Project Life: July 2012

A few weeks ago at the Studio Calico papercrafting forum, I posted my dilemma about journaling in my Project Life scrapbook.  For those who are not papercrafty, "journaling" is just a fancy way of describing photo captions, explanations and any other memory-capturing text that one adds to the page.

I find myself drawn to clean, symmetric, neat designs - check out Cathy Zielske's Project Life (she's a professional, so her pages look amazing).  It looks like a magazine!  I love it.

So I thought maybe I should switch from handwritten to printed journaling.  A few weeks ago, I printed some captions on decorative labels from Martha Stewart's line at Staples and they look awesome.  But it was a hassle to download the template, get everything set up correctly, then go down and print them on my fancy printer.  I'm not sure spending *more* time on the computer is what I need.

I also think that having my handwriting in the album is more personal since we so rarely handwrite *anything* anymore.  So for now I've decided to do some printed journaling and some handwritten captions.  Click each photo to see a larger version.

July 2-8: My Mondo Beyondo Dream Lab, cake fail and art projects

July 9-15: Good Dog Carl park, Zeek's pizza, TJ's ride to Mt St Helens



July 16-22: Baby Beluga joins our family, lots of art projects, Red Robin for dinner

July 23-29: Road trip to Portland

I'm proudest of the Portland layout.  I used the Studio Calico Elmwood Park kit so it has a more cohesive look.  I'm definitely going to try to use more coordinated papers for the rest of the year.  I also love how the computer journaling looks.  It was a pain to get it formatted correctly in Microsoft publisher, but a snap to print on my fancy printer.




Detailed view of Week 4 crafty bits

I love the 9-slot page protector from We R Memory Keepers that I got as part of a multipack. The slots are the perfect size for Instagram photos if you print them 4x4".  I like to print them a bit smaller so I can fit some craftiness around them.

TJ pointed out that the rest of the year is not going to fit in the binder I bought to store my pages, so I've decided to consolidate to 2 weeks per 2 page layout.  Which will be a little less stressful when BabyX' arrives, anyway.   I'm also working on a separate mini album for our Portland trip since I took a lot more photos than I've put in that week's layout.

As you can tell, I'm all fired up about craftiness right now, which is great.  I just wish it extended to things like organizing BabyX's clothes or room...