Project Life - My Way!

If you have been around my blog for awhile you know that I also do a lot of digital scrapbooking.

So, here is my story of how I do Project Life, which is not in the traditional sense, but it is in a way that finally works for me.

In 2012 I started with p365. If you are not familiar with that it is a picture a day, every day, for the whole year. Now towards the middle of the year I did loose steam and lost a few weeks but a friend encouraged me to pick back up and keep going and that is just what I did. Thankfully at the end of the year I had a great set of photo memories of the year and on New Year's Eve we sat down and watched a slide show on our TV of the past year and it was almost magical. The whole enjoyed it and it really gave us a sense of closure to the year and we were all looking forward to doing it again.

Now, with those p365 photo I did p52. Which is a scrapbook layout for every week of the year, ending with 52 layouts for you in your album. This book is something I will always treasure. Here are a couple double page spreads to show you how I did it. Each side is a week's worth of photos and journaling as to what went on that week.

Now in 2013, Project Life was a HUGE hit and I decided to give it a go and try that method. Thinking it must be about the same, weekly layouts, etc...

Well, that is not really how it worked out for me. Project Life is a lot of ephemera and add ons and even when people do it digitally they try to print it out and hybrid it combining both digital and physcial supplies and it is SO OVERHWHELMING I can not even tell you. Wat it did was it completely sapped the love of scrapbooking right out of me. I scrap book for the memories, for my children and I found myself not even wanting to open Photoshop.

One problem I found was that in without the mindset of p365 (a pic a day) I would sit down to do a weekly layout and not have enough photos some weeks. I would not remember everything we did that week. I would have to scroll through facebook sometimes just to see status updates to remind me of what the heck was going on. Also... I felt like the layout were just TOO busy, too much. Here is a look at my PL style layouts.

In the end I made it to week 27 and quit. I was so sad really as I ended up with no book for last year and so this year I have taken matters in to my own hands. I have come up with a hybrid of my own so to speak.

I am doing p365 again, making sure that I take a photo a day and journal every day with the photos. I think that journaling is really important because we may remember at the end of the year what was going on in these photos, but five, ten, even fifteen years from now who knows.

So, I am going to combine the loads of journaling with the pics for every day and do it in this pocket style format instead of the scrapbook layout traditional style and see if that works better for me.

My goal is to see it through again all year! If you follow me on instagram (tanyiadeskins) then you will see most of my pictures. Some get taken with the big camera, most do not. I will be posting my weekly layouts here as well and I want to be accountable somewhere to getting them done and sticking with it!

Have you ever scrapbooked? Have you ever tried the p365 or any other year long memory keeping projects? I would love to follow your progress as well, if you do! Just leave me a link!

I have week one and two of my layouts done so I will be posting those soon as well!

-Tanyia