Project Life :: 2012

I just completed my 2012 Project Life project.

What is Project Life? It's a scrapbooking system that is the brain child of Becky Higgins. For me, it's scrapbooking light. Take the photos, print the photos, journal a little and stick it all in a binder. You don't need a dozen different embellishments or really anything fancy at all. Just photos and words. And as someone who has boxes of photos that aren't in albums along with computer drives chock-full of digital photos, I wanted to have something concrete to look at, to hold in my hands and this system works for me. I have also never scrapbooked before in my life (yes, boxes and hard drives full of photos) and I love this project.

I began working on it in January of 2012 with the intention of documenting each week on a weekly basis. Sometime in April I stopped. Life got busy and something had to give and I guess that something was Project Life. My girls kept looking back at the first three, completed months of the years and asked when I was going to finish. I paged through the album and realized that I had to finish. Over the Christmas holidays, I spent the better part of two days culling through photos and uploading them to be printed. And then over the last two and a half months, I put it all together.

I've captured all our vacations and every day moments in one place. And while the layouts I did at the beginning of the year certainly had more detail and journalling than those that happened later, they all put a smile on my face. I have done a 365 photo project on Flickr for the past 5 years and while I adore that (and am still taking a photo every day), this has far more photos and moments captured than that project ever could. This is probably the best job at memory keeping I have done since, well, forever.

My 2013 album is empty and waiting for me to fill it. The supplies are at hand, the photos waiting to be uploaded. I'm anxious to get a start on this year and catch up to the present. I figure it shouldn't take me too long - maybe a few weeks. No matter. Did I mention that I love this project?