A Simple Approach to Ali Edwards Week in the Life Project
What is Week in the Life?
Week in the Life is a seven day photo, writing, and documenting project created by Ali Edwards back in 2005.
You spend one week capturing your everyday life in photos and words.
And then you use those materials to put together a mini-album or other project like a photo book or even a video.
Ali’s finished projects are often a 6 inch by 8 inch size using paper, photos, writing, pocket pages, and other scrapbooking supplies.
Her blog is filled with her past projects, photo ideas, journaling prompts, and creative inspiration if you’re looking for more. It’s all there.
Why participate in Week in the Life
I decided to jump in and participate this year for the first time for a couple of reasons.
One, I haven’t felt particularly inspired to take a lot of photos of our everyday life and I knew this would motivate me to do so.
As our kids have gotten a bit older, it hasn’t felt as important to capture every moment. Our boys just aren’t changing as quickly as they used to.
This seemed like a great way to motivate me to take some “everyday” photos of our ordinary life.
Two, I wanted to be part of the community joining Ali.
She has weeks where she captures and collects the memories and then the week when she documents alongside her community.
To be honest, I had a bit of FOMO (fear of missing out!) and I wanted to join the fun.
I put together an album of our holiday memories (inspired by Ali Edwards’s December Daily project), but I don’t do it alongside the community.
I capture photos and memories while they’re happening, but I just don’t spend the time documenting them during the month of December.
For Week in the Life, I wanted to participate as it was happening.
Reminder: it doesn’t have to be perfect!
As with my December memories project, I wanted to keep this very simple. Part of it was just joining for the first time.
I wasn’t sure how I’d do this and because I decided to participate a few days before the week of capturing photos, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do much “research” into what my approach would be.
So I can’t say I’m doing this the “right” way, but I will say this:
If I’ve learned anything from the memory keeping community over the last ten years, it’s that there is no “right” way to document your memories.
When I start to feel overwhelmed by all the beautiful creative projects and incredible photos people are capturing, I remind myself that it’s okay to take my time, take my own approach, and just get a few pictures everyday for a week.
That’s way more than I’ve been capturing, and in the end, I will have documented our ordinary, everyday life.
My simple approach to Week in the Life
1 / Photos
This project begins with capturing the photos.
Originally, I wanted to capture a kind of a “theme” for the day, but that quickly went out the window. Maybe next year!
Instead, I set the very simple goal of taking at least 10 photos each day (and a few video clips - because I love video and so do my kids!).
Will this be “enough”? Well, maybe not to do a full-blown album like Ali and some of the community do, but that’s okay.
I’m just letting this project be whatever it will be, but it starts with the photos.
2 / Words
A huge part of Ali Edwards’s impact on the scrapbooking and memory keeping community is her inclusion of words and stories alongside photos.
I want to make sure I’m filling in the gaps with some stories.
So I set up a Google doc with headings for each day to jot down notes about the day, which I’m trying to stay on top of.
I’m just writing whatever comes to mind - what we did, if anything special or significant happened, what the kids were up to when I wasn’t taking photos of them.
I also keep a detailed electronic calendar, which will help me be able to see what we did each day, and I used the paper planner that sits on my desk to track my work to-dos and the kids’ schedule each day.
I’m hoping this will be “enough” information to fill in the gaps, but again - I don’t know exactly what this will look like in the end, so I just focused on gathering information about our schedule, our daily life, and anything that struck me in the moment.
Really trying not to overthink this one!
3 / Format
I wanted to choose a format for my project. Photo book? Video? Mini album?
I went with a mini album simply because I love putting them together, working with my hands, playing with paper, and it’s not something I do on a regular basis.
I already owned a 6x8 binder and some pocket pages I plan to use, and I went ahead and ordered the mini kit that Liz from Paislee Press designed for this year’s Week in the Life collection.
I’m a memory keeping minimalist, so I don’t ordinarily buy things like this - felt letters and stickers and wood chip tags.
But I do love working with my hands on a project like this.
Similar to my take on Ali’s December Daily project, I wanted to put my photos and words into an album we could flip through.
I enjoy putting those pocket pages together and my kids love flipping through them. So, a mini album it is - and since I likely won’t fill it to the brim with a week’s worth of memories, I’m hoping to continue this tradition, participate next year, and just add whatever layouts I create to my existing album.
Documenting the everyday
The biggest challenge has been reminding myself to take photos - and this is just in the “documenting” phase.
The biggest surprise has been how uneventful our life really is right now.
I wish I’d done this project last May. My husband was deployed, the boys were home full time doing school everyday, and we were at the height of Covid.
There are remnants of that experience.
Our kids still only attend school on a limited basis (three hours a day, four days a week), and while my husband is home, he runs an F-18 squadron, so the guy isn’t in a lot of our photos during the week!
As I write this it’s mid-week while I’m capturing photos. I’ll snap a pic of my keyboard and include it in my album.
I can’t wait to see how this project evolves.
If you want a sneak peek of what my album might look like, you can read about my really simple take on Ali’s December Daily project.
