Little Something Sunday with Karen Grunberg

Documenting Two Weeks in My Life

I've wanted to do Ali Edwards' Week in the Life project for the last few years but somehow I never managed to actually do it. I liked the idea of documenting an ordinary week in our life, but when it was time to take the photos, I always found an excuse or two not to do it.

At the beginning of 2010, I made a list of 52 things I wanted to do this year and I purposefully put doing a Week in the Life project on the list. I figured now that it was on the list, it was going to get done.

As it turned out, I did it twice.

The first one is a minibook that I put together in advance (if you've ever done a December Daily album, I did this in the same style) and then each day, I picked just a few topics and photographed and wrote about them instead of trying to capture everything. This took the pressure off of trying to make things interesting and it made it manageable since my project was already put together and I was just adding photos and words (all of which I handwrote to make it even easier). This project was more art and fun and didn't try to capture everything.

Here are some photos from that book:

You can read more and see all the pages of this project on my blog.

I thought I was done with this project and felt good about the outcome. But then Ali did it this week and I couldn't decide if I wanted to do it again or not. So I decided to take photos as if I were doing it and make the decision later on. It took me three days but I finally decided to do it fully digitally and very very plain.

This project was the opposite of the other one. I used only photos and words and just five free digital papers. I made 4 pages per day which added up to 20 photos for most days. I wrote all the journaling on the computer and tried to capture most of the moments of our day. Here's a photo of what each day's page looks like:


You can see the full week of photos and words here. And you can download the template I made here.

This project was much more detailed but because it stuck to only photos and words and it was purely digital, it didn't take more time each day than the other one where I had to print and glue, etc. I might still end up printing this one, too but I am still undecided.

The reason I wanted to share both of these was to show you how wildly different the two projects are and yet they are the same idea. Sometimes you can take the same subject again and again and depending on how you choose to create your project, it will look and feel completely different.

Did you ever do a Week in the Life project? If so, I hope you share it with us.