the month of january $

I've learned a lot during the Project 365 process and one of those things I figured out early on was that the weekly scrapbook layouts are a killer. As every week passed, I became further and further behind. Every week I tried to come up with a new layout and it was exhausting. By the end of the year I had fallen so far behind it has taken me three months to catch up. I finally did, but as I finished it up I promised myself I would do things very differently this year. I still want to do a book of layouts at the end of the year, but I need to simplify the process or I will go crazy.

One of the biggest problems I had when I put my 2009 book together was pagination. Some weekly layouts were one page and some were two. This created a big problem when I layed out my book. Many of my one page layouts had to be redone as two page layouts to make everything flow properly. The other challenge was doing a new design every week. It took too long and it working on them became a pain and not enjoyable in the least.

To eliminate both of those problems I checked every digital scrapbooking site I could find and specifically looked for designers who designed templates by month instead of week. Weeds & Wildflowers has monthly templates but they missed the mark for me because they are built for only horizontal pictures. That doesn't make sense to me, so I kept looking. Design House Digital also has month templates, but the individual pages don't have room for journaling - you do all of the journaling at the end of the month. That didn't work for me either. Anyway, I kept looking and I found great monthly templates by Biograffiti at Scrap Artist.

The Biograffiti templates are great. Everything is organized by month and is pre-dated with date elements that I like and that are my style. It only took me ten minutes to put in all of my pictures. The text boxes took a bit longer, but once I had my background papers in place and my first text box made, all I had to do was copy and paste across all of my pages for the month and then enter my journaling.

Anyway, here's what I came up with for January:













Templates: P365: Simple Solutions {Jan. 2010} template set by Biograffiti from ScrapArtist
Paper: Oh Boy! by Carina Gardner & Crystal Wilkerson from Design House Digitals/Jessica Sprague
Border: Life 365 by Gina Marie Huff from Weeds & Wildflowers
Handwritten Words, etc: Studio 365 Weekly Album by Karla Dudley from DigiChick
Font: Pea Hannah Vanilla

February is going to be very similar but using different papers and a different set of dates that come with the February template pack.

I thought I'd post this in case anybody found it helpful. :)