Project Life: April 2018.

Today I'm sharing my April Project Life pages. In the beginning of this month winter finally ended and spring started with full force. It was so refreshing to have colourful things to photograph outside again after so many months of grey! Actually these aren't all of my April pages because I travelled to the Ukraine this month and I haven't even started working on the pages documenting this trip yet. Thus, I will be sharing the rest of April later!

Project Life: February 2018.

So I'd say it's about time I share some more of my 2018 Project Life pages, don't you think? Until now I've shared January, March, May and June and I decided that I will share the rest of the months in order, so that means February is first up...

Around here: 34 weeks pregnant.

To be honest I always expected that I would post regular updates on social media if I ever got pregnant, so it has surprised me a bit that I haven't really felt motivated to do so. I think it has to do with my not knowing what the purpose of my social media presence really is, aside from sharing my Project Life pages that is, and also with the fact that I have really struggled to find the time for my old hobbies since we moved to our house a year ago. With that said, I thought it would be fun to post a little update now that I am so close to the end of this pregnancy.

Infertility: Lucky Number 5.

Since I tend to assume that everyone who finds their way to this little blog gets here through my Instagram account, I haven't gotten around to sharing this announcement here earlier. If you do follow me on Instagram this is very old news, but in case you don't I figured it's high time I posted this here as well.

Project Life: May 2018.

Today I thought I'd share my May pages. If anyone's keeping track I now have February, April, July and August left to finish before I am up to date. I hope I can get at least some of those months fully completed soon. The May pages are definitely my favourite 2018 pages so far. I put them together rather quickly and stuck to a few rather basic products. The journalling took the longest, but that is usually the case for me, not because I don't know what to write but because I always end up with a lot that I want to document and it takes time for me to structure each month's stories.

Project Life: March 2018.

Since I've been catching up with a month here and a month there this year I will be sharing my pages a bit out of order. These are the pages I made documenting March. Might be inspiring if you too have fallen behind and still have winter days left to document. And hey, if you can do Christmas in July you can totally do March in August ;)

Project Life: June 2018 + my catch up formula.

I just finished my pages documenting June 2018. It's the first entire month I've finished documenting since January. Because I have a system for documenting my life that lets me catch up fairly quickly once I set my mind to it (read more about it at the end of this entry) I can let myself fall quite far behind. That's not to say I haven't felt guilty for being so behind this year... I've felt especially guilty about not sharing any pages on Instagram or here on this blog for so long. I feel like so many people I used to look to for inspiration have stopped sharing their memory keeping projects this year and it becomes a vicious circle that makes me feel less inspired to share mine, too. But, at least in my case it's not a conscious decision to stop sharing as much as lack of time and I intend to improve, starting with my June pages :)

Project Life: January 2018.

To my great relief I finally finished my January pages tonight. I struggled with these because like I've mentioned on Instagram, I don't really think I've taken a single good photo so far this year. We have been blessed with quite mild winters these past few years so I've been fine with them, however this year has served as a reminder of why I hate winter. January was still not so bad because I was still blissfully unaware that winter was just starting, so you can imagine how little inspiration I feel to document February and March that have just been more of the same. I'm so over the cold and the snow but there's still no end in sight.

Project Life: My finished 2017 photobook.

Project Life: December 2017.

The time has come to share the Project Life pages I made documenting the final month of 2017. Now all that's left to share is photos of the finished, physical book which should be arriving in the mail later this month. I hope we will get some decent light soon instead of these dreary grey days so I can take some photos of it when it arrives!

Project Life: 2018 title page & goals.

Project Life: November 2017.

I am so close to getting my hands on my printed 2017 photobook and I can't wait to see it in real life :) In the meantime, I thought I'd continue sharing my digital spreads. In this post you can see how I documented the month of November. I realized at the end of 2017 that I hadn't used the Everyday Edition that much yet for my 2017 album so I decided to dust it off and these spreads turned out to be some of my favourites out of all the pages I made in 2017. You just can't go wrong with this edition and it truly does stand the test of time. As much as I love Project 52 Fresh which I've been using a lot since it came out, if I had to choose one I would go for Everyday.

Project Life: October 2017.

Today I thought I'd share the five spreads I made documenting October 2017.

Project Life: September 2017.

Usually busy months equal many pages in my Project Life albums, but September was an exception because I didn't have as much time as usual to focus on taking photos. I still managed to fill up twelve pages, which isn't so little and does cover everything that happened this month, but it doesn't reflect that it was our busiest month of the year. It feels a bit wrong to share these pages so long after the fact and I still have the final quarter of the year left to finish and share, but perhaps I can inspire someone who also hasn't finished documenting the autumn of 2017 yet :)

Project Life: 2017 album cover.

Life Lately: December 2017.

Watching | We watched Murder on the Orient Express at the cinema. I hadn't read the book before so didn't really know what to expect but I just loved the dreamy scenery and the acting, and the ending was very surprising! Other than that we mostly watched some Christmas specials/shows on TV throughout the month.

Listening to | Various Christmas music + the music from Så mycket bättre, still.

Consuming | All the Christmas food, of course :)

Reading | Nothing new, just finished some books I had started earlier in the year.

Visiting | The parents for the holidays.

Enjoying | Decorating our house for Christmas for the first time. My first real Christmas tree since moving out of my parents' place! Having friends and family over to visit (soon all our closest friends + family will have visited us at the house at least once!). The beautiful Christmas celebration we had.

Making | Slowly making progress with my 2017 Project Life pages. Hope I can order the book in January!

Looking forward to | Lighter days. And spring (although it's still so far away.) I am sick to death of darkness and making it through the winter months is only getting harder with each year passing. At least having put the winter solstice behind us means it can only get better from here on out :)

1 Second Everyday: (Half of) 2017.

2017 1SE from Diana on Vimeo.

I thought I'd start off this year by sharing the 1 Second Everyday video I put together of 2017. I discovered the 1SE app through Elise Blaha Cripe (check out her videos if you haven't already - they are amazing) halfway through 2016 and immediately knew using it would be one of my creative projects in 2017.

I managed to keep up really well during winter and spring. I did cheat a bit from time to time but I think that is okay - at the end of the year it really won't matter if the video I picked for March 3rd was actually shot on March 7th and so on. I was great at remembering to record my daily clips on days that nothing special happened and I love that these clips capture my everyday life in a way that even my Project Life albums can't.

However, during special events or when we travelled I would always forget to record a daily clip and I would end up filming something random in the evening or another day. On days like that I always carry my dSLR around and somehow that makes me forget all about using the camera on my iPhone. This became especially apparent during our week in Croatia, and when I came home from that trip without enough clips to fill up the days we spent there, I decided to give up this project and pick it up again in 2018. At the time I felt like the clips I'd included so far weren't a good representation of the year since there were important events missing. I also anticipated how busy I'd be during our upcoming move, and figured this was a project I could drop.

I didn't open the app again until the end of December. When I looked through my video of 2017 I saw it through new eyes. The clips that seemed random and meaningless to me at the time now told the story of our final winter and spring in the city. Our everyday life looks very different now, and I am so grateful that I have this little video to look back on. I regret dropping this project, because it would have been so much fun to have documented the moving process in this way, even if I'd end up with some days missing. Seeing this video has definitely motivated me to commit to this project in 2018 and I have asked my fiancé to help me record daily clips during my "dSLR days" :)

Some technical details: I added some free music to the video through the iMovie app. When I tried to create my 2017 video, it turned out that a couple of videos from March were "corrupt" (something I learned by contacting the 1SE support team which offered great help). This meant I had to delete them to be able to create the video. That's why there's a day missing in March. We were in Budapest during those days and I had made a separate little 1SE video of the trip so I replaced two of the missing clips with clips from that, but that's why the dates look funny. In any case, it has taught me to mash a video of every month throughout 2018 to make sure that all the clips are okay, while I still have the original clips saved. Also, there are two days missing in February as well from when I was hospitalized. I decided to leave them empty because it felt wrong to add some random clips to those days.

Anyway, I hope I have inspired you to try this app in 2018! It's not too late even if you haven't started yet ;)