P365 – Day 226 – project life

This week I was very excited to learn that pre-orders for Project Life were now open.

This is the second year I’ve done this project, and I use it for most of my photos. I still scrapbook the special occasions and the photos I love, but for most of the day-to-day stuff, this approach is so much easier.

I’ve fallen a bit behind in my 2011 Project Life album. I’ve kept fairly up to date with the photos, but need to catch up with my journalling. At the start of the week, I still had to fill in most of the journal cards from March, April, June and July.

My approach has been different to the ‘photo a day’ approach that a lot of people take with this product. This page explains what I’m doing with it.

As a result, my album is more complicated, because I don’t always know what pictures are going to make it into the album, and how many photos of an event I’m going to use. With the photo a day approach, you can write your journal cards any time and slot them in the album, even before you’ve printed the photos. My approach means I can’t really fill in any cards until I know how the page spread is going to look, and I don’t know how the spread will look until the end of the month when I can sort through all the photos I’ve taken that month and decided which ones to print. So it’s become very easy to fall behind.

However, seeing the new kits are about to be released has given me some momentum to get my album up to date. I’ve spent quite a lot of time this week filling in the cards and getting it all organised. Now all I have to do is a few days from June, one day from April and all of July. Progress indeed!

I also want to put the spreads on my blog at the end of each month. I was originally going to put them all one page and update that each month, but I can see that would get very big by the end of the year. 

Instead I’ll probably just do one post for each month’s spreads as I complete them. (Or more likely, as I get around to photographing them, which is a whole other process. So far, January is all I’ve managed to do.)

Juniordwarf loves looking at the albums. He calls last year’s album ‘the red photos’ (because the binder is red) and this year’s is ‘the blue photos’.

Today he looked through both albums, and we talked about all the pictures, who was in them and what was happening. He had lots of questions (many of which started with “why?”) about what was in the photos, what had happened afterwards, where we were, what we were doing and so on. I love how he takes such an interest in them.

That’s one of the great things about Project Life: how easy it is to display all our photos. If I’d tried to scrapbook all of the photos I wanted to since starting in 2010, I’d probably be lucky to be up to March last year. Plus I can let Juniordwarf look at them without worrying he’s going to damage one of my scrapbook layouts. If a couple of photos get dislodged and wrecked, it’s simple to replace them.

These albums and kits are fantastic, and I plan to continue using them for as long as Becky Higgins keeps putting them out.