My Project Life

We had some snow in our sandy part of the world which gave me and Mr. M some time off work. I took the opportunity to play some catch up with my Project Life album.

Project Life is a pocket style scrapbooking system designed by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about the products and the inspiration behind it on Becky's blog. I love it because I can customize it for my own needs. Your albums can be as simple or as embellished as you see fit and it helps me keep up with documenting our family's life. Project Life is all about documenting the everyday. While it was originally designed to fit a photo-a-day, many Project Lifers do weekly or monthly spreads to document the entire year. I do weekly spreads and include a photo from each day of the little one's first year; however, my week numbers correspond to how many weeks old Little is, and not the week of the year.

For each of the little guys, I took a photo-a-day throughout their first year. I used Project Life for the first time to document Big's first year. Currently, I am using it to document Little's photo-a-day along with other little things that come up. I learned a few things when doing Big's album.

1. Stick to one set of page protectors. I use Design A for Little's album and I spend so much less time analyzing the photos and trying to decide which page protector will work best.

2. Use a Core Kit. It is easy to become trapped in an ever-developing, super stash of scrapbooking supplies. By sticking to ONE core kit, my color scheme is already picked out for me, and I already have different elements that match. It's as easy as sliding different elements into the pocket pages.

3. Set up your album in advance. This was a biggie and helped me keep up to date with Little's album for about six whole months until the holiday's hit. I took an album (I like the We R Memory Keepers ones), filled it with a stack full of Design A page protectors, and filled it with title cards from my Seafoam Core Kit. I pulled out all the title cards from the kit and shuffled them in an equal manner. Then I put each title card on a page for a week spread. This has helped so much because I spend less no time trying to match a title card to photos for a week. I use the title card as inspiration for the rest of the spread and just go with it.

4. Decide what is important for YOU. You are the scrapper here, you are the one documenting memories for your family, so you are in charge of what is important. For me, it is important that photos and journaling make it into my album. Embellishing is fun, but if it has to take a back seat to get things done, it does. I save decorating my title cards so I can do a bunch of them at once when I'm feeling extra creative or I'm caught up (or don't feel like editing) my photos. My theory is simple: If 30 years from now my boys are flipping through their albums, what are they going to miss? Will they miss if I didn't get around to putting some stickers, cut outs, or enamel dots on a title card? No. Will they miss if there are photos missing or my words aren't there to tell the story of the week, or the day, or the split moment? Yes, yes they will. So that is my focus.

Week 29 , Left Side

Week 29  , Right Side 

My style tends to be pretty simple. I like to use mostly Core Kit elements and will sometimes include a free printable card found from Pinterest (like the Family card) and add a few stickers. This spread even includes a QR code that links to a family video on our YouTube account. My philosophy is to keep it simple, and get it done.