Ask and you shall receive – Project Life January 2016

Quick and easy yet still creative and satisfying? Yes! That is what some of my wishes were for my 2016 project life album when I decided to do a monthly as opposed to weekly approach. I finished January’s layout in no time, and still was happy with the creativity I was able to use and with the final result!

The biggest challenge I found with my first monthly layout was that I printed out WAY too many photos. So then came the difficult process of deciding which would stay and which would go. I needed to remind myself of the goal had put forth in my initial 2016 post, which was to focus on and capture the highlights and used that to narrow it down.

Second biggest challenge was getting used to 3×4 photos, which are the majority of the layout F spaces. I haven’t used a lot of 3×4 photos until now, and was finding the scaling difficult as I also realized that I don’t take that many vertical photographs. So there was a lot of cropping large photos and of splitting a 4×6 photo into two 3×4 photos to have the whole picture (somewhat) intact.

I am super excited to show off my first monthly layout!

All of the cards in my January layout are from Gossamer Blue’s January Life Pages Kit (with the exception of the white journaling card on the right page of the layout which I cannot remember where I got it from!).

To the title card, I added January ’16 in black foam thickers, and added a vellum circle that I punched out and stuck  behind a piece of ephemera, the green camera (I think from Amy Tangerine? not sure). I finished it off with some enamel dots from Fancy Pants which I got in the February Life Pages kit from Gossamer Blue (I used many of the enamel dots and hearts throughout this layout). I journalled a lot on the photos as I didn’t have a lot of space for journaling cards as I would rather have had more photos.

The January Gossamer Blue Life Pages kit also had these amazing little journaling spots (I think from Fancy Pants as well?) which I used all over the layouts. I also used a bunch of little word phrases from the Heidi Swapp Stickers that also came in the kit.

I wanted to add in my ticket to a Cirque du Soleil performance I saw, so I glued it to a journaling card and made sure I had enough space left to add in some journaling. The “today” sticker is from the same Heidi Swapp phrase stickers and the little aqua word phrases are from Ali Edwards.

I have always been a big fan of journaling on my photos. I especially love journaling in white ink on the dark spaces of photos like I did here.

Every month, I print out the digital files that come with my Gossamer Blue Life Pages kit subscription and I used two of those elements on this page, the arrow journaling spot and the “These are Sweet Memories” phrase.

And that’s a wrap! January is complete, and I am so happy about how it has turned out and how fast it got it done! I would say 2016 so far has been easy to document! Stay tuned for February!!

Sarah