Project Life: One Week Since You Looked At Me

Did I mention already that I'm *not* a scrapbooker? I'm really excited about Project Life because it's a much easier way to document the little fun stuff we do.  And I get to be crafty which pseudo-justifies the ridiculous amount of papercrafting supplies I have.


I'm not sure I can commit to blogging every week's pages, but I am ready to show off my title page and week 1.  Actually, I was ready last week but didn't quite get around to posting it since I had so many other things I wanted to write about. Better late than never, right?

Let me start by saying that I'm a newbie Project Lifer.  I'll mostly use the kit, with a few bits and pieces from my own stash, rather than break new ground and painstakingly embellish every last slot. 

I started with the Turquoise Kit, but switched to the Cobalt Kit.  Thanks to my friend S for making it possible (she wanted the Turquoise Kit because it was decidedly NOT girly). 

Here's the title page (someday I'll figure out a better way to get non-glare photos of the page protectors!): 

One of the PL blogs gave me the idea to split up a 4x6 photo into two slots, which worked nicely for our house photo.  Since all the pre-printed cards in the kit have rounded corners, I figured it would make sense to round the corners of the photos as well.   The black '2012' is actually a series of clear round letter stickers overlapping each other, which looks neat up close.  I'm glad I get to break into my sticker stash for this project!

Week 1:

Having the "filler" cards with just graphics or words is really helpful for the pages with tons of 3x4 slots.  For the 6x6 slots on the second page, I used paper from my vast collection in coordinating colors.  I'm going for a more eclectic, fun look than a serious matchy-matchy one. 

And again, the rounded corners.  I've moved the corner rounder out of the drawer and onto the rail right next to my desk since I'm using it so much now.  What a neat little tool! 

I think this project is going to help me keep up with sorting through all the photos I take.  I dumped all the photos from my camera and phone, and went through everything for the week.  I selected what I wanted for the pages, and used Target online to print photos for local pickup.  It can take photos directly from Smugmug, which we use for our online albums.  So not only am I up to date on processing photos, they're also going to be uploaded online regularly!  (Says the woman who is still only up to March 2010 online...)

I also figured out a little trick to get photos the right size for the 3x4 slots.  I create a "page" in Photoscape or a "canvas" in Photoshop Elements, that's the size of a 4x6 photo and then divide it into 2 3x4 slots.  I drop the photos I want into those slots and then Target will print the photos together.  I just cut them apart and they fit perfectly into the little slots.  No more strategic (or tragic, depending on how it goes) cropping of 4x6 prints, and it saves me some money as well! 

The other thing I learned from doing the first couple of pages is to just GET IT DONE. I could fuss with it for hours, making incremental changes, but really, the point is to make scrapbooking easier and have fun doing it.  I tell myself I can go back later and embellish, tweak, etc.  I probably won't, but this way I can minimize the time I spend, which maximizes the probability that I'll actually be able to keep this up for a whole year.  (I know there's some sort of nifty formula I could write for that, but I'll spare you.)

And now I must go, for week 2 is calling...