Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Project Life: Documenting Beach Days, Summer 2014

As promised, I'm back with more pages from our 2014 Project Life Album.  This time I've combined our two days spent enjoying our state's beautiful Great Lakes.  It's one our family's favorite traditions to spend at least one day playing in the sand and splashing in the water, and I love getting to use all the cute summery beach collections to record our memories!


On the left side above, is a summary page detailing my daughter's stay with my parents, July 13-17. I'm mainly mentioning it so I can bring up the wood frame with the cursive fun, by Freckled Fawn.  This is older, but if you like me have had it in your stash for awhile, be more careful than I was when applying adhesive.  If you click on the image to enlarge it, you might be able to see where I cracked it while using my tape runner to attach it.

For our first day at the beach, I used a lot Echo Park's A Perfect Summer, an older kit that I've had for awhile and had bits and pieces to use up.  I also used some various Becky Higgins Core Kits and other random embellishments.

The right side above is an opening page to this following pages on our trip to the beach in Lexington for my Mom's birthday.  This is actually the very first beach my daughter was ever at!  My son and husband had never actually been there before, in subsequent years and pre-second child, E and I would go during the week with my family while Brad was working.

I made sure that everyone who was along that day was included on this intro page and used my two favorite pictures of each of my kids on it.  I like to do a page like this for extended section on the event.  To give a section even more definition, I plan to do something like this one Jennifer Wilson at Simple Scrapper did last holiday season.


On this first spread, I continued the general memories and included more group shots taken that day.  Then on the left I did a 12X12 traditional scrapbook page, highlighting my daughter.  This was her last day of age 7.


Then I did a 12X12 layout with a specific story I wanted to remember about my son's time at the beach.  Following this, I added a trading card page protector with more random photos and memories.  The cards used in the insert are mainly from the Travel Pocket Pages Themed Cards by MAMBI.


There are more pictures of my son on the other side of the trading card holder and on the following Design A.  I treated this as a whole spread and designed them with both sides in mind, carrying the same colors through both in an effort to tie them together.  I like that orange Noted card, as I think it mimics the ball shape and color.

In case you are wondering why there are more pictures of my son than daughter on this trip, that is intentional.  My oldest is five years older than him and that means there are many years of beach trips recorded with her as the only focus.

I explained to her that I've documented her first few beach trips and memories extensively, so now I am trying to record his stories as well.  She came to the conclusion by herself that this was fair, especially since I am beginning to include help in writing down her own memories.

There is one more spread in this first beach section about playing in the beach's playground and exploring downtown Lexington, but I've got put a few finishing touches on it.  I didn't realize it was incomplete until I went to photograph these spreads for blogging, oops!


Our second day at the beach last summer was in August and while the first one was on the east side of Michigan, this time we were on the west side.  We love Grand Haven, have since my friend Margaret invited us to join her family on an overnight there back when the girls were toddlers.

This side of the state has sandier beaches, and since that's where both of our kids spend most of their time it's one we really enjoy.  We typically go there once a year, often in August as our last hurrah of the season!

This time I used a 12X12 traditional scrapbook layout as the opening to this mini section within the month of August and again featured my favorite pictures from the day.  To help make these stories stand out from our beach stories the previous month, I used a different collection.  This time it's from Simple Stories, I Heart Summer.  I think a couple stickers from this collection made an appearance on the July pages.


Again, I highlighted an individual memory related to my son on a 12X12 layout.  The Design A next to it continues stories from the day, in relation to him.


Highlights from my daughter's day are on the next spread.  Then this day finishes with our trip to Culvers, it was my family's first time there.  I don't "love" my daughter's face split like that.  I assembled the larger card and then cut it to fit.  Next time, I do something like this, I will cut the card first and them place my photos and embellishments!  If I had just shifted the photo up a fraction, I would've been so much happier.

Thanks for seeing how I decided to create several themed pages for our album!  I've always been more of a themed or event based scrapper so doing this gives me a lot more creative satisfaction than just using one or two pictures in a weekly spread.

Something I dp really like about PL is how much faster I can document a lot of photos.  Leaving the strict photo a day format, gives me room to include as many photos and I want.  After not feeling quite full creatively satisfied with it , I've rediscovered my love now that I'm making more of an effort to incorporate 12X12 pages.   How have you been making Project Life work for you?

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