Week In The Life™ 2023 | Special Guest Kim Chaffin

Hello, crafty friends! This is Kim Chaffin or kimdocumentslife on Instagram and kimdocumentslife on Youtube. I documented Week In The Life April 24th through April 30th alongside many in this community. It’s one of my favorite memory keeping projects, and I love the record of life at this moment that we create in these scrapbooks. This was my sixth year playing along, and I’m very excited to have completed my album in record time. It took me only a week to put it together, which is often my goal but seldom accomplished. I’m sharing a few thoughts on what made the difference for me this time around. 

I don’t normally do a lot of prep work prior to a project like this. I tend to think that the experience of the week will inform the way I want to scrapbook it. This year, however, I did do a minimal amount of album set-up in advance. I knew that I wanted to use the transparencies to begin each day. So I printed those,  and I embellished them with large numbers as well as die cuts from the mini kit. I arranged those in my 10 x 8 scrapbook, with each day followed by one of each of the three types of page protectors included with that album. I knew that I would likely have more photos than this, but for now I simply wanted to get the basic structure of the book in place. 

I also knew that I wanted to use the 10 x 4 Journal Cards for my daily journaling and the 4 x 6 day of the week cards to include the voices of my family members. I assigned each person to a day card, and I placed both types of cards in the page protectors corresponding to the correct day.

I spent the actual week documenting, taking photos and writing journaling for each day. I also made sure to get the appropriate person in my family to fill out a card on their day. After the week ended, I was excited to get busy! 

I began with a few introductory pages, including a photo of my husband and me, a screenshot of a front page of the New York Times, and the Highlights page, summarizing our week.

I chose to follow each of the daily transparencies with a full page photo from the day. I normally work on these projects one day at a time. This year, I decided to try batch printing instead, so that I wouldn’t have to frequently change out paper size in my printer. I found that this went much more quickly, allowing me to keep my focus on the task at hand. I added a digital day of the week to each large photo and printed these at 11 x 8.5, because I planned for them to be placed outside the page protectors. 

I also batch printed the journaling on the 10 x 4 Journal Cards. Finally, I batch printed templates, one for each day. The templates were adhered to the back sides of the large photo that begins each day.

From here, I only had to go back and fill in my page protectors with photos and embellish. I added additional page protectors for most days. I’ll share a sampling of the album below, and you can see all of the pages from my full week on Instagram, and a flip-through of the entire album will be on Youtube in the very near future. 

Thank you for documenting with me! I love the inspiration we share in this community!

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8 thoughts

  1. PrinzessinN says…
    05/15/2023

    Dear Kim,
    Thank you for sharing your pages with us. I love them.
    Can you advise which printer you use? Mine makes a lot of problems and I am thinking of exchanging it.
    Thank you.
    Nadia xoxo

    Reply 1 Reply
    1. kchaffin2005 says…
      05/15/2023

      Hi, Nadia!
      I use a Canon Pixma Pro-100 for printing. I love it because it can also print larger format photos!

  2. Jeannew says…
    05/15/2023

    Beautiful album, Kim!

    Reply 1 Reply
    1. kchaffin2005 says…
      05/15/2023

      Thank you!

  3. Ashleighsmom97 says…
    05/15/2023

    Beautiful album, Kim! Thanks for sharing your process!!

    Reply 1 Reply
    1. kchaffin2005 says…
      05/15/2023

      Awww, thanks!

  4. Jackie66 says…
    05/16/2023

    Love your album Kim, thank you for sharing it.

    Reply 1 Reply
    1. kchaffin2005 says…
      05/16/2023

      Thanks so much!