2013: Project Life

My first Project Life spread of 2013 is complete, and oh, do I love it.

If you’ve read this blog in the past, you may have noticed that my Project Life is looking a little different this year. After several sleepless nights, I decided to make the switch to the 12×12 size (and, believe me when I say there were sleepless nights). The decision was a hard one for me and one I waivered on many times; I knew I was going back to the pocket page protector approach but had always assumed it’d be in the 8.5×11 format. The smaller size is the size I’m most comfortable with; however, my biggest struggle was how to deal with weeks when I had a lot of photos- particularly vacation weeks. My husband and I take many vacations throughout the course of 365 days and I am hoping this year won’t be an exception. I thought long and hard about how I would make those weeks work in an 8.5×11 format… I couldn’t come up with anything except 12×12.

So, here I stand. I really like my Project Life from 2012, it was so fun to do and surprisingly easy. But… as I was blog hopping around for Project Life inspiration I stumbled upon something that struck a chord with me. Someone I had found so much inspiration from had shared that she was not a scrapbooker. In fact, she thought most scrapbooking was horrendous. I stopped at that sentence, immediately blushed and thought “oh my gosh, she is talking about me!” Not literally, of course, but it was true.

While I’ve never scrapbooked to please anyone but myself, I’ve always said that- to me, traditional scrapbooking was my creative release and Project Life was my means of documenting life.

So I’m trying to return to the back to basics approach where the focus is on my photos and journaling. Journaling has always been my most favorite part of this project so I don’t intend to stop. The photos have always been the struggle for me; I don’t take a lot of photos and I don’t take great photos- I don’t have great subjects to take photos of. While I’d like to aim for a double page spread every week, I know that I’ll likely only have enough photos to fill a single page spread. I’m fine with that- as long as I know it ahead of time… I am a planner afterall.

This particular spread was so much fun to make, and surprisingly… simple! A lot easier then I remember when I used the page protectors back in 2011. I’m going to try to keep the embellishments to a minimum, I want this album to be timeless… something that is a feast on my eyes no matter what year I’m in.

And so it begins…

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