Wrapping Up the Month

Can you believe it's the end of May?  I know it sounds trite to say things like, "my, how time has flown," but seriously, it was a quick month for me. Our students are about to start finals week, and then it's officially summer around here.

My plan was to use my May kit to do all our Mexico pages. While I finished a couple of pages, I didn't yet tackle the "guts" of the project. I'm still editing pictures to size - I'd like to avoid extra printing, so I'm trying to pre-plan what size prints I need for each page. I know I'm using the same basic format as I used for my Week in the Life project, with some 8 1/2x11 pages and baseball card divided pages for each day.

So while I wait to have prints, I decided to use the remainder of my kit (and some other papers I've pulled in from my stash) and make a handful of journal and filler cards for each day. 

I wanted to identify some specific colors to follow each day and found this color swatch from Design Seeds to use as a base.

I'm just drawn to these colors, and yesterday I realized these are the colors of a pottery soap dish I purchased in Akumal and the similar colors I found on these Deja Views sticker sheets I put in my kit.

I'm not sure if I picked those items and their colors inspired me to use this palette, or if I just love this palette and it leads me to pick items with these colors. Either way, it's what I'm working with!

I did a daily intro card with the day number on it, and I made them all look similar. Then I picked one piece of cardstock. sticky notes or patterened paper per day and used it to make the cards. I mixed in white and kraft to draw it all together. I'll add more embellishment to the cards (stamping, brads, etc.) as I fill in the journaling and better know what space I need to fill.

It was fun to make a few cards, but I saved some card bases to finish as the project comes together. And I saved lots of stickers to use throughout the photos, too.  When I actually get my photo prints, the rest of the project should now come together a bit more quickly. Here are some pics of about half of my stack of cards:

It's not much to look at right now, but it will help me tackle the rest of this project in the near future.  And it made my kit contents shrink dramatically.  I'm REALLY hoping to get a good start on it the rest of the project this weekend.  I'd REALLY REALLY like to say I'll complete it this weekend, but knowing my turtle-paced scrapping, it would be a real surprise!

If you are coming to the end of your own kit, consider using some scraps to make a few quick journaling spots or tags. It might result in some time savings later!