Ali Edwards // 2019 in Review Spread
I’ve been doing weekly project life spreads for a few years now and I have yet to finish an album. This does not bother me at all. I’ll typically get a little more than half way. During the next year, I will periodically go back and finish spreads, filling in the gaps. Additionally, quite a few of my creative team projects require working with themed products in advance of the holiday/season they were designed for. Leaving a few weeks/months unfinished allows me to make the best use of the products. All that being said, it’s quite possible I will never go back and finish those weeks. So, when the latest Ali Edwards Story kit was released with a “list” theme, I had the idea to go back and create a 2019 Year in Review spread.
This took a bit of time, but I’m ridiculously happy about the final product. Not because it looks amazing, but because I feel like these memories are in the album. It ended up being three 12x12 Design U page protectors (favorites of mine, but really hard to find) and a 6x12 title page. For the 6x12 page I used a quote from Elton John’s Your Song. I've always thought of these albums as a sort of love letter to my family, a celebration of our daily life. So I suppose you could think of this as a dedication. I used colors taken from the kit and a few embellishments.
To put these pages together I started by asking Siri on my iPhone to show me my favorite photos of 2019. Siri then pulled all of my photos from 2019 in my favorites album. This really reinforced that I need to go through my pictures periodically and mark my favorites. I scrolled through the photos and made an album of my favorite of the favorites (hah). I wasn’t really looking for the most beautiful photos, more photos that represent significant moments. I ended up with 109 pictures in that album, I printed about 60, and then further culled them, ending up with 47.
Next, I date stamped each of them. I have a generic date stamp from amazon that’s a great size and also has an option to stamp the month, two slashes, then the year. I went this route for a few reasons: less work not having to change the date for every photo and it gave me a little creative license to arrange the photos from each month in a visually pleasing way. Next, I spread them all out on the floor to see how many pages this would be.
Knowing each page had 12 slots, I could work backwards. I wanted a filler card in each spread purely for aesthetic reasons. I then laid each page out to see how many empty slots I would have. Those slots would be used for my journaling. For each and every photo I went in and typed a sentence or two. This was probably the most time consuming part of the process. I completed this little project over the course of two evenings. I ended up with between two and three journaling cards for each page. I knew I would need plenty of space to get my journalling in, so I decided to go with straight text boxes on colored cards and zero design elements. Again, I used colors straight from the kit for the background colors of these cards.
You may notice there are more pictures for the last half of the year, and that is absolutely on purpose. As I mentioned, I finished weekly spreads for the beginning of there year. So, in the event I never finish these albums, I have a few important moments to document the last half of the year. I really do love how this turned out and will most likely do this in future years. Let me know if you have any questions!
