Week In The Life™ 2023 | Ali's Album

Welcome to a look at my "almost" complete Week In The Life™ album for 2023. I've got just a couple spaces remaining to fill (you'll see those below) and felt like this is a good time to share the entire thing. This is a big post with a lot of photos and a video so grab your favorite beverage and let's dive in and see how this all came together. 

You can see each of my daily word + photos from the documenting week here. 

You can see steps I took for repeated embellishments here. 

You can see my original design plan for this project this year here. 

A few things to share before we go through each day: 

• I really wanted to celebrate + elevate the everyday by focusing on photo enlargements and letting the photos sing their own songs.
• I love the mix of typed + handwritten journaling. Remember that all the typed journaling comes directly from my blog posts during the documenting week. I simply copy + paste what I wrote and add that into my album. Handwritten pieces include some that were done during the week itself and others that I wrote as I was putting the actual album together and some of that writing is more reflective vs. in-the-moment. I love that combo of the two. 
• This project is a labor of love from the documenting to the printing to the embellishing. Let it take its time in coming together. 
• Remember that you get to choose the right level of embellishing for you in this season of your life. With this project I tend to do "light" embellishing (compared with a project like December Daily®) and that works for the way I want to tell the story of my week. 
• I am so, so, so happy that I used my DSLR camera for this week. It re-ignited a love for me and I feel grateful to this project for reminding me how much I love looking through that lens. 
• I loved diving in to my stash for some sentiment cards and word phrase stickers. 
• Definitely one of my favorite parts of my project this year was inviting our teens to add their voices via photos texted to me each day. I had set up a page for that during our Prep Day but when it came down to documenting those photos I decided I wanted to do something different and used one of the layered templates from this set. I love how it turned it especially since those were all phone photos. 

What's not done yet? 

1. Individual family photos that will be cropped into circles for one of the intro pages at the beginning of the album. 
2. Some of my ephemera pages need more pieces added. I'm simply adding things as I find them in the mail, around the house, etc. 

Feel inspired after checking out this post? This is a project you can do at any time! Pick a week and go for it. It is so worth the time. 

Interested in learning more about the entire process of documenting a week in your life? Check out my Storytelling With Week In The Life™ workshop. 

Here's the overview video: 

Here is a look at my album via photos: 

This is where I still need to add circle photos of each family member. 

These photo strips are 1.25 inches x 6 inches. 

In yesterday's embellishment post I shared about how I added this photo + words to the back of the highlights page and included "reflective" writing as I looked back on the week as a whole. 

MONDAY

One of the things I did different this year was cut up some 6x8 page protectors to create 3x4 pockets to hold sentiment cards from my stash. As you'll see below I added those to a number of my full page photo enlargements (ones that are inside a page protector). I loved adding in some cards from my stash - you could easily add more writing to the back or use regular journal cards if you had additional writing you wanted to do. 

The page protector pockets are adhered with red line tape. 

As you'll see below I struggled to fill these in each day. But not to worry, I'm simply adding more from the weeks after the documenting week. It's all related to this current season of life. 

On the back of each of those ephemera pages I added a full page photo with a chipboard label and "loving this life" stamped. 

Here's the template I ended up using for the "from the kids" page. I love being able to see their full photos (vs. in pockets like I was thinking originally) and love the nod to the technology that delivered that content to me. I filled in the additional phone spaces with extra photos from my day or screenshots. 

I went with another layered template - part of the same package as the phone page - to showcase more photos (love the contrast between the small photos here + all the other enlargements). I adjusted this one each day depending on the number of photos I had for the day and, on most days, I added journaling here as well. 

This is the journaling that is all copied + pasted from my blog posts during the documenting week. 

Journaling continued from the page before. 

I added stickers from the Main Kit to some of my 10x4 photos. 

Loved diving in to my stash to add word/phrase stickers to the vellum tags from the kit. 

TUESDAY

And repeat. Love repetition in this project specifically. 

WEDNESDAY

Large chipboard words were a great fit for some of my full page photos. These are from the Mini Kit. 

For Wednesday I had just enough photos for one page of a photo grid so I decided to create a custom page for my journaling with a circle in the center for one of the plastic circles. 

THURSDAY

On Thursday I started the journaling on the 10x4 card and then finished that up on a 4x6 custom journal card (see below). 

Here's where the journaling is continued from the 10x4 card. I added this to the album using a page attacher. 

Sweet little card from Brandi Kincaid's Extravagant Hope. 

FRIDAY

For Friday I was able to combine a couple rows of photos on the template with journaling below (and continued onto the 10x4 card). 

SATURDAY

Yep, still need to add stuff here. 

For Saturday and Sunday I had fewer photos and words so I took out the 10x4, 2-pocket page protectors. Make it fit your story. 

SUNDAY

Ah yeah. I can't wait to look back at this one again in the future. I feel like it's a really decent representation of life around here in this season of teenagers. 

Thank you for being a part of this memory keeping community! You've got this! 

SUPPLIES

• Week In The Life™ Main Kit (just a handful of these remaining at the time of this post)
• Week In The Life™ Mini Kit
• Star Album 10x8
• Week In The Life™ 10x8 Layered Templates 
• Days Of The Week Transparencies
• Multi-colored Plastic Circles
• Number + Journaling Inserts
• Alpha Sticker Bundle
• Days Of The Week Journal Cards
• Phrases + Circles Stamp Set