Weeks ago, I mentioned I was trying to think of a way to document this year. I considered a lot of ideas and for awhile thought I was going to go entirely digital with an album or book. But printing all those digital 8.5×11 pages seemed expensive and waiting until the end of the year to have book printed through blurb or somewhere did not appeal to my impatient side. I wanted something I could work on at the end of every month.
I finally decided to go with a Kolo
photo album. The one I chose, has two photo sleeves on each page that are about 4×7.75 and are designed to hold a 4×6 photo. Slipping a 4×6 photo into each sleeve felt a bit too basic (left image above) so I decided to have my photos printed 4×8 (with scrapbookpictures.com) and then at home trim off that extra quarter inch so they would fit in my book (right image above).
At this size, the photos take up the whole half of the page which makes the book seem more full and less like a traditional photo album. I first mapped out how my pages would go then adhered the photos that would be sharing a sleeve back to back. Next, I slipped the photos into the removed page protectors and punched three holes through both photos, using the existing holes in the sleeve as a guide.
I created a few 4×7.75 inch canvases in PSE in order to share multiple photos on one print. On the prints with two images, I sewed a zig-zag stitch with my sewing machine down the dividing line to separate them and add extra detail.
As mentioned in my earlier post, this is my book. It is not about Paul and I, but more about the things I will be doing. Right now, this means the book is about a lot of craft projects. And I am happy with that. I love the idea of having a book full of what I made over the course of the year.
I am planning on doing a monthly "here's what happened" write up in addition to the photo pages. The fonts on this page (and for the months that will follow) are bead chain & optima. And yep – just saw that "workhsop" typo. Oops.
Above are the pages I have completed for January & that last right page is the start of Febraury. You can click any image to enlarge. I have decided to include odds and ends that are appropriate in the photo protectors as well (like the paint chip & fabric samples). I also included the text from the blog for the 40 loaves project. I made canvases in PSE for the bread images so I could include four photos of each loaf.
I'm excited about this so far and hope it is fun to keep up with. I store all my photos in iPhoto and at the end of each month plan on just going through and picking the ones that best represent the big stuff. It's helpful that the 4×8 photos are just $.25 to print. I am trying to limit each month to about four to six page spreads, but that may change.
If you have any questions, please ask in the comments and I will answer them there. And PS – I shared ideas for building a 2011 album on Here's Looking at Me Kid earlier this year if you want to try something like this on a smaller scale.
enJOY it 
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