
If you'd like to know more about why I'm doing Project Life on a monthly basis rather than a weekly basis, you might want to read this first: Project Life 2013 | By the month.
And since I explained it all in that post, I'm going to cut right to the chase and post the pages. *with one small apology for the glare - it has been dark and dreary here for months and that makes it incredibly hard to photograph this project without putting it directly under a window - next month, i'll photograph the pages outside of the page protectors.*




You may be wondering why there are 3 1/2 pages and multiple two-page spreads. Because yes, I said yesterday that one of the main reasons I wanted to use a monthly format was so that it look up less space - which leads to the obvious conclusion that I would use fewer pages. And I have. In January of 2012, I used 4 two-page spreads and 8 inserts for a total of 12 pages of thickness in that album.
I don't expect every month to use this many two-page spreads. But this month, we had two new kittens, a presidential inauguration, Emily's first high school dance, Emily's first high school speech meet, and Emily's birthday. It made for an unusually busy and photo-heavy month. I'm sure that other months won't be this full. And regardless, this is still far fewer pages than I would have otherwise used. Last year, the norm was for me to do a two-page spread plus two inserts every single week. So follow me for a second with some math. When you're talking about taking up space in an album, that's 4 pages every week. On a slow week, it might be 3 pages/week. Times 4 times/month = 12 - 16 pages every month. For January of this year, I used 3 1/2 two-page spreads and 2 inserts. Which = 6 pages/month and exactly half of the space used in January of 2012. So even if I keep using this many pages for every month, I should still fit my pages in one album for the year and that's my primary goal with space-saving.
Here's the individual pages up close. You'll see that I didn't have a weekly or monthly journaling card - I simply journaled the stories beside each photo or directly on each photo.


I also embellished a lot less and left a lot of white space. It feels less cluttered and much more my style than what I did last year.





When I did want to add an embellishment, I stuck with small arrows, some heart stickers, and some word stickers. Many of them are digital supplies that I used from Designer Digitals and some are traditional supplies that I found at Target.




My two inserts are trimmed down page protectors and I put them at the end of the month - one for the inauguration and one for Emily's birthday and extra-cute kitten photos that I just couldn't leave out. :)




And there you go! If you have any questions about my supplies, leave me a comment and check back later - I answer all the questions in the comment section. :)