Week 24: The Documented Life Project

June 8-14th, 2014 is one of my favorite weeks of this year. My kids were involved in our city's 100th year celebration, namely, in a community play. Very exciting.

And I want to boast about my spread: I love how this all turned out. The details, the colors, the content. 

I made a tip-in, shown on the right side in photo above. It was hard to get a good photo with proper lighting and accurate coloring today for some reason! This week's challenge was to fill your flap with hearts, so did that. A tower of hearts, let's say.

The flap opens to reveal the last half of the week .

Photo above is the back side of the flap: a scrapbook page! Felt so good working with photos again. :) I met a lady on Instagram who just could not stick to one type of scrapbooky art format, so she combined them all: art journals, traditional scrapbook pages, smashbooks and pocket scrapbooks. So, that's what I've got a bit going on here. :)

For placement of photos and elements, I used an idea sketch by PageMaps that matched the photo sizes and number of photos. If you are a scrapbooker and really struggle with where to place photos and embellish, I strongly recommend trying a map. There are hundreds to choose from. There are other companies that use maps too. Check it out! It totally revolutionized the design of my scrapbook layouts!

Will talk about the details of my pages, and will start with my week at a glance layout.

For this week's header, I filled in the background with Tim Holtz distress inks, using a baby wipe for blending. Then added doodling with a Sharpie and a few colors of Montana acrylic paint markers. Then, something I haven't done in a while, scrapbook paper! I was working on this page at my friend's scrapbook store when I spied this paper that just went absolutely perfect with my color scheme. Cute patterns of clouds and trees. :)

For the day strips of watercolor, I just used a few colors from a cheap brand of a watercolor pan set.

Now, just to warn you, the next set of photos you might find reduntant, but I could not just settle on which ones to include. I just love my flowers and doodles and colors here...

For the flowers, I used a punch set by Martha Stewart. One punch was the larger hydrangea flower, and the second punch was a set of three smaller ones. Decorated with my Montana acrylic pens, waterbrush filled with Dylusions ink and sharpie markers.

punched flowers out of old book paper (which was the DLP's challenge last week)...

neons mixed with retro pastel colors...

random dots make it so playful...

the second page: 

more flowers
some I punched out of Gelli-prints
others out of old book pages

some font play going on

The 13th was a rainy day, so added a cute little cloud with raindrops.

The little orange bird washi tape was a cheap set of three I found at Walmart. Thought it went well with the feel of this layout. This washi tape fastens the tip-in on the inside, so when you open and close it, everything will stay snug and intact. It bends well, but so decorative at the same time. Washi-tape, that is. :)

Now, for the scrapbook layout on the inside flap:

As seen in the photo of my photo grid, I could have placed another square photo beside the top middle, but I chose to go with a decorated square paper since I didn't have another photo to place there. Could have left it blank totally, but that didn't look quite right when I looked at my layout from a distance.

I used a simple index card for some of the embellishing, adding some journaling and doodles, cut out a piece from some patterned paper, punched more flowers out of Gelli-prints and old book paper, added doodles and dots, and last but not least, some watercoloring.

The background is an old Gelli-print I had laying around. Glued the whole thing to the flap with matte medium. 

Another little square of index card, doodles and flowers tucked in among the square photos which I printed off at www.prinkl.com

And now for the top of the flap: last week's challenge was to include text paper and this week's is to cover your flap with hearts. I did both here.

I think I bent one of the punches, trying to punch out some flowers of a triple layer of paper in the top left part of the page. LOL I was somewhat successful with the flowers, I like how you can see through to the other pages. :) 

I pinned this quote some time ago to my Words board on Pinterest, and since I am reading Mother Teresa's story right now to the kids in my homeschool, I figured it was timely and appropriate! The frame is from the same patterned paper set I got from the scrapbook store. It's Prima brand, but can't remember the name of the line. 

The bright yellow swirls were made using a cute set of Target watercolor gel crayons. You color with them, then wet them, creating a vivid design. LOVE! They are in the kids' section at Target! Only $4.50, or something like that!

Hot neon, two blues, white, and an orange Montana acrylic paint marker for the doodles.

 Stampin' Up punch of three different sized hearts. Use this punch A LOT! Very versatile! Again, I punched book paper, and doodled the edges. 

Really love the washi tape edges of this project! Art to the 5th ladies, you are brilliant! :)

The background is another Gelli-print I found that matched my colors so perfectly. You should see my stack of prints! Kinda embarrassing actually. LOL!

Well, finally the end of a very long post! Had such a great time creating these pages. Worked on it really early in the morning, some in the afternoon, some in the evening, and long into the night sometimes...work of love, it is!

Like Ms. Teresa said, 

Spread love wherever you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier. 

Anna

P.S. Do check out her biography. You won't be disappointed, as she's a very inspiring lady. This is the book I'm reading to my family:

Teresa of Calcutta: Serving the Poorest of the Poor