Project Life = Project LOVE!!

Way back in November I wrote a post about Becky Higgins' new scrapbook product called Project Life. I ordered it the moment it was available and it finally arrived on Saturday. It was supposed to arrive via FedEx on January 5th but FedEx LOST my original order. Isn't that amazing? Anyway..........Becky and her husband, David, were awesome about corresponding with me through it all and got another kit sent out right away. I was SO happy when I saw the FedEx van pull into my driveway Saturday morning. You should really click over to Becky's site for all the details about this awesome kit. However, I am going to devote this post to it to try to describe to you how wonderful it is.



Before I start I want to tell you that I have been a "scrapbooker" since about 1996 or so. Before we had children I was very into it and kept all my scrapbooks very up to date. I still enjoy pulling them out and looking through them. Once the boys were born I did pretty well keeping up for about the first 5 or 6 years of my oldest son's life and then I pretty much just stopped for the most part. It was just too much to keep up with. Becky's new system will, I think, reinvigorate my previous enthusiasm for preserving our family memories. Before you stop reading because you believe you could never "be a scrapbooker", let me assure you that this system can work for ANYONE who takes photos of their life. It is so easy and Becky has made sure that it will look really good with little effort.



In the kit you get a HUGE binder to hold all the pages you will make. I was a little surprised at how big it is. I love the colors and design of it. You can see mine pictured below.









In addition to the divided page protectors (I will explain those more in a moment) you get a box with all the decorative "elements" (all precut to slide right into the pockets) and 4 little boxes with journalling blocks.






The next photo shows the "title page" of my album. You can see from this photo how the page protectors are arranged. On every double-page spread there is space for 8 4X6 horizontal photos (one space will be used for a "header" card..........more on that below) and 8 little 2X3 inch spots for journalling (and decorative) cards. Becky has included several decorative cards to insert into the title page.............here you can see my layout.








This system is very flexible. Last year Becky launched a Project 365 product which encouraged people to take a photo every day for a full year. In the Project Life kit you have enough space to do the photo-a-day approach. However, it is also really flexible if you fall "off the wagon" and don't have a photo a day to scrapbook. As I described above, there are "header" cards that you can insert in the top left space of each double-page spread. I have gone ahead and inserted those into all the page protectors in my album. You can see from the picture that you can simply circle the month and then write the dates of the photos on that layout in the little white space at the bottom.





In addition to the journalling cards there are a bunch of little tiny stickers with the days of the week that you can stick right onto the journalling cards if you wish. In the photo you can see the "sat" sticker in the bottom right corner. There are also arrow stickers that may be used to point to the photo referred to on the card. You can see one in the photo below.

There are also clear days of the week stickers that can (if you wish) be stuck onto the page protector covering your photos to further label your photos. You can see the "sat" sticker in the bottom left of my egg photo..............this egg photo corresponds to the journalling you saw above.

Here is my plan for keeping up with this system. Luckily, I frequently upload photos from my camera to my computer because of all the blogging I do. I have set up a separate folder in "My Pictures" folder called "Project Life." As I upload, I copy the photos I plan to use in the Project Life book into that folder. Every weekend I plan to upload the Project Life photos to Shutterfly. I can then pick them up (or my husband can) at our local Target store. That way I don't have to pay shipping. If you don't have more than 100 photos, you can usually pick them up in 1 hour. Becky suggests writing on the journalling cards every day if you can and I am going to try to keep that up. I started this project on January 1st because I knew my kit was on the way. Before I had the kit I had a Word document where I was briefly listing the things we were doing each day that I wanted to include in the Project Life book. Now that I have the journalling cards I will probably just use those to jot things down as they happen. Another strategy I am planning to employ is to take some "filler" photos each week which I will fill in when I don't have a specific photo for a day of the week. For example, tonight I took a photo of the split pea soup I made for supper. If I don't have enough photos for the whole week, I'll fill that one in as it gives a glimpse of our life right now.

Oh...........I almost forgot. Becky is just about to release a digital version of this kit. Details will be posted later this week on her site. It sounds like you will be able to totally play around with it for free. Then if you like it you order a finished book to be sent to you..........one that you've customized online. It sounds pretty cool too.