Month By Month

I can be one of the worst decision makers and thus my late post again. So again I apologise for the poor layout photo further down the post and I will fix this tomorrow in the day light.

I am excited about doing a month by month album this year to record 2010, but I will need to speed up my selection of photos or I will never make it to Dec - lol

This month I tried to take a few photos from different angles, my favourites at the moment always seem to be those taken from above and usually portraits of the children.

Below are two photos I took this month. The first is my favourite of the month and the second is my husbands. They are both of our daughter Jaime. Photography is not something I know much about, but I plan to work on that this year and so as I go week to week I will try to remember to share some of my photos with you as well. It was nice to sit down and look through the photos I took this month. Often I will take them and never really sit down to look at all of them. I will choose some to scrap, but trying to capture the whole month on one layout made me go through the photos more carefully.

As you know I have been tossing around different ideas for how I would approach my month by month. I started out thinking I would use a sketch similar to the layout I used for my 'snapshot of 2009' that I posted last week and repeat it each month.

Then after I made my 'snapshot page I decide this would be too difficult. I do not have a square punch that works well enough to make the page quick and simple, so I was hand cutting all the squares (too much each month to make sure I make it to Dec). Then I decided the divided sleeve from American Crafts (available from the website) would be a good option. Each one has 6 pockets, giving me 12 spaces I could fill with photos, journalling or embellishments. I had settled on this idea until I shared it with my husband, who decided he would like it if I could add an enlargement for something special that had happened in a month.

So ... I replaced one side with a regular 12 x 12 sleeve that will allow me to journal and use enlargements if I want.

On January's layout I have used a mixture of photo sizes and because I printed them at home was able to play around with these a little. (You can do this instore too). I have included a 6 x 4" calendar in the bottom corner and will include this each month. I copied the months activities straight from our wall calendar. Each month I can vary what I have in the pockets to suit and use as many or as few photos as I like. Similarly on the other side I can have all photos, all journalling or a combination of the two.

Thank you to those people who emailed me through the week with comments from my last post. Please feel free to add a comment using the comment tag below. I will answer any questions by replying with a comment. I think it is great to be able to share thoughts and ideas with each other. Some people have let me know they are unsure about commenting on a blog. Please let me encourage you not to be concerned, if you are wondering something chances are someone else is too. Have a great week and I will be back with some scrapping next week using January's patterned paper pack/subscription (yet to be released) :)