Project Life, Week 5 (our family holiday)

Today is all about Week 5 – the week of our family holiday in Gerroa, on the south coast of New South Wales. It was a rainy and grey week, but we still had a wonderful time away. In fact, the weather made for some rather lovely photos; the light on such grey days is so much easier to work with than when it’s bright and sunny. Anyway, I’ve been inspired by Elise‘s simple Q&A format for her Project Life posts this year, and with her permission, I’m going to replicate it somewhat here.

What happened this week?
The five of us drove down to Gerroa and stayed in a beautiful holiday house right by the ocean. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the main living area turned the scenery into stunning works of art that greeted us every morning and stayed with us all day. From the comfort of the house, we watched storms roll in over the water and we saw every day how the headland changed its mood and colours depending on the time of the day. We’d brought a small box of toys to keep the boys entertained, and we were also quite lenient in letting them watch a healthy dose of afternoon television. Meanwhile, Rick put the Nespresso coffee machine to great use, drinking up to four or five cappuccinos a day! He also cooked some amazing dinners for the two of us that week. At the end of the day, it was all about spending time together as a family, and that’s exactly what we did.

Number of pages and inserts?
This was the first time we’d been away as a family in over a year and a half, so I wanted to make sure I did a proper job of documenting it. As such, I went all out. Because I didn’t want to create a separate album, I allowed myself six spreads (that’s twelve pages!) in our main Project Life album. In addition, I ended up with three 8×10 inserts (front and back).

Anything different about the spreads?
Instead of my usual point-form summary of the week in the first 3×4 pocket, I wrote a small paragraph describing our week away. And then, spaced throughout the twelve pages, I placed additional journalling cards – one for each day we were away. On each of these, I wrote an additional small paragraph about that particular day. This served as an effective way to visually break up all the photos, plus it was nice to include some journalling, which is something I don’t do much of in our normal week-to-week Project Life spreads.

Ratio of DSLR photos to iPhone photos?
As you probably already know, I usually only include iPhone photos in my main page layouts. However, I made an exception for our holiday documentation and included a handful of photos of the boys that I’d taken on our DSLR, as well as a couple of shots that I’d taken of myself in the mirror using the EOS. Still, of the ninety-one photos across the twelve pages, only eight of these were EOS ones.

How did you process the photos?
Some of the photos were processed on my iPhone using VSCO Cam, but mostly, I used the VSCO Film presets in Aperture to process the majority of the photos. Kodak Portra 800+ is currently my favourite. A couple of the square photos set in white space (like the one of the boys’ bedroom with the giant fish on the wall) were processed with Instagram.

What were the inserts for?
The inserts were mainly collages filled with some of my favourite photos taken on the EOS. Even though I know I’ll be creating a photo book with the EOS photos down the track, the collages mean that those moments still form part of the Project Life story.

Supplies used?
Becky Higgins Design A page protector; Becky Higgins 8×10 vertical page protectors; Kodak 210gsm glossy premium photo paper. All photos printed on the Canon MP630 Pixma using genuine Canon ink.

Overall thoughts?
I love these pages. Family holidays are so precious, and I’m really happy I was able to document our time away in this way. Even though I usually lean towards minimalism, I honestly don’t mind at all that I used so many pages and inserts. I also love the resulting grey colour palette, which I feel sets these pages apart from my usual layouts. Grey rocks!

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Other posts you might be interested in reading:
My weekly Project Life process from beginning to end
Tips on taking photos for Project Life
What you need to get started with Project Life

You can read all my Project Life posts here.

(Linking up with The Mom Creative.)

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Project Life is a system created by Becky Higgins that is designed to simplify your efforts to document life and help get your photos into a book. To learn more about the product and how to get started, click here.

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Tagged as: memory keeping, project life