Project Life 2012 - Week 1

Well, I've decided to jump on board the Project Life bandwagon this year and for the first time in a very long time I'm getting back to my traditional paper scrapbooking roots and creating a "real" scrapbook! I just wrapped up Week 1 of my Project Life 2012 and I have to say - I'm LOVING this style of scrapbooking!! And overall I'm pretty happy with how my first layout turned out. I'll mostly be using the Design A pages, although I haven't committed to an album yet. I'll also be adding in a variety of different sized protectors throughout the year depending on the different "stuff" I have to add - you can see below that I've already added a few extra inserts. I did purchase 2 of the core "paper" kits (Turquoise and Clementine), but then I also bought and downloaded a few things from the digital version of the Cobalt kit, printed and used it for week 1 and I'm already using some other printed digi goodies for week 2. So I'm definitely taking a hybrid approach to my Project Life.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and get on with it. Links for all of the products I used can be found at the end of the post. Please tell me what you think. Are you doing Project Life this year? Have you found any good inspiration links? Please share! I'm compiling a Project Life Inspiration Pinterest Board and I'd love to fill it up!!

Here's a look at both pages for Week 1 as they'll look together in my album:


The "Photo a Day" approach definitely does NOT work for our family - I work part-time as a Physical Therapist 3 days/week and those work days are LOOONG (10 hours) and photos just don't usually get taken on those days. Because usually we just don't do much as a family on those days (although I plan to journal if Joel and Dean or my Mom and Dean do something fun after school - but neither Joel nor my Mom is great about taking photos. It just is what it is). So anyway, my Project Life will be more of a "Weekly Overview" type of project. Which I like. Some weeks will be busier and have more stuff (and likely more inserts), some weeks will be more boring and have more pockets with just embellishments to fill up the space. I'm OK with that.

Here's a look at the left-hand page. Week 1 was pretty full. Joel and Dean had an "adventure" on Sunday where they spent the morning at the beach and then went and saw the movie Chipwrecked. I stayed home and did some cleaning and laundry and grocery shopping, which almost always means 2 stops - Safeway and Whole Foods. Monday was a holiday for both Joel and I, but Dean spent the day and night with my Mom, which meant a rare Date Night!! (we went to the movie Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).


And the right-hand page with a look at a few inserts, including an altered page protector that I cut down and sewed closed to hold a small drawing Dean made of a Color Wheel (along with some journaling). Also on Monday Joel took the Christmas lights down from the 3 big Palm Trees in our front yard. The rest of the week was filled with back to work and back to school after a lot of time off during the holidays. Saturday we went on a hike in the morning and then had a family "Slumber Party" in the living room - ordering pizza and watching the movie Rango while snuggled in our sleeping bags (and spending the night on the living room floor - Dean LOVED this!).

Here you can see the page with the color wheel insert turned over, out of the way. This reveals the rest of the page - the tag from my new chair at work that we received on Thursday (big excitement over this!), and a few other things.


Probably my favorite 2 inserts from Week 1 are these 2 3x4 cards - one capturing a conversation between myself and Dean and the other a small clipping from some of his doodled artwork he created while waiting for dinner to be ready Friday evening. Both a perfect capture of Dean right now and a perfect example of why I'm doing this project!

2 more 3x4 inserts this week - a "2012 Goals" freebie from the Plucky Momo blog (she's doing a Project Life freebie every friday!) and a journaling card with our "Week in Review". I plan to do some type of Week in Review each week. Loved how this turned out.

I can already tell the hardest thing for me with Project Life will be narrowing down my photo selections to just a few photos for each "event". We basically had two real outings as a family this past week - we went to the beach and we went on a hike out in Makena (King's Highway Trail) and both outings resulted in about 50 photos each. Picking just a few photos to tell the story for each event was agonizing for me. And that's what's nice about these extra inserts! For the beach trip, I just used up a few of the pockets from the first page protector. For our hike, I added a Flip Pocket and also used a 4x6 Template to create a photo collage for the bottom photo. It worked out great! You'll probably be seeing this a lot.

So that's it. Week 1 is done!! I am on a mission to finish all 52 weeks this year and to stay fairly caught up throughout the year. I'll try to share my pages with you here. Hopefully someone will find something inspiring. If you do, please let me know! Thanks!

Products Used:

InLinkz.com