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 ;)