Daily - Weekly - Monthly pages - need input

Hello Eva,

Since sereval years, I'm making a Project Life and a Daily December.

1. What's best: Daily? Weekly? Monthly? It depends the photos you take. I try to make photos everyday from the children and our everyday so the weekly format is good for me. But in December, I know I have a little elf at home and I choose the daily format that's why I make a Project Life and a Daily December. My PL stops at the last of november and my DD is for the whole month of December. I know people make DD only through dec 25th.

2. If you tried doing a project - what's your best advice to finish, and not give up on the way? Not give up, it's the hardest thing sometimes. Last year, I gave up and I know I can't continue later. I have a notebook where I have a board to follow my work. I made sereval columns (photos, week number, kit used, page printed) and I checked at each step. I can see the album growing and I helps me a lot.

3. Do you keep notes or something to help you remember? (In case you can't scrap every day) Of course, I have an other notebook where I write each the little things. It's hard not to forget. And last year, I gave up this too, that's why I can't continue my album.

4. Any advice on pocket pages? During the month of december, I'm searching the red line of my album. I love having a title card with the week number. I keep the same page layout and it gives harming to the album. And I keep simple for the pocket. This year I used the app Project Life and I really appreciate it because for me it's an important time saver.

5. Other things to think of? I print my pages at home because I haven't find cheap album in France with over 100 pages because when there is special event like a birthday I make a double spread only about this event. So the album grows quickly. Seeing the album growing is an other way not giving up.

6. Please enable me with kits/products in the store will help me create! For my PL, I love pocket cards. And here at The Lilypad, there are lots of choice https://the-lilypad.com/store/Journal-Cards/. My favorites for everyday pages are the pockets cards from Designed by Soco and Sahin Designs and for special event I love having a little artsy feeling and for that I love Rachel Jefferies pocket kits.

I hope it will help you BUT as my PL is very personal it is not publish in the galleries.

 

1. What's best: Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
What’s best is what you want in the end. What will work best for you? A monthly recap? Try that. Be flexible if you don’t like how it’s going. I prefer daily because that holds me accountable each day, and if I skip a few days that’s fine. If you try monthly and skip a month, you will be skipping a lot more.
2. If you tried doing a project - what's your best advice to finish, and not give up on the way?
Have a set time to work on it. I am horrible at this so I always fall behind and have to play catch up which is hard. If you don’t like how it’s turning out you may want to give up, but instead try something different.
3. Do you keep notes or something to help you remember? (In case you can't scrap every day)
I don’t keep notes but I should! I use my photos to help me remember (so if there’s no photo I forget). I use the Google Keep app for notes when I remember.
4. Any advice on pocket pages?
There are so many in the store to choose from. I like a plain white background because it goes with everything. If you take more portrait photos look for pages with more vertical spots.
5. Other things to think of?
Have fun and be flexible. Decide what you want in the end and find what you like and what works for you.
6. Please enable me with kits/products in the store will help me create!
I love Soco’s Pocket Stories templates (she has five sets so far) and Lynn’s Messy Pockets templates.
https://the-lilypad.com/store/Pocket-Stories-Vol-5.html
https://the-lilypad.com/store/Messy-Pockets-Noted-Bundle.html
I also love month calendar cards. Soco, Paislee Press and MPM are my favorites.
https://the-lilypad.com/store/Calendar-2022.html
https://the-lilypad.com/store/2023-Desk-Calendar-Kit-Sunday-Start.html
https://the-lilypad.com/store/Memory-Pockets-Monthly-BOUNTIFUL.html
Hope this helps!

 

I love that you wake up with a song in your head! That would be so fun to scrap!

 

1. What's best is entirely subjective. I've been doing projects like this since 2009 and I prefer weekly but I know people like different methods for different reasons. I've tried them all. One year I made a monthly calendar grid with one photo for each day and that was cool. It was more of a way to use photos I hadn't otherwise scrapped though. I think weekly is a good rhythm for me; it became a habit. By the way, there are different ways to do it weekly. Some years I picked one event each week on which to focus. Other years each week's two page spread was a collection of unrelated photos from the week, some years exactly seven, other years just a few of my favorites each week.

2. If you tried doing a project - what's your best advice to finish, and not give up on the way? I think the most important thing for me might be choosing a day for my regular scrapping day. After a few weeks, it just became a habit. A routine. So I hardly had to think about it. And the further into the year, the more the momentum just keeps me going. And I never let myself get more than a week behind and caught up quickly.

3. Do you keep notes or something to help you remember? Many years ago I guess I kind of wrote notes by writing captions on my photos in Lightroom, so I could refer to those. But in more recent years, I journal several times a day in a digital journal, so that serves to remind me of details.

4. Any advice on pocket pages? I never cared for them. I prefer scrapping freeform.

5. Other things to think of? For me, keeping it simple and not having much rules or structure was best. I just decided at the beginning of the year what I wanted to do and stuck with it for the whole year. My rules are limited to size of my page, whether I make it single page or a two page spread, sometimes a consistent calendar element, how to decide what photos to use as I described above, and what day I scrap the page each week.

I did not do this kind of project this year, but I did last year so if you want to click back several pages in my gallery to see them you can.

6. Please enable me with kits/products in the store will help me create!

I like putting a calendar on my pages like this. I put these on all my 2021 pages, sometimes layering two when a week spanned two months.


I also like products that allow me to easily mark my photos like this. I haven't used these yet because I only acquired them this year.


Kim Jensen has a lot of cool ways to date our pages like this. I've used these on many of my pages already, and was excited to see the awesomely wide range of years. With other date kits I've done a lot of cutting and pasting to change the year to what I need.

 

1. What's best: Daily? Weekly? Monthly? What ever works for you. I've done various projects over the years. Some have been daily, some have been weekly, some have been monthly. It just depended on what fit the project itself.

2. If you tried doing a project - what's your best advice to finish, and not give up on the way? I just have to keep it up because if I don't, then the project will end. But at times I do have to maybe switch to something else if I get bogged down on the project. I spent so much time working on layouts for a cousin that I was getting burned out. I got caught up in April of this year so moved on to something else. Something for me, a project I've had on my list for awhile. I do keep my albums by themes so that is also how I scrap although some things are chronological within the themes. I paused on my personal project to do a project for October Daily. I'm documenting the colors of autumn for one month... and it was a gorgeous one this year! I'm halfway through it and will catch up on a couple other monthly pages that I do before I dive into DYD.

3. Do you keep notes or something to help you remember? (In case you can't scrap every day) No, I don't keep notes on a regular basis. I let the photos dictate things for me.

4. Any advice on pocket pages? Nope, because I don't do pocket pages. Like Michele, I'm a freeform type of gal although I do use templates, mostly by Scrapping With Liz. She has several collections that make it easy to do projects and the layouts look cohesive. I'm a big fan of her Daily Life templates and for October Daily, I'm using her Layers Upon Layers templates.

5. Other things to think of? Again, Michele said a lot of what I feel!

Decide how you want to do the project and stick with it. For my October Daily, I have no journaling at all on my pages except for the date. I'm letting the photos tell the story. I'm also doing a "5 on 5" project this year. I take at least 5 photos on the 5th of every month. It is a take off of a "12 on 12" I did about 10 years ago. It was easy back then to get 12 photos since I was out and about every day but now that I'm retired, I'm not. On those pages, I do journal about what the day was for me. May not be much but a little look at a day in my life. I also do monthly pages about Peyton. No journaling on those this year, just her various looks throughout the month. Although Peyton's pages have changed throughout the 5 years I've had her. 2 pages on a monthly basis in the beginning since she was growing so much. Lots of journaling on those for those first 3 years. Then in 2020 I switched to 1 page per month using templates that had spots for 12 photos. All months had journaling, some more than others. 2021 was switched to 1 page per month with maybe a line or 2 of journaling. 2022 is also 1 page per month with no journaling.

This is year number 6 for DYD for me. I do all 31 days of the month. A few lines of journaling on each page. A couple years I used templates specifically for DYD, another time I just used a template that fit the photos I had. A couple years I chose kits that fit the photos. Other years I chose one kit to use the whole month. The one thing that tied all the layouts together for each year was how I did the date. Whether it was using a font on each layout or using date elements from the same kits or even using the numbers from the templates, it was a cohesive look.

 

2020 is a whole other project for me! I was an accountant and a number nerd so I started documenting info for my state, county and city. The state still puts the information on a website on a weekly basis so I'm still collecting it. I have decided that I will end this project as of Dec 31, 2022. Basically I have monthly pages and in 2020 I had other pages documenting masks, how much was shut down for about 8 weeks in my state and how different the holiday season was. I also documented vaccines and other miscellaneous stuff. Looks like I'll have 58 to 60 pages for this project. I'm thinking about doing a Shutterfly book for it. It is very light on photos but heavy on information. However, I did do regular layouts of things going on in 2020 for my regular albums and yeah, more went on than I would have thought!

 

This isn't an easy one to answer, because I'm an "all over the place" scrapper. So, here's my thoughts.

1. What's best: Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
Whatever is easiest for you. I tend to start out strong, then wimp out near the end. So I'd say it all depends upon what photos you get. If only a few, do monthly. More than that? Weekly. Daily is hard for me because I run out of things to do.

2. If you tried doing a project - what's your best advice to finish, and not give up on the way?
I've only done one day-to-day project. This year I'm doing one on for every Christmas of my family, starting when my parents were first married to when I graduated high school (not sure on the end date!). I find that topic scrapping is so much easier to do. Two years ago I did all my kid's Santa photos. It worked great for me.

3. Do you keep notes or something to help you remember? (In case you can't scrap every day)
Again, I try. I've got some severe ADD going on, so remembering to do anything is extremely difficult for me to do.

4. Any advice on pocket pages?
Nope. lol!

5. Other things to think of?
Be flexible. But mostly, be forgiving. Give yourself room to break the "rules" and just have fun with it. If you only do three pages, that's better than no pages at all!

Also, I'm finding it's easiest for me to scrap simple these days. If I limit myself to what I can use I don't spend half of the time figuring out what to use. So....

6. Please enable me with kits/products in the store will help me create!

This is what I'm using for this year's project:

 

I've made a family album for almost 10 years! A double-page layout for every week of the year.

The way I make sure I get it done is to have a set-aside time every week that I scrapbook. My time is Sunday afternoon or evening. If I don't have a lot of time I make sure I put my photos in my templates and do a little journaling. I can add all the fun stuff later.

Keep it simple, no matter what you decide to do.
Shop and download products ahead of time...this is where I can get distracted. Shopping is so much fun!
If you get bored with the project, remember why you are doing it. For me, it's for my kids and how excited they will be when we get that printed book in the mail at the end of the year.
Or maybe have a goal to get one page done and then work on something else for a break.

 

I do have one suggestion. Maybe try going for a goal of one two-page spread every two weeks. I've tried to do this more than once but with it just being me, David and the fur babies I just don't have enough interesting stuff to do two pages every week. So if you have enough one week, great. If not, you can still meet your goal.

 

2020 is an incredibly interesting year to document! I'm up to fall 2020 so far. In addition to photos and journaling notes (which are my usual) I took screenshots of news clippings throughout the year and documented celebrating major events and holidays over Zoom. I'm sure you could find that info online if you didn't document it at the time. Between the pandemic and the election and how all of it affected my family, I've had plenty to scrap. Looking back, it's so interesting to go look at a June 2020 page, for example, and see that my 11 year old was seeing friends outside for the first time since school shut down. They were all masked and distanced outside, and it reminds me how little we still knew at that point in time. Even just a few years later, I've forgotten plenty of the details until I look back at my scrapbooks.