Last month, I shared a little about my reasons for taking my Project Life digital in 2013 and why I loved the end result so much. A lot of that had to do with the quality of my prints. After hearing many good reviews of Persnickety Prints for many years, I decided to trust my entire album to them (and I couldn’t be happier with the results!).

But just how did I turn a digital kit into paper cards for my Project Life album? There are a number of ways I could have done it, but I think that the method I came up with was both time and cost efficient, so I wanted to share it with you today!

I would start off each week by gathering:

• All my photos from Instagram for the week;
• All my notes from the Day One app on my phone for the week;
• A simple template I had created (a 12 x 12 document);
• One digital kit that complimented the colors in my photos for that week. For this week, I used a kit that I created with my good friend Krista (called Life As We Know It).

I would fill up every blank space on my template with a photo, some journaling or a note card that I liked. As I worked on them over the year, I saved up all my pages and sent them off to be printed this March, right before I joined some friends for a weekend crop.

I could have printed these as I created them at home… but I didn’t want to worry about ink.

I could have printed these as 4 x 6 prints and then sliced them up… but I didn’t want to have to piece everything back together like a puzzle once I had printed them all.

I chose to print them as 12 x 12 sheets so that they would look exactly like I planned them to when I was working on them in Photoshop!

And here is my page in real life, right before I sliced it all up:

I learned two things the hard way this year:

Trying to rubber stamp on photo paper is not as easy as I imagined it would be.

And, if you do go ahead with a crazy notion like this, it’s better to stamp on your cards when your page is still intact. Otherwise, it’s even more a pain in the rear and you curse at yourself for ever thinking that this would be “cute.”

(ps. I bought myself some awesome digital date stamps for this year instead! If you like that look, I TOTALLY suggest you do the same.)

So, how hard was it to turn this page full page layout into a bunch of Project Life sized cards?

“Shwoop, shwoop,” goes the cutting blade!

(It’s not hard at all!)

Now, as you can see in the picture above, I did need to trim a bit from my cards on the sides. Otherwise, it’s an almost impossible fit to try to get them in your pockets. It’s not a huge issue for me, seeing as I used to be BIG into rubber stamping and card-making several years ago—I’m used to making the little cuts.

But if it’s something that worries you, you could always try something like putting a small stroke on every card while you are creating your images in Photoshop. Then you’ll know just how much white space to trim off once you print! I’d do this for myself, but I’ve found that I don’t need to trim anything off the top of my cards, so it’d be extra work for me. So, I just eyeball it and I’m very happy with the results!

So, that’s how I turn my digital layouts into paper pages!

If you’ve been doing Project Life, I’d love to hear how you are getting your prints into your albums. And let me know if you have any suggestions for me. I’d love to hear them!

Until next time, Happy Scrapping!