Week In The Life™ 2021 | Special Guest Jill Drangsholt

Hello friends! Jill here and I can’t believe it’s my 10th year doing Week in the Life! It has taken many forms over the years, from Shutterfly photo books to Ali's 6x8 albums to several years putting it right in my Project Life album. I used to stress myself out taking hundreds of photos and get very overwhelmed putting my projects together. But eventually, I settled into a system that could scale up or down depending on how motivated I was feeling that year. It is the key that has kept me going year after year. And that is to simply have a goal of documenting at least one morning, one afternoon, and one evening story each day. Some years that meant only 3 photos a day (gasp!!), but those years mean just as much to me as the more robust documenting years. It’s all part of the bigger story.

I just came out of several “lean” documenting years and again set myself a doable goal of at least 3 photos a day. But after a few days, I realized that I was settling into a routine of about 10 photos a day (yay!!). I had a feeling I’d be taking more photos this year, but not enough for a full album, so I decided to try it out using the 6x8 folio that released with this year's One Little Word products paired with two Freckled Fawn pocket page inserts. It ended up being a perfect fit!! The only downside was that it's not as easy to add inserts as in a traditional album, but as you'll see, with some creative glueing, staples, and washi tape, I found a way! 

Rather than using the Week in the Life kit this year, I thought that my three story documenting style would work perfectly with using the Morning and Evening story kits paired with the May Stories by the Month kit for the afternoon stories. This project successfully crushed all three kits and gave me seven mini stories from each kit, which I love so much! For my Thursday evening stories, I even squeezed in three extra stories inspired by Ali's story classroom content. 

This year was definitely product heavy for me compared to previous years, because I had so much fun playing with these kits. I let the journaling cards guide many of my stories for each of the days plus some of my smaller Ali stamps for prompts such as "today I" and "loving." I think this is my favorite year for this project so far and am already looking forward to trying to graduate back to a full album next year. We'll see! 

I mentioned earlier that I did several years directly in my Project Life album, so I wanted to share one of those with you as well. My 2019 project has been sitting unfinished for 2 years, but during this year's prep day I just got it done! That year I really did only take 3 photos a day and had them all laid out in just two spreads. But I had never gone back to do the journaling, so I altered the digital journaling cards from Ali's kit to hold my morning, afternoon, and evening stories. The rainbow of journaling cards make me so happy and sort of make up for the fact that there are zero embellishments on this one. Because this year was pre-covid and pre divorce and I was finishing it two years later, I did all of my journaling using the "I want to remember" prompt. This helped to keep me focused on the good memories from that time. My 2019 project may be lacking in embellishments or creative photography or photos in general, but it's still a piece of my story that I'm so grateful to have documented just as it is. 

My encouragement to all of you reading this is to make the project yours. It doesn't have to look like Ali's or any of her creative team. And it doesn't have to look like how you did it last year. Switch it up, experiment, make it work for YOU. 

Here's Saturday and Sunday: 

You can find me at @jill.drangsholt on Instagram where I will be posting a full walk through video of this album on IGTV this week.

2019 Week In The Life™album photos: 

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4 thoughts

  1. totteacher says…
    06/10/2021

    Oh my goodness! - I am love love loving your creativity with your journal cards! Ah!... *runs to my box of cards ☺️

    Reply 0 Replies
  2. Jeannew says…
    06/10/2021

    Love it and how you used the morning and evening story kits! And your tip to just make it our own and not worry about what everyone else is doing!

    Reply 0 Replies
  3. ScrappinMyHeartOut says…
    06/10/2021

    Thank you for sharing everything life brings each day, in such a beautiful way. I love your WITL!

    Reply 0 Replies
  4. stkong7 says…
    06/12/2021

    I love how you used the folio for this project. Wouldn't it be great if Ali offered some inserts etc for the folio so you can customize your own way.

    Reply 0 Replies