Thursday, January 12, 2012

Project Life 2012

My goodness, I can't believe it's been a month since I posted anything.  It was a delightful month, though, and I hope all your holidays were as lovely and family-fun-filled as ours were.  Anyway, if you've been hanging out with me here for a while now, you might remember my enthusiasm last January about starting Project Life.  And I did really well until the early spring.  Then I got behind.  Then I got caught up.  Then at the end of May I put it down and didn't look at it again until the last week of December.  Oops.  But I was dead set and determined to finish what I'd started, so over the last couple days of December I worked hard and finished my album.  It wasn't a picture a day, and there is definitely a lot of detail in the beginning of the year than in the last half, but I was thrilled to have it completed.  That's me, late at night on January 1st, hugging my finally-finished album.


What did I learn?  That I really do love to document all the everyday details of our family, but that the traditional way would not work for me.  I still took pictures almost every day, but then it would take me forever to get them printed.  I don't like to print pictures at home, so by the time I'd get to Costco to pick them up, I'd have a hard time remember the dates of all the different pictures, so it required a lot of backtracking to figure things out.  But I believe that it is totally worth the effort, and I love the Project Life products.  So this year, I'm going 100% digital!  I downloaded the Clementine kit from www.jessicasprague.com and set up a few different templates for myself in my graphics software (I use CorelDraw).  This way I'll be able to drag and drop the photos and all the other goodies right in and all the date and such will be right there.  I can type in as much journaling as I want and easily tweak things for various layouts.  I just finished my cover page and my first week, and I have to tell you I am super excited!  I think this is going to be the ideal solution for me.  Here is my cover page, which I made by using one of the papers and then layering a bunch of the other elements over it.



This is my first week:



Okay, it's actually not quite a week -- we're still missing Saturday, but we had a huge event that day that I'm going to dedicate a whole 2-page spread to.  At any rate, I am loving this!

Any other Project Life-ers out there?  What is your approach?  What do you think the chances are that I'll be able to keep up this year?!

1 comment:

AShu93 said...

Good for you! Mine would get behind in the first wk, so I'm just doing one that's 12 pic on the 12th in '12. I hate to print them @ home too, so maybe I should try something digital.