I am so excited to share my first pocket pages with you guys! I am in my fourth year of doing my personal Project Life album and it is my most favorite project I do and the most important to me.
I have been wanting to change it up the last year or two and finally took the plunge this year. I do mine monthly now and I also use October Afternoon’s 3×3 pockets. This change has been wonderful for me. I pick my photos using Lightroom. After I do some quick edits, I add the photos to my Quick Collection, then from there, I print in various print sizes I created. I do an overview of the month, so not every photo I’ve taken throughout the month will make my spread. I keep it to two pages only. I’m thinking of starting a separate pocket style album. That and layouts to fill in more details.
I used mostly the new Hip Kit Pocket Page March kit. But mixed in the Color Kit and Embellishment Kit. Another change of something I have wanted to do for awhile, is keeping my spreads flat. Paint, stickers, mist, rubons, all of these still add so much detail but no bulk.
I love a mix of photos showing all of us, our lives. But I also see this as leaving my mark. Almost my replacement for my long-lost art journal. I used the stencil and the mist and paint from the Color Kit, including some of me using my phone or selfie stick.
I loved using the entire sticker sheet from the Pocket Page kit here. I just trimmed it down to fit inside the pocket, and added one of the sentiment stickers over it.
I print some of my photos to not fit the entire size of the pocket, and used the reverse side of some of the cards to apply lines of paint and the used the large circle stencil from the Color Kit.
So many ways to still add so much texture and interest to your spreads without the bulk. I used the rubons here from the Embellishment Kit with the labels from the Pocket Page kit.
For the cards that I used from the kit, I just trimmed down to make them work and then added typing, die cuts, stickers, stitching, etc. (see my typo…LOL…all good, I know what I meant)
The only embellishment that had a little more bulk that I added were the sequins from the kit. I just stitched them into place over one of the photo overlays from the Embellishment Kit.
Thank you for joining me today and letting me share my personal Project Life with you.
This looks amazing, Patricia! Thanks for sharing!
Hi Patricia. I love all of the great ideas I see in your work and am itching to try some new things myself. So I have a specific how-to question for you and anyone else who would like to share their answers.
I love to journal and write…anywhere, on any thing, at any time. How do you guys type your journaling bits onto the small pocket-page cards or on pieces of scrapbook paper or on layered pieces of ephemera used in cardmaking, scrapbooking, art journaling, and papercrafting—basically, on any type of paper item that is significantly smaller than the various standard sizes of paper (i.e., letter, legal, A4) that we normally send through a laser or ink jet printer?
Do you tape the smaller piece on which you want to type your journaling notes onto, say, a sheet of standard letter size of 8.5″X11″ copy paper, use word processing software (such as MS Word) or desktop publishing software (such as Adobe FrameMaker) or even graphic illustration software (such as Adobe Illustrator) to design the font type/size/format and the placement of the journaling you type into the software, and then print it out onto the copy paper with the hope that you have lined everything up correctly and precisely so that your journaling bit prints exactly where you want it to be onto the pocket-page card or whatever small piece of paper you’ve taped to the copy paper that runs through the printer?
Or is there a much simpler way to do this that I am not thinking of?
Printers can easily and often do jam when you try to run cardstock or some of the heavier watercolor papers or any paper that is thicker than usual through the rollers of the printer, depending on how your laser or ink jet printer feeds the paper through, prints on it, and rolls it out. For example, my ink jet printer feeds the paper from the front tray and then rolls the paper over a 180-degree rotation to print on what was the underside or backside of the paper when it was in the feeding tray. It then spits the printed paper out of the front of the printer a couple of inches directly above the feeding tray, hence the 180-degree rotation of the paper inside the printer while printing. As such, my particular printer jams if I look at it sideways, so you can imagine the difficulty it has whenever I try to coax it to print on cardstock or watercolor paper.
So, is my assumption of the process I *think* you guys are using to type your journaling bits correct? Or do I need to buy a manual typewriter at a thrift store or on eBay? (I have no idea where to get such a thing. LOL.) Or do I need to upgrade to a better printer of some sort that can handle thicker and/or a variety of smaller sizes of paper? (I don’t know if such a printer exists.)
I appreciate any help, suggestions, answers, or advice you or anyone else here can provide to me about how to type my journaling onto these wonderful papers, cards, and pieces of ephemera of various shapes and sizes we get in our Hip Kits. I feel like there is some trick to this that I am missing and that it is probably far more obvious and simpler than I imagine. So thank you for your patience and understanding. I see many people successfully accomplish their typed/printed out journaling, and I would very much like to do it too in my own artwork.
I look forward to anyone’s responses. Thanks again!
Cheers,
Christina 🙂
Hi Christina. Great question. My printer jams too much but have used. Here is a video of another layout I made and you can see how I do this process. Hope this helps.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l8MvvgwujVE
Patricia, thanks so much for the link to a video you made in which you show how to print/type on journaling cards, pocket cards, and other odd-sized pieces of paper we use in our projects. The process video is a huge help for me!
Cheers,
Christina 🙂