Ali Edwards's Blog, page 113
May 12, 2020
Week In The Life™ 2020 | Monday Words + Photos
Welcome to Week In The Life™ 2020.
A few thoughts on the process from today:
I almost felt like today was a warm-up. I feel rusty with my DSLR but super happy I've chosen to use it this week. I love the practice of playing with settings and seeing what happens when I try stuff. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and I'm here for all of it. I reminded myself multiple times today that I don't have to scramble to get a photo of every single thing today - that whatever I ended up taking photos of over the course of the day/week is going to be just fine. It's quiet when the kids aren't here and I definitely want to capture that in my images. They'll be back here again on Friday and this might be the first year I have more photos on those weekend days vs. during the week. I felt super comfortable using the "loving" story lens today and I really enjoyed thinking of things to add to my list. I don't feel at all like I have to have photos to "match" each one of my journaling numbers to my photos. It's all of it coming together that tells the story of my day.Here's a look at my Monday journaling (this is a printable from a download that was included with the Week In The Life™ Prep Day):
I might journal more or I might just make this be the bulk of my journaling this year for this project. When flipping back through my past albums I definitely liked when I added text to my photos so I might just do that at the time I print them out (add a bit more context or tell more of the story).
Here's a look at my day in photos:
You are invited to share a link to your Monday words + photos in the comments below.
May 11, 2020
AE Creative Team | PROGRESS Story Kit™
This month we have been investigating and documenting stories of progress in our lives. And today we are delighted to share the projects by our awesome Creative Team using the PROGRESS Story Kit™.
And as a reminder, tomorrow, Tuesday, May 12th, is the last day to subscribe and receive the PROGRESS-themed products.
As always, we are so grateful to our Creative Team for sharing their stories and creative inspiration with all of us!
May 4, 2020
Week In The Life™ 2020 | Prep Day Coming This Saturday
Week In The Life™ for 2020 starts next Monday, May 11th, 2020.
I am so looking forward to telling stories alongside you coming up next week. It's such a unique time in all of our lives and an awesome opportunity to document what our real life looks like right now.
To help get us all in the mood we are having a Week In The Life™ Prep Day this coming Saturday, May 9th from 9am to 4pm. For those of you who participated in our December Daily® Prep Day the format will be similar.
Here are the details:
Join the Week In The Life™ community for a fun online prep day on Saturday, May 9th. Use this opportunity to finish past Week In The Life™ or Day In The Life™ projects or begin brainstorming ideas you might want to implement in your 2020 project. The classroom will open at 8:30am Pacific with the first live video happening at 9am Pacific. The last live video will be posted at 4pm Pacific.
Cost: $5
At the top of each hour Ali will be live from her office (these will be recorded + available for viewing later) chatting about a specific topic related to this project for 10-15 minutes. The goal is to give you a few ideas and then send you off to work on your own projects, clean up, prep, etc.
Here's a run down of the schedule:
9am Pacific: Welcome + Reason Why10am Pacific: Make A Plan For Documenting Your Week11am Pacific: Telling Your Story With WordsNoon Pacific: Product Play Idea #11pm Pacific: Telling Your Stories With Photos 2pm Pacific: Product Play Idea #23pm Pacific: Bringing It All Together In An Album4pm Pacific: Wrap Up
Each topic will have it's own Lesson within the Classroom. Inside each lesson you'll find the live video, a free download, a challenge, and a spot for conversation in the comments section of the lesson. Live chat will be available for anyone who wants to converse back and forth during the live event.
You're invited to come hang out and get ready for a fun week of documenting!
If you have specific questions you'd like me to address you can let me know in the comments below!
April 27, 2020
AE Creative Team | April 2020 Stories By The Month™ Digital Kit
Happy Monday friend. We are kicking off the week with some some creative inspiration from our awesome Creative Team using the April 2020 Stories by the Month™ Digital Kit.
As always, we are so grateful to our Creative Team for sharing their projects and the stories of their lives with us!
April 24, 2020
Affinity Photo iPad App Tutorial with Kelly Sill
Today I'm happy to welcome back Kelly Sill to share some new ways you can use my products on your mobile devices.
As many of you know, I do most of my scrapbooking from my computer or at my table using a mix of digital and physical products. Because of that I love to bring you ways you can use my products with other platforms. Today Kelly is going to share about an app program called Affinity Photo. One of the coolest things about this program is that it is able to handle layered PSD files. For this tutorial Kelly used the new layered templates from the Week In The Life™ Digital Collection.
Read below for more information and three tutorial videos from Kelly!
Hi friends! It’s been a little over two years since my last guest post for Ali where I demonstrated how you can use her digital products in the Project Life App and LetterGlow. I am happy to be back with new tutorials, this time focusing on a very powerful mobile app for iPad, Affinity Photo.
Affinity Photo by British company, Serif, was released for iPad in June 2017. It is a fully-functioning photo-editing app that supports layered PSD files! I have been using Ali’s digital files with this app for almost 3 years and I can’t wait for you to dive into the videos to learn how you can do the same!
Affinity Photo is available in the Apple Store for $9.99. There is no subscription needed! The has versions for both OS and Windows platforms making it available for your desktop computer. You can read more about the desktop versions of Affinity Photo here.
Unfortunately Affinity Photo is not available on the Android platform. However, that shouldn’t discourage those on Android devices from giving mobile memory keeping a try. There are several apps out there for Android that allow you to use Ali’s digital products. Check out the Over and PixelLab apps. While you cannot use layered PSD files in them, they will allow you to use digital elements!
I have recorded three tutorials to help you get started with Affinity Photo. They are by no means a complete education on the app, as there is a pretty decent learning curve. I am, however, providing you with what you need to move forward with confidence in creating scrapbook pages using Ali’s digital products within the app. Each video I recorded builds on what you learned from the previous.
This video covers where to store your files, how to copy and paste digital kits from your computer to a cloud-based app and how to download kits directly from Ali’s shop to your iPad and unzip them. We also explore Affinity Photo’s user interface and go through the process of opening a photo in the app.
Here we discuss how to crop a photo, add digital embellishments to a picture explore the Effects Studio, and take a more in-depth look at some of the tools and features Affinity has to offer.
In this 40-minute video I will walk you through how to open templates in Affinity. We will learn how to “clip” a photo to a shape, set up a color palette, add text to our layout, and more.
Here are some page samples created in Affinity Photo using the Week In The Life™ Layered Templates:
Once you have viewed the videos and you are starting to feel comfortable with Affinity, you may want to check out my other videos on my YouTube Channel where I go into greater detail of how to add dimension and texture to digital embellishments. Even though the products I use are from the Week In The Life™ digital collection, you can apply it to any of Ali’s collections. I also have a tutorial of how I organize Ali’s kits in iCloud Drive! Links are below:
Chipboard and Puffy Stickers
Adding Texture To Embellishments
Digital Kit Organization
I am very passionate about helping others to use mobile technology for documenting their photos and stories. I would love to help you any way I can! If anyone has questions please feel free to connect with me through the following outlets:
Blog: pixelstopages.com Instagram: pixelstopages (this is where I share all things mobile memory keeping) or kmsill (my personal feed)
Facebook: Pixels to Pages
Email: kellymsill@gmail.com
April 22, 2020
Week In The Life™ 2020 | Susan's 4x6 Album
Today I'm super excited to bring you a Week In The Life™ project that I saw last week on Instagram from a member of our community named Susan (you can connect with her via her Instagram account here). I asked her if I could share her story here on my blog and she said yes! To keep things simple I just had her send me the images she had included in her story and I'm adding them here into the post.
Susan had a really creative way to put together her Week In The Life™ album for this year in a 4x6 size using binder rings and small string tags to bind the pages to the rings along with the kit. I completely LOVE how she used a circle punch to punch holes at the end of some of her pages to create pockets to hold additional content (totally want to remember to incorporate that idea into my album this year).
Just a reminder that I'll be documenting my week coming up with a beginning date of Monday, May 11th. As always, and just like Susan did here, I encourage you to make it your own! There's still time to order any products you might need to support your storytelling here.
Thanks so much for being willing to share with us here on my blog Susan!
Let's dive in:
Thanks again Susan!
April 21, 2020
Chapters Digital Freebie
Hey Friends! I started the year with a couple of these "chapter" designs in the Stories By The Month™ digital kits and then forgot to continue adding them to the designs. I decided to just go ahead and make the full year of designs and give them away to you guys as a thank you for being a part of this community. Enjoy!
Download the digital package here.
Please note: If you are viewing this in your email you'll need to click over to the actual post in order to download this digital package.
April 17, 2020
AE Creative Team | May 2020 Stories by the Month™ Physical Kit
Stories of Love. Stories of thankfulness. Stories of showing up to life. Today we are delighted to share some creative inspiration from our awesome Creative Team using the May 2020 Stories By The Month™ Physical Kit.
There are so many storytelling possibilities in this little pouch of products. As always, we are so grateful to our Creative Team for sharing their stories and creative inspiration with all of us!
April 16, 2020
New "My Story" Kit | My Adventures
Last year we released
a new collection called "My Story" which is designed to encourage kids (and kids at heart) to document their stories.
Today I'm happy to let you know that we have another fun kit to add to that original collection - this one is called My Adventures.
The new kit includes 3x8 prompted journal cards with the holes already punched, a set of fun stitched felt icons, a sticker sheet, a chipboard sheet, and a 3x4 stamps.
Here's an overview video for a look at what's included in the My Adventures kit:
We do still have the original My Story Starter Kit available along with some fun extras!
This is a great starting place for kids who want to document their own stories. You can see the full collection here.
Also, here's a fun video we did for that initial launch with Anna + Audrey:
They are already so much older than when we originally filmed this video. Man, it goes so fast.
Let me know if you have any questions about this release!
Pieces Of Us | Morgan Beal
A few weeks ago, Ali invited all of us to join her in community creative adventure: Pieces of Us. The main goals of this self-portrait project were to get ourselves into our stories (literally) and to play + experiment + practice loving ourselves and developing our own photo voice.
One of the coolest things that came out of this project was the variety of different ways that people documented their stories. Some people made layouts, some used travelers notebooks, some used albums, etc. I loved seeing the variety!
Several of our Creative Team members joined in this community adventure and we'll be sharing those with you this week.
Today we are delighted to share Morgan Beal's approach to documenting her photos and stories from the day.
We love seeing how you are creating with these photos and stories! So please keeping sharing your projects using the #aepiecesofus hashtag. And as always, thank you for being part of this amazing, wholehearted community of storytellers.
