31 Things

One of the reasons I enjoy following Ali Edwards is that she stresses the telling of a story, and I have lots to tell.  I joined her 31 Things class (in fact, I did the bundle, so, eventually, there will be 62 topics of my writing), and have been working my way through reflecting on the stories that she prompts.

Ali provides a lot of digital offerings, which always is a draw of mine to her classes.  I have chosen to do a hybrid album, meaning I set things up digitally, yet everything is eventually printed and pieced together in an album.  Ali set this up to be 12 x 12 pages, with 2 "things" on a page.  I decided that I wanted to go with a 6 x 12 album option, cutting each page in half after printing.  I ordered the following items to make this happen:

This We R Memory Keepers album is actually meant to store dies.  I liked the plain kraft cover, and its fairly inexpensive cost, so I ordered it.  I also ordered some Bazill orange peel white cardstock (great price through JoAnn's) and some Becky Higgins 6 x 12 Project Life page protectors.  Other materials needed were my drawer full of washi tapes, my Epson printer that can handle 12 x 12 sheets, Photoshop, MS Publisher, and photo paper.

Because this is Ali's livelihood, I won't use this blog to show every "thing" that we write about.  I did want to offer a glimpse of what I have been up to.  On each page, you are provided with a word as its theme.  You can pretty much go anywhere with the word you like, but Ali offers her pages and journaling for inspiration.  The tricky part of this is that some pages require a lot of space for journaling while others don't.  The other tricky parts include printing pictures to fit the spaces.  For photos, what I typically did was determine my space and create a new Photoshop document for that space.  I would then place my photos in the new file which was already cropped to the correct dimensions and save the photos as .jpg files.  I would place as many of these photos as would fit in a Publisher document (you can also do this in Word, I just like that Publisher lets you move photos around a lot easier without having to change settings) and print an 8.5 x 11" photo page (mainly because the photos were of various, and sometimes not-so-traditional, sizes.  I would then trim the photos and adhere them and the washi tape to the pages.

This was my title page that was simply patterned paper (I believe that is from Stampin' Up!) and the circular "31" provided by Ali and recolored with the help of Photoshop.

The first page shows the basics of how a single page looks in the book.  Ali provided the word art for each day, although she uses stamps in her margins of her pages.  I just really like her writing.

This is what a double-page spread looks like.  Ali keeps these together as one 12 x 12 page, but I really like the look of them separated.

One interesting thing is that I can't seem to adequately get my printer to "bleed" to the edges of the page.  Ali does offer a classroom kit for the tops and bottoms, and I think I will order this for the 31 More Things part of the class, as it's only $5 if you are in the class.  I have to see if it will be allowed, since I am trying to purchase the kit after I purchased the classes.