documenting halloween costumes through the years
Sara Wells from Our Best Bites is a fantastic documenter and her go-to memory-keeping system is Project Life®! She recently put together a Halloween-specific project that we just adore and I'm pretty sure you'll love it too!
All you, Sara!
My family loves Halloween and I wanted to document my children's costumes through the years so we could remember how everyone dressed up and see how they grow! I turned to my trusted Project Life App because I knew I could do it quickly and easily. I started with a 10 x 10 Black Faux Leather Album and a pack of 10 x 10 Page Protectors. For my cover page, I used the Word Swag App, which easily creates graphic font designs and has lots of stock photo backgrounds available (like those gorgeous fall leaves). I saved it onto my camera roll and easily uploaded it to a page template.
Obviously my Halloween photos were all on my computer, so I took some time to round them all up, organize them by year, and then air-drop them to my iPad. If I'm using my PC, I just upload my photos to Amazon Cloud Drive to access them on the app! It took mere minutes to whip out quick pages, simply documenting the year and the costumes, and sometimes a quick note about something interesting that year.
I actually didn't use a specific Halloween kit for the journaling cards, but rather peeked through a variety of kits and pulled out cards with black, white, and orange on them. There are actually quite a lot of those!
Sometimes projects like this that span over a number of years can be overwhelming when you're thinking about searching for the photos in years past. My advice to people who have those feelings of overwhelm for individual projects like this, or memory keeping and journaling itself, is always the same: start in the now. Don't start trying to create baby books for your now teenager and hope that you eventually make it to current day. Instead, start documenting the teenager as a teenager and then move backwards. The years closest to you will be most accessible and also freshest in your memory. Hopefully you'll catch the bug and keep moving back as far as you'd like, but if nothing else, you're caught up on the "now" and that's the best place to be!
Now that I am caught up on my own children for this particular project, I've started to round up old photos of both my husband and I when we were kids (like the year I was a rainbow!) so I can add those as well. To create pages for old printed photos, I simply place the originals on a table in an area with plenty of natural light and then snap a digital photo of the printed photo. It's so much quicker and easier than scanning and makes whipping up a page in the app super quick.
We'll keep this book with our Halloween decorations so we'll get to pull it out each year and see how everyone has grown and changed and remember all the fun costumes!
NOTE 1: After Sara completed her pages in the Project Life App, she tapped on "order prints" right there in the app and ordered those 10x10 prints, which were delivered right to her! We also print 8x8, 12x12, 6x8, and 4x6 through the app.
NOTE 2: There are some Halloween specific cards in the Holidays Mini Kit. And here's the link to the digital version of that kit ... and this is the digital Halloween set of Themed Cards too.