Week in the Life 2012 (WITL)

This time last year I participated in the Week in the Life Project which is the brain child of the very talented Ali Edwards.  Last year was my 4th year I have done this project and I had this printed into a book with Blurb and I would have to say it's one of my favourite projects and photo book.

After seeing Lynette Nettio's WITL for 2011 I was hooked on her fabulous design and purchased her templates for my pages.  I added lots of different things to my book and it went something like this.

• Introduction to our family
• Family Mealtimes
• Seeing the Everyday
• Monday - 4 double spreads (morning, lunch, afternoon and evening)
• Tuesday  - same as above
• Wednesday - same as above
• Thursday - same as above
• Friday - same as above
• Saturday - same as above
• Sunday - same as above
• Instagram pics
• Profile picture of James and his list of favourites ie meals, snacks, tv shows, dvd, games etc
• Profile picture of Sienna - same as above
• Profile picture of Kathy - same as above
• History and photos of our suburb from Wikipedia
• 21 questions to ask your kids (these were asked the month before but wanted them included because it was how they viewed things at 8 and 5 in 2012)

So all of these pages gave an insight into our life in April 2012 and I just LOVE IT.

I have participated in Photo a Day for a year which at the beginning of the year can seem extremely daunting to be committed to that every day.  It's actually quite easy whereas this 7 day intensive photo taking from morning to night with everything you are doing is crazy intense and I think harder than photo a day project.  However the rewards from looking at this book far outweighs the paparazzi style of photography once you have your finished book in your hands.

I tackled this project in a few stages as follows:-

1. During the 7 days just take as many photos as you can and you are not going to use them all however you are going to have a big choice then and what you take on the day may not make it into the book but it gives you options and you are still recording your life anyway.
2. About a month later I picked and added the photos I wanted to the templates and left it at that.
3. About a month later I started putting words to the templates about the pictures and these are all saved as jpegs so one double page is one jpeg file which is uploaded into blurb to span 2 pages.
4. Then after that I uploaded them all to Blurb and had to check the "bleed" margins so that my words wouldn't be cut off so this was a little time consuming as I would see I might need to make the word columns narrower and adjust the file in photoshop, save it as my jpeg and load it up again.  Because the book was going to be quite thick in the middle I didn't want any words cut off so this was important.
5. Doing it in stages helps because it is a big task and even Lynette said when she started to put the book together she didn't realize how much time it would take to get it all done but also believes it is totally worth it. 

I could have tackled this project one stage a week but raising kids, helping with homework, dinners, baths reading and down time this was how I tackled my project and as we all know spending a lot of time on one project for a long time in the end you just want it finished.  Stages worked best for me ie Taking photos, putting photos into templates, writing words, loading them into blurb, checking page bleed so that the words wouldn't end up in the bindings so adjusting and reloading and then ORDERING and RECEIVING which was the best part.....this time last year was when we did this project and I can remember every little thing we did because of this book and it brings back special memories.  If you have never participated in Week in the Life 2013 should be your year so keep an eye out for Ali Edwards posts come fall.  She usually gets well prepared the month before with templates and helpful tips.

Here are some of the pages but not all of them.  Ali is doing WITL in fall this year (which I think is our September) so I will be doing it again in 2013 and I think I'll just stick with this same format and book from Blurb and the quality of this book is outstanding.