Project Life: Getting Started

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about doing Project Life.  I am SO behind in my albums that it’s a little embarrassing to admit.  Let’s just say, I haven’t scrapbooked much since I’ve had kids, and my oldest is seven. *hangs head in shame*  I always talked myself out of Project Life, because I love what I call “traditional” scrapbooking – sticking everything down to the page, journaling by hand, and embellishing to the nines. I didn’t want someone dictating my layouts, and I certainly didn’t want my photos to just slip into an album!  What if a child got ahold of the album and all the photos spilled out?  I would probably die… However, the idea of Project Life really interested me because I would be able to get a lot more pages scrapbooked more quickly than how I was currently doing it.  So I compromised.  I used precut journaling boxes, die-cuts, and stickers, trimmed my photos, and I quickly stuck them to the page. It was great!  And I could do it quickly.  Here’s one such spread that I haven’t journaled on yet. It’s simple and boxy (which I LOVE), but I still needed my workflow to be faster.  So I finally made the decision to go all out and use Project Life, 100%!

Making the switch

Getting started with Project Life is actually super-easy!  All you need to do is buy three things:  an album, a starter pack, and a set of photo sleeves.  You can get all that great stuff HERE!  I have this dream to have a shelf full of family albums in a rainbow of colors, so I decided to purchase a pink one to start with.  Later on, I’ll get red, orange, green, and so on. The idea of Project Life is that you document everything that happens each week and put it into a spread in your album.  I don’t know if I will be that “on top of things,” but I hope to do more scrapbooking than in the past.  Like I said, I’m so far behind, but my plan is to start on our 2017 family album while also working on 2006 (when I got married). For Christmas, my husband got me an HP Envy 4520 wireless printer which I love.  It prints photos and the quality is actually pretty good!  I’ve already started getting my photos organized so I can get started printing and scrapping.  I will definitely be posting my pages as I go so stay tuned for that. Anybody else thinking about starting Project Life?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!