I am finally finished putting together the spread for July. I’m so behind and I’m not loving doing it this way. The first half of July was still first trimester haziness and then towards the end I emerged from that and began to feel better, but we were super busy. David’s grandmother passed away so we had a lot of family stuff going on, and Meredith had her birthday and party. So far in August I’ve been feeling great (hence the blogging I’ve been able to do) but it’s taking awhile to get all areas of my life on track like they used to be. The scrapbooking schedule is not a priority, in other words.

So here it is. There are two inserts: one has Instagram photos I took on Meredith’s actual birthday and on the back are photos from her party which was the following weekend. For those I relied almost solely on my mom’s iPhone pictures so I trimmed them down and mounted them on paper to fit into the square pockets. The second insert is this blog post and I chose to leave the back blank.

There are many reasons that a monthly spread isn’t working for me, but one of them is that although I’m not taking a TON of photos these days I still have more than can fit, and too many of them are vertical iPhone photos. So this layout is mainly pictures with three chunks of journaling about big events: Meredith’s toddler phases, Gigi’s death, and a pregnancy update.

In putting this together I tried to keep it really simple and easy. A little stamping and similar labels on all the vertical photos to keep them coordinated. I used mostly neutrals on all the papers since there was color enough in the pictures.

Same thing happening on the right side.

Here is the insert for the sort-of day in the life I did on Meredith’s birthday. If I had taken better notes I would have included the times on the photos but I didn’t, so I didn’t.

This is just a closeup of the tab I used for the insert. Nothing exciting but it says it all.

And photos from Meredith’s party. There were a lot more but these give a decent overview. I just wish we had more pics of the rest of the people that were there.

So that’s that! Next weekend I’m going to attempt to get another layout done that includes just the first half of August. My goals with this project starting now are to take more horizontal pictures and to get back to bi-weekly spreads.