One Little Word 2013 – January

As I’d mentioned in past blog posts, I decided to participate in Ali Edwards’ One Little Word this year. I really dig all of the challenge type stuff in concept, though I find that daily stuff (like December Daily) is too difficult. As a housewife, my day to day is way too boring. Give me a week or a month and I’ll be set. Luckily, OLW runs on a monthly schedule and has monthly prompts and challenges so it’s right up my alley.

Now, if you look back to my New Year’s post, you’ll see that I already showed off some of the work I’d done for my OLW section. However, in light of some of the changes in my style, I wanted to hit the reset button on it. I kept the word (create) but I wanted to redo the cards to reflect me and where I hope to go this year.

In my last post, I’d showed off a new layering technique that I’d been working with that I was pretty excited about and I was ready to use it to create all my monthly cards for this month’s challenge. But, once I put it into practice, it all kind of fell apart. The font I was using didn’t really work when cut, each card was taking me an hour and a half, it was a mess. I huffed and resigned myself to not having the cards I wanted when suddenly it hit me… I didn’t need to use traditional scrapbooking techniques. Why not make digital cards?

So, at around 9:30 last night, I sat down and, using the original card bases I’d created, got started on creating the cards in Photoshop. The first one came out so well, I decided to go full out and do the whole set that way. I finally finished them all this afternoon and I’m really pleased with the results!

Here’s what I used to create these:

Page Protectors: Project Life Design G
Cards: A mix of white 4×6 Project Life cards and white cardstock I cut to fit
Font: Grand Hotel
Paper: A mix of this one and this one from GraphicMarket on Etsy
Doilies: These from AngieMakes on Etsy

I’m thinking of making a quick tutorial video on how I made these consistent using guides in Photoshop. Once you know how to use them, producing nearly identical cards is very easy! Please leave me a comment or contact me via Facebook or Twitter if that’s something you’d be interested in seeing! Below is a gallery of some of the cards as the digital files:

In addition, I received my locket from Liz Lamoreux. It’s so nice and I’ve only taken off for showers since I received it. It’s nice to have a reminder of my word on me all the time. Just the feeling or sound of it reminds me that I want to focus on creating so much this year and that starts with intention. What am I doing in this moment? Is it creating what I want? If not, what do I want and how do I create that?

So, are you doing One Little Word? Really dig using Photoshop? Leave me a comment below answering either of these questions or just leave your thoughts! Now off to work on my Project Life spread for the second week of 2013. Don’t want to get too behind!