Warning: lots of scrapbooky stuff coming, enjoy the layouts if you don’t want all the details!

How do I get from the Picture of the Day to those lovely photo books? A little bit at a time. The goal is to complete a layout containing the week’s photos before the following week is over! I use my blog as a reference to get the correct photos, then I copy and paste the journaling in to the layout. One of my favorite designers has made this whole process easier by offering a monthly 365 kit. You can go check out Vicki’s blog and 365 offerings for yourself! At the top of the store page, there’s a link to her blog.

Tips for making 365 easier:

1. choose a kit and use it for the full year, choose one with parts that come out each month (like Vicki’s), or choose a really big kit. (check The Daily Digi for kits, you’ll need to subscribe, well worth it!)

2. load your photos on to a blog or gallery with your journaling every few days

3. choose a font to use for the whole album, I chose Lucida as it has cursive and print choices

4. make some weeks in to a 1 page layout to save on printing costs down the line, see weeks 3 and 4 for an example

5. find 5 or 6 templates to use and rotate them, don’t reinvent the wheel!

6. don’t be too hard on yourself with daily photos, nothing is too mundane for your photo! Don’t you wonder what your room looked like when you were a kid? Have you ever photographed the inside of your fridge or documented a temperature or gas prices? If you forget a photo, grab one from another day and use it. Try not to make a habit of this though!

7. As you pull your photos off of your camera, put them in to a folder by month. Your computer will show you what day they were taken.

8. Make sure the geo-tagging feature on your phone and your camera is turned off! This is especially important if your pictures are on-line.

9. If you are a paper scrapper, leave your album kit and journaling supplies out. You could also print your photos each week as a collage and just mount it with the journaling to save time.

The Layouts

I started by doing the first 2 days of the year on one page to get my weeks to go Monday to Sunday.

This is week 2. I’m still struggling with getting the layouts consistent from week to week. I will go back and tweak these a bit, I want to add a page frame on this layout and change the photo frames on week 1.