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.

Christmas Memories books

I was so thrilled when unpacking our Christmas decorations this year to find this little Christmas Memories book that my oldest son had made last Christmas. I had totally forgotten about it and it is definitely something I will always treasure. To make this I just took 2 sheets of printer paper and folded them in half. Then I cut a piece of Christmas scrapbook paper a little larger than 8 1/2 X 11 inches and folded it, placing the white pages inside. Using red thread and a zig-zag stitch on my sewing machine, I stitched up the side. My son added the letter stickers to spell "Christmas Memories 08" and then illustrated and wrote on the inside pages. I forgot to photograph one page, but the sentence starters were: "My favorite gift was........., My favorite thing to do was.............., My favorite thing to eat was..........., And my favorite part was........." He did such a great job writing and illustrating the pages. I loved pulling it out this year. I am planning to make one for each boy this year. Obviously my 4 1/2 year old will need a little more help with the writing part, but he can definitely illustrate his ideas. If you would like to do this project and don't/can't sew, just staple the side or punch holes and tie or lace it with yarn or ribbon. I'm planning to get ours out every year to put in a special basket so we can look back at our past Christmases through the boys' eyes.



front cover







first page






close-up of his illustration of his favorite gift, the game "Mousetrap"






"favorite thing to eat" page





I loved reading that his favorite part was handing out gifts. Hopefully he will hang onto the joy of giving as he grows older.

Project Life

As some of you may recall, I made an attempt (didn't stick with it though) to use Becky Higgins' Project 365 as a format for documenting our family life during 2009. I was really good about taking a photo a day for about the first 6 weeks of the year, then I got behind, got discouraged and stopped entirely. It was also a bummer that her Project 365 kits sold out immediately and weren't able to be reordered. I know a few of you were interested in the photo a day concept and I know one of you (Beth!) did a better job keeping up than I did. Well...........in case you never jumped on the 365 bandwagon, Becky in her supreme creativity has designed a new concept called Project Life. It went on sale over the weekend and as far as I know will not be sold out and if it does sell out quickly, there is another printing. So..........if you're curious, head over to Becky's blog and check out the details. It is an amazing value for only $40 (not including shipping) and is perfect even for people who don't scrapbook. It is also flexible so you don't have to do a photo a day. I am really leaning toward ordering one for myself and trying harder in 2010. I did a pretty extensive scrapbook for the year 2000 which I truly treasure. Now a decade and two children later it seems time to tackle this again. And I think Becky's system will make it really doable. If you decide to order, let me know! Then maybe we can encourage each other through cyberspace. (Although I think my local buddy, Krystal, was interested. If so, we can do it IRL.........in real life for those of you not well-versed in cyber-speak.) This would be a super Christmas gift for a busy mom of young children. Although it won't be shipped out until early January, Becky suggests if you are giving it as a gift this year you could print out a picture from her website and roll it up and tie it with a ribbon as a cute presentation.

Edited to add: After publishing this post I decided to take the plunge and order myself this kit. I have loved Becky Higgins and all things Becky ever since I began scrapbooking. I have many of her books and they are so awesome. If DH is reading this, consider it my Christmas present. But if you WANT to get me something else, let's talk IRL. :0)

Aaaahhh............much betta!

After MUCH effort, the craft room has been reorganized! Yay! I actually reorganized it last summer and wrote about it on my other blog (which was my ONLY blog at that time since I wasn't crazy yet!) and you can read about that here if you are so inclined. This time around I dug into things a lot more and got rid of a bunch of craft supplies that I didn't think I would use. Believe me, I still have enough to outfit a Brownie troop for several years. Below you can see one view of my newly organized space.....this photo is taken from the doorway. I decided to allocate one long wall to my scrapbooking materials and the opposite wall to sewing since I have so much more room now. This photo shows the scrapbooking side.



And this photo shows the sewing side (on the left) and a shelf that I moved downstairs to hold all the boys' scrapbooks. I used to have them in the white cabinet that you will see in a moment, but decided to put a bunch of them on a shelf that kind of displays them and makes them more accessible. My oldest son immediately pulled out two of his books to look at when he got home from school today and realized he could actually walk into the room now without stepping on stuff. So I'm really glad I put their books on the shelf.




Here's a better photo of the sewing space. The table on the left is for cutting fabric and the one on the right will hold my sewing machine which is now in the case beside the chair until I pull it out for my next project. I am getting pretty motivated to work on something in this new space!



The next photo shows a close-up of the scrapbooking table with easily accessible paper and tools and a little lamp for extra lighting.

To the left of the scrapbooking table is a cart with drawers that hold my rubber stamps and stamp pads and the white cabinet which holds a BUNCH of stuff including more scrapbooks that didn't fit on the shelf.

Here is the inside of the cabinet with sewing and scrapbooking things neatly organized. I love this cabinet. We bought it several years ago at Menard's and it holds so much and was pretty cheap.

This photo shows the two shelves above the scrapbooking table. The drawer organizers you see on the bottom shelf used to hold my 8 1/2 X 11 scrapbooking paper and paper scraps. I have reorganized the paper and now these drawers hold various scrapbooking and crafting supplies along with my sticker collection. I also love the little clear boxes on the top shelf. I bought them at Wal-Mart and they have many sizes. The lids are attached and snap shut. These are really inexpensive and are great for organizing. I use them all over my house.

This is the left side of the shelves with my crafting books on top and my 12X12 paper organizers on the bottom. I recently gave up my cart which had lots of my larger scrapbooking paper. It has been repurposed for use by my oldest son. You can read about that here if you want. So.....I bought the 3 drawer organizer at Hobby Lobby and divided my papers by color. I had originally bought the case you see with the pink suitcases on it, but it didn't even come close to holding all my 12X12 paper once I pulled everything out and started sorting it.

The next photo shows how I've organized my scrapbooking paper that isn't 12X12. I had two large file organizers from my days as a Creative Memories consultant. I used one to hold the 10X12 inch paper that CM sells and one to hold my 8 1/2 X 11 inch paper that used to be in the drawer organizers. The paper is organized by color and sits on the left side of my scrapbooking table.

As I mentioned before, I had saved scraps of cardstock and paper from scrapbooking for many years and had it organized by color into individual drawers. While I do use my scraps whenever I can, as I reorganized I realized that the scraps were taking up so much room that could be better utilized. So I decided to recycle most of my scraps and try a new system. The clear box you see in the next photo will sit below my scrapbooking table to hold miscellaneous scraps. Once it becomes too full, I'll have to purge again.

Aaah.........it feels SO good to have my basement tidy again. It has been a big effort, but tonight even DH commented that it is so nice and relaxing to have the clutter cleared up. The back of my van is full of more items headed for donation. This will be my third big vanload since I started Flylady. I am making good headway though and may only have a few more trips to make before I can declare my house "de-cluttered!" I'm really excited to get to that point because then I can start really focusing on deep-cleaning the Zones as they come up. It is so hard not to get over-zealous. I still have some de-cluttering to do in our master bedroom and it's hard to walk past it every day and not dig into it. But I've tried really hard to follow Flylady's advice and not get distracted. Now that the craft room and basement are organized, I have a list of other places that need to be decluttered and I will diligently work on them a little at a time until they are all crossed off my list. Now I am going to sign off and go read in bed! Yay for me!

Girls Only Weekend

This weekend I met my friend, Beth, for a girls only weekend to celebrate my recent 40th birthday. Beth and I joke that we are soul sisters. We are both elementary education teachers, both love sewing, rubber stamping cards, scrapbooking, reading good books, and the list goes on. We met in grad school at the University of Iowa. She is one of my very best friends and I don't get to see her enough. So it was GREAT to get together. We met at an Archiver's store to pick up supplies since we planned to scrapbook into the wee hours.





After shopping a bit, we ate lunch at P.F. Chang's. Neither of us had eaten there before but we both had heard great things about it. We were not disappointed. We tried the famous lettuce wraps since I'd heard about them from another friend. They are AMAZING!! I can't wait to get back there and try them again. Below is a photo of one of my lettuce wraps before I wrapped it. SOOOOooooooo good!





After lunch we checked into Embassy Suites and set things up for a late night of scrapbooking. I got a lot done and was very happy about that. I hadn't scrapbooked for almost a year and it was really good to get back to it. We worked for a while then partook of the complimentary happy hour that Embassy Suites provides. Then we scrapbooked some more before taking the hotel shuttle downtown for dinner. We ate at a really great Italian restaurant and dined on wine, Mojitos (Beth had the Mojito and I had the wine), pizza with fresh basil and mozzarella, and a really amazing chocolate cake with raspberry sauce for dessert. Then we headed back to the hotel for more scrapbooking. The next day we enjoyed the complimentary breakfast before heading out for a little shopping before we parted ways.


Beth gave me the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett for a birthday gift. I have already started it and love it. I love it when people give me books as gifts because I love to read but rarely buy fiction books for myself. And I love to go to the library but our local small town library doesn't always have the best selection and I don't get there very often to look for myself.






So there's my weekend in a nutshell. Thanks, Beth, for helping me celebrate the big 4-0 in a really fun and great way. Oh.........I also bought a new tote bag to haul my stuff back and forth to school. I'll take a photo of it and add it later.

Project 365 Update

I don't know yet whether or not I'll be able to get my hands on one of Becky Higgins' Project 365 kits. However, I am still committed to the project. I love the idea and the simplicity of documenting a year in our lives by taking a photo every day. I thought I would share a few of our photos in this post. Keep in mind that for this post I'm only using the ones without my childrens' faces. However, our Project 365 scrapbook will (obviously) contain full photos of them since it will be for our family's viewing.



My oldest son practicing the piano



My littlest boy playing with his "snow dough"



Little boy again, coloring a "race car", his current fascination



Little boy using GeoTrax tain tracks to play "air guitar"



Biggest boy setting up obstacles at the end of the race car track

Besides taking photos of our everyday play, I would like to take more photos of "things" in our lives such as favorite foods, meals, beverages, etc. Additionally, I am going to collect receipts from the gas station, Target, etc. It should be a really nice overview of life in our family in 2009 once it's finished. If you are doing the project, let me know how you're coming along. I'd love to hear about it.

Project 365

I just stumbled across a cool thing yesterday. It's called Project 365 and is a scrapbook kit developed by Becky Higgins, one of my favorite scrapbookers. Unfortunately, the kits are sold out, but I'm pretty sure that due to overwhelming demand they are going to make more available. If you want the most recent information you can check Becky's website. What I love about this is that it easily allows you to capture the real life living (as opposed to just special events) of your family over the course of a given year. It looks like the kit makes it completely easy to do even if you're not a scrapbooker. Basically there are just pockets to slip photos and journalling boxes into. No cropping, no gluing, nothing! I am preparing with the assumption that I WILL get my hands on a kit. I've set up a separate photos file on my computer called "Project 365" where I can send copies of the photos I want to use. I also just set up a Word document to type a VERY brief little snippet of our daily stuff. I will keep you posted about this as I find out more. It sounds very doable, reasonably priced for what you get, and an amazing keepsake to make for your family. Leave me a comment if you're up for this project. Maybe we can keep in touch and brainstorm ideas for things to capture through photos.