I recently participated in this year’s Week In The Life project. Keen to learn more about my daily habits, it was a great way to get a snapshot of my life. Here is what I learnt and daily documenting tips I picked up during the process.
The Week In The Life project is a daily documenting idea dreamed up by Ali Edwards. The idea is to document your life for a whole week and capture your daily movements through photographs and journaling. Yep! I mean scrapbooking your week in an album. Scrapbooking is now referred to more often as memory keeping and has changed a great deal over the years to include more modern documenting methods, tools and techniques to record your daily lives.
Now documenting our lives is cool again as most modern ‘memory keeping’ tools and materials are now made and designed by amazing upcoming creatives, artists and illustrators.
I was interested in participating in this year’s Week In The Life as I was keen to learn more about my daily habits. It’s also a great way to get a snapshot of your life. I can see by participating in it once a year, it would be fascinating to see how much your daily habits and weeks can change over time.
Here is what I learned from participating in the Week In The Life, as well as a peek of my album and daily snaps:
Being OK with me
I’m not a fan of taking selfies of myself. So it was a personal process to be ok making myself the focused subject. Look I’m happy I did learn how to use that good old automatic timer though!
Beauty in the mundane
While we take so many more snaps daily than we did a few years ago thanks to Instagram and our need to photograph everything! It was interesting to see the beauty of a daily mundane chore or habit that you may not regularly think about photographing or capturing. Such as the commute to work or your essential must-need daily items.
Use your stash
Documenting, Ok scrapbooking is a big business again. But while there are SOOO many awesome products available now, you don’t need all the latest documenting tools, project cards, stamps to make a lovely album. I had fun using some stationery items from my stash or previously bought and hoarded papers and stamps to fill my album pockets.
Work with your personal talents
I used some of my own creative talents in documenting the week such as illustrating a map of my week in a flow chart.
People rather than things
I realised I need to start taking more photos of people rather than things. Because it’s the people that matter to me the most at the end of the day.
Print is back
The enjoyment I felt printing out photos again was amazing. It’s nice to get hands on with documenting.
A win
It was a good excuse for my (camera shy) hubby to let me take photos of him (he never lets me) as well as some of our meals before we ate (I normally get a ‘really’? look if I ever do this) which is not often by the way! I do rather enjoy eating my food than spending hours composing a foodie photo.
Finding a past crafty love
I was obsessed with rubber stamping as a child and it was great revisiting a well loved craft again. I have so many ideas for more documenting projects. It’s definitely a craft I could get used to doing more.
Working together
Most people participate on this project at the same time. So it was nice to see other people sharing their progress via Instagram or seeing video walkthroughs of other peoples finished albums on You Tube. So even though I was doing this project alone at times it felt I was crafting with others, all over the world. It’s always nice to feel part of a community.
A little tip
There are so many different ways to get your Week In The Life documenting finished. What helped me was tackling the journaling part of the project at the end of each day. Because you may not feel like playing catch up if you have a whole week to document (we all have busy lives after all).
I also found it easier to be creative with only using a few cards, stamps, papers etc. or it can get quite overwhelming. Minimal tools and materials is the key to success.
Have you participated in the Week In The Life project or does it sound like something you would like to give a try? Would love to know in the comments or feel free to share a tip!