My Project Life Process

DISCLAIMER!  If you are not doing Project Life you might just want to skip this post!

I started doing Project Life not knowing the heck how I'd get it going....I looked at lots and lots of blogs out there and found all kinds of tips. Being organized with this process is very important to me because if it's not....then, for me, it would become overwhelming and then I'd simply give up on it! So I picked up tips here and there and relied on some of my friends to tell me how they "work it".  A big thanks to Donna Gibson, a friend of mine, who is on Becky Higgins' Creative Team.  Her blog can be found HERE....she is doing hers digitally and I just drool each week over how wonderful her pages look!  So neat and clean!  I don't know that you can get that same effect with paper....but I do love the whole paper thing so am sticking with that for now.  She keeps dangling the digital carrot in front of me for NEXT year and who knows...maybe I'll bite! :)
So...this is how I organize my photos for developing.  I don't have a good quality photo printer so I make a trip to Costco or CVS weekly to pick up a few cents worth of photos.  Maybe my husband will see this and take the hint! ;)  (Hi, Dave!)
First of all, I decide which photos to include.  The best tip I read online was to set up an individual folder for Project Life which is exactly what I did:

 
 You can see it highlighted in the above screen shot and is titled 000_Project Life_2013.  I put the zeroes at the beginning of the folder name so that it would be at the top when I go to my Pictures.  That way I don't have to hunt for it.  (Note to self: clean up your pictures folder, Susan....back up those babies and move them!)
Once I open the Project Life folder I have individual folders with weeks labeled so I can easily drop in the pictures for the particular week I'm working on.  You can see photos peeking out in "Week 9".

I have moved the previous weeks folders into "Weeks Done".
Donna mentioned on her blog about a fabulous set of photo templates for 4x6 photos at Lily Pad Designs which can be purchased HERE.  They are just fabulous to work with because they include a white grid overlay that can be used as well as a white frame.  Kinda nice and simple to use.  Templates permit you to use more photos on your layouts by resizing them smaller.  Cool.
Here are my templates:

I made jpgs of all the psd files so I could see what they look like....and I also have a few templates I made myself. 
OK, so then I go to my pictures and determine exactly which photos (as well as how they will be sized) to use and get them ready for upload.

I also keep my planning page handy and pretty much determine where everything will go:

Some weeks have more notes....some less but this planning sheet has become invaluable for me.  And sometimes when I actually get to putting the photos in the page inserts I do switch things around...but not often!

And then I upload those to my photo printing place which this week was CVS.  I've picked up my photos for this week and they are in this envelope....but I'm not showing them to you yet!

And now I'm all ready to SCRAP!  But first I think I'll take a nap!

Happy Crafting!