Day In The Life 2025™ | Special Guest Denine Zielinski

Hey friends! It’s Denine, and I am excited to be here today to share my Story Play Collection: Day In The Life 2025 process and album with you.

I am currently in a season of life where each new day is pretty much exactly the same as the last. Wake up, go to school, come home, prepare for school, go to bed, wake up, go to school, come home, prepare for school…well, you get the point. I’m pretty much living the movie Groundhog Day. I just started a new teaching position, and it takes up all of my time. So, when DITL time rolled around, I was curious as to how it would all play out. Then, I reminded myself that there’s always a story to tell and, I broke out my mini kit to begin gathering ideas. I was so super excited to find that Ali had chosen the lens of “today I noticed” and created these wonderful 3x4 cards for us to tell our stories.

Even in the most mundane of seasons, we all notice things, right? Perfect! I sat down and started brainstorming additional lenses to help me narrow down my focus. I came up with eight different things to notice and created some 3x4 cards to go along the ones in the kit.

This really took the pressure off of me when it came to taking pictures. No timeline. It reminded me of a few years back when we documented our DITL through the lens of colors, and I remember how freeing that felt. Documenting everything by times is fun, as well, but just wouldn’t have been good for me right now. Of course, both lenses (time and noticing) could totally be used together if it fits your current season.

I chose a 4x4 album from We Are Memory Keepers as the home for this DITL. I remember how much I loved doing a little 4x4 album for WITL back in 2022, and I got all excited just thinking about it! Below is one of the spreads from that album, and you can search for my entire post on Ali’s blog if you’d like to see more.

To open my album, I cut a piece of transparency from my stash to 5x5 inches and added the DITL 2025 chipboard piece + a vellum circle from my stash on top. I also added a little hanging tag with Wed on it. I cut that from one of the 12x12 paper from a past Quarterly Scrapbook Kit. I added a silver eyelet and hung it from the center of the transparency with a bulb pin.

On the backside, I added another vellum circle + chipboard piece.

Next up, I resized the digital version of the Basics One Day In This Life 7x8.25 Paper to fit my album, typed my journaling using the prompts, and stamped my date in the date spot. This page is so tiny, and I love it!

Then, I begin the design for each prompt that I created. I shopped my stash for 12x12 papers that I could cut down to use as backgrounds for my 3x4 journal cards. I cut the 12x12 papers into 4.25x4.5 rectangles and chose to add them in by using the holed strips from page protectors. You can also cut the rectangles to 4.5x4.5 and punch holes in them.

The first page of each section contains the prompt card that I created. I added a tiny silver brad to the top of the card for some dimension. That is followed by a divided 4x6 page protector folded in half. These page protectors are from a horizontal 4x6 album that was a part of a DITL release a few years back.

To alert the viewer that the page protector can be flipped open, I added a page tab. For those prompts where I did not have four photos, I slipped a 3x4 piece of patterned paper into one of the pockets. On top of that (outside the page protector), I added either a chipboard piece or a circle cut from the Words Text Quote Circles 7x8.25 Paper + a phrase strip.

I finished off each prompt with another piece of patterned paper + my journaling on one of the Today I Noticed 3x4 Journal Cards. In my video, you will see that I had originally added a tiny silver brad in the center of the zeroes. This caused my pages to be quite bulky on the top since I had another brad on the prompt cards I created. I thought this would be balanced out by the addition of chipboard pieces to the bottoms of the filler cards, but it wasn’t. I ended up removing the brads from the centers of the zeroes and adding a paper star instead.

You can see how my album came together for me in the video below.

I was seriously “in my head” with Day in the Life this year…feeling that my season right now was just too ordinary, too low-key, and too uneventful. So, I have a few final thoughts that I’d like to share if you happen to have similar feelings. Many of these thoughts are things that we all have probably heard before, but every once in a while we just need a little reminder.

1. Reframe ordinary, low-key, or uneventful as REAL. The routines you live right now (your morning coffee, commuting, cleaning up after your cats, teaching prep, even what you eat for dinner) may not feel special today, but in five or ten years they’ll be wonderful reminders of what daily life really looked like in this moment. Life can and does change ever so quickly while we’re busy just living.

2. Think long-term. Documenting the seemingly ordinary day is a gift to your future self. What feels plain now will one day be nostalgic in the same way old photos of kitchens, cars, or fashion seem endlessly interesting years later.

3. Embrace this year’s prompt: today I noticed. It invites you to pause for a moment in the middle of your routine and become more aware of what’s right in front of you. Instead of rushing through the day, it slows you down and helps you see your daily life as a story worth keeping. You can use some of the prompt cards that I created. I have included them in a PDF file below with four additional cards: things that I was grateful for, things that I let go, things that I did for others, and things that I did for myself.

DOWNLOAD DENINE'S PDF

You can see all of the pages in my album and how I worked with each of the prompts in the video below.

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you are on the fence about documenting a day in your life right now – just do it! Take those pictures and tell those stories. You will be glad that you did. I know I am!

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below. I love hearing from you guys! You can also find me on Instagram @denine2 and YouTube @Denine2.

Happy storytelling, my friends!