Finishing up Project Life 2012

I wanted to share a few last pieces of my Project Life 2012 albums.  I never shared how I transitioned my albums (I have two for the year) so I wanted to share how I did those.

I ended volume one at the end of June.  Luckily my days lined up and the last full spread actually ended on June 30th.  I still had the backside to fill so I decided to use a full size image. I picked an image that was from June and blew it up to 12 x 12 and added some text at the bottom.  This is actually a photo I took from my phone that does appear within one of my spreads earlier in the month.  I printed this at home and I do not have a large scale printer.  All you need to do is section off the photo and then print.  These are the steps I took.

1. Set up guides within PSE on top of your photo. I add one vertical at 6" so I know where the middle is, one horizontal at 4" and one horizontal at 8". This will help you with the next cropping step. Plus it also helps when you add text so you can space it so the words don't get cut up.
2. Crop three times at 12x4 the top, middle and bottom sections of the photo. Save each of them.
3. Crop each of those sections again twice at 6x4 (the left side and the right side).
4. Print each of the 6x4 sections, you will have 6
5. Cut the middle two photos in half so you end up with 4 3x4 pieces
6. You will need to trim the middle 4 pieces just a bit to fit them in the slots, like less than 1/8". I trimmed the outside edge of the left and right photos and the inside edges of the two middle photos and it still lined up perfectly.
7. You can round your corners if you wish, I opted to keep mine square.

Because I wanted my volume two to start with a full spread I added another full size photo as the into page to volume 2.  Here is that photo. It was cropped and trimmed the same way as I shared above.

I also had one last side to complete at the very end of the second volume.  I knew I wanted to summarize the year in some way and had seen this awesome example linked on a message board I believe, I'm sorry I don't remember which one.  I thought it was an amazing idea to count up what was contained within our year.  The example was used as a way to end one of her volumes so I knew my counts would be pretty high since I was doing the whole year.

I made a list of things that I knew I wanted to include and set up a list on a piece of paper.  I started with the first spread and just went down my list and counted each of these items if they were shown on that given spread.  It took me less than an hour to count everything so trust me it wasn't that daunting if you decide to do this too.  I will say that I did not count every time our faces were shown, I counted the number of slots our photos were in.  I did this because I quickly realized when I hit a collage of multiple images that counting each time our faces were shown would be too daunting.  I did the same thing for food photos, in some cases there was a collage of several images of food, I just counted each collage as one.  It still gives a really good overview of our inclusions so I'm fine with that. Feel free to make up your own rules here, just keep the rules you decide on the same for every item.

Here is what I ended up with.  Another large scale photo shifted to the left with room for my summary in numbers down the right side.

Here it is uncut so you can read it a bit better.

This really brought this project home for me.  Seeing it listed in numbers like this made me realize how full our lives were in 2012, how much we got out and how much fun we had.  It also made me realize that the number of kid less overnights definitely needs to be higher and the number of concerts, plays and sporting events could be higher too.  All things I hope to add in to our plans for 2013.

If you haven't tried adding a full size photo in your album yet, I hope my steps make it easier for you especially if you don't have a large scale printer.

I will be back on Wednesday with my plan for 2013, my first week and hopefully my finished cover page, its still a work in progress.