night, but not much more. Yet, there were some stories linked to those days and I felt bad leaving it all out. Therefore, I went with a single page and took photos of the items, that were linked to the memories. I do that quite often. If I have something material, that tells the story I forgot to photograoph, I will take a picture later and add that. In this case it was a bronze plate with an Irish blessing (his family gave it to us as an engagement gift and I was very touched) and cosmetics, that perfectly represented my shopping day.
The last two days in Nothern Ireland were mostly travelling, watching TV with my sick and tired love and I had abandoned my camera completely. This was the time to simply accept, that I will never document EVERYTHING in my Project Life album and move on. Instead I wanted to incorporate the christmas cards we got from friends and family. They are such a traditional part of the holiday feeling and I love them. To my delight they fit perfectly onto one page.
I kept it very simple, created a white journal tag and added it to every card with the name of the sender(s). This is how the second spread looked like now:
Back home I only took photos of one more activity. And that was a family walk, when we just needed some fresh air and movement after all the christmas days. So I put those all on another page.
The title card is a weird mixture of German and English. I started creating it an then realised, I had done the main title in German. I did it mostly because it’s the name of an area around here and we use it like a set phrase. Again I stayed true to my fuss-free PL motto and shrugged it off. Our life is often a crazy mixture of both cultures, so why should the album be any different?
Last up: New Year’s Eve. I so didn’t feel like bringing the camera, fighting a massive cold and all that. So I thought, I would just do a nice filler page in the sense of “Welcome 2013″ with all the pretty scrapbooking goodies popping up everywhere for PL title pages. Of course I started regretting that decision as soon as the fireworks begun. However, there were some friends with mobile phones snapping away. And so I did something, I’m usually very very bad at. I remembered to ask and remind people to send me those pictures. This is the result:
Ok, they were night time phone pictures. But then again, I didn’t want to print a big poster, I just wanted to add them to a page. With a bit of editing, the result was really not that bad. I’m glad, I was able to wrap up my holiday scrapping with the first moments of the new year.
And that’s it. I ended up with 6 themed pages in total and I must say, I’m happy with the result. They actually show our holidays quite well and I was able to scrap them all in a few days. Now I’m curious. What did you do to document your holidays in PL? Leave me a comment and link me up with your pages!
These are awesome! Go you! Thank you for linking to my tutorial <3