Disneyland Family 5K -2014

Disneyland Family 5K -2014

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

These Are a Few of my Favorite Things....

Many times over the past few years, I have mentioned something called "Project Life," a way of scrapbooking that was designed by Becky Higgins.  The first year I tried it, in 2010, I wanted to take a picture each day and journal each day.  I won't say that I failed miserably, but there are a few holes in that book.  In 2011, I resolved to do so much better, and I actually did.  With just a few (2 or 3) days when I did not take a picture, I completed the year with photos and I journalled each day.  It was sometimes a bit tedious when I was doing it, but it is fun to look back and see how our year progressed.  2011 was a big year for Kensi, going from 3 months to 15 months and so it is fun just to see her growth through the year.

When 2012 rolled around, I decided that I did not need to do a picture or a journal spot for each day of the year.  Instead, I borrowed an idea that I saw posted on Becky's Blog (www.beckyhiggins.com/blog) from someone who did weekly pages.  So far, that seems to be working for me.  I sit down each Sunday night and think back over the week and journal about what we did, who we saw and life in general.  I sometimes find that I only have pictures from 1 or 2 days in a week, so I fill the pages with those days.  Other weeks, I seem to have more pictures than I know what to do with, so I will go back later and do separate layouts for some of those different events or outtings.

For now, I feel like I'm keeping up with some of the most important times of my husband and my lives - the growth of our girls.  Kensi will be 2 in October and Brooklyn will be 7 in December.  These are the fun times that I want to make sure we capture and are able to look back on later.  They seem to grow so fast and I just want to capture a moment of that.

Now some specifics - Becky has created a number of different layouts that you can use for your pages, should you choose to embrace this journey.  I use her "standard" pages, which have places for 4 horizontal photos (size 4 x 6) or other insert, along with 4 smaller inserts for journalling.  Sometimes I include smaller photos in the smaller spots, sometimes I fill them with journaling.  To mix things up a bit, I also added one of her slightly smaller page sizes, I think it's an 8 x 10 or 8 1/2 x 11 page, but it has places for 2 horizonal and 2 vertical 4x6 pictures, plus 2 smaller spots for journaling cards or photos.

I thought since I had talked about these things before, you,  my faithful few readers, might like to have a quick way to get at them.  (And here is where my shameless plug comes in....)  You can only get Becky's designs at Amazon.com.  So I've included a handy little link on the side of my blog with some of my favorites marked.  Here's the kicker.... if you click on the link and buy her stuff, I get a few pennies!  Yup, that's right.  I know, it sounds incredibly strange and almost like a commercial, but I figured "what the heck, I'll give it a try." 

So now you have the best of both worlds (whatever those "worlds" might be) - you have my blog posts, with pictures of what I've done with Project Life, and you have a quick link to Amazon in case you want to get started on your own Project.

I will add that new products for the 2013 year have been getting added here and there and I have only posted to my favorites those that I can see on Amazon.  As the journaling cards and new albums and other things come out, I'll come back and add those to my favorites as well, so that you can see them.

In the meantime, enjoy some pictures of my efforts with "life".


This is a week from my 2010 book - April, I think.  A picture for each day and journaling.  The arrows point to the appropriate pictures.  Below is another one from 2010.


This next one (below) is a week from this year in February.  We had quite a bit of fun with Valentine's Day, so I did one show side of the week (using the smaller page that I mention above) for the pictures.  I added some stickers on the outside as well.


The last two are more from this year (2012.)  You can see I did less journaling, opting instead to highlight bigger events, rather than the everyday "mundane" things that we have going on.  I also have smaller pictures in some of the spots.




One final note - I don't have pictures of it to show you, but I borrowed another idea from one of Becky's fans and went back and rounded the corners (yup, ALL the corners) of all of my pictures - big and small.  I'm not sure why, but I like the way it looks.

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