{project life…}

Project life. I wasn’t sure if it was for me. I didn’t know if I could make it work. I hon­estly thought it would be too much of a com­mit­ment and that I would be over­stretch­ing myself. I eas­ily lose inter­est in projects that don’t work out per­fectly, and I knew that I would stum­ble along the way here.

But then some­thing hap­pened when I down­loaded the new Clemen­tine kit. After almost two months, I opened Adobe Pho­to­shop again and started play­ing with these good­ies. I had been eye­ing the Clemen­tine kit on ama­zon, and had been seri­ously think­ing of buy­ing it. It would be the per­fect kit for all of my lit­tle girls pho­tographs after­all… Imag­ine my sheer joy when Becky Hig­gins joined the Jes­sica Sprague team! I could now do Project life digitally!

Now, I had to choose some photo to test drive the clemen­tine kit. I had about 80 gigs of unprocessed pho­tos from our lat­est India vaca­tion. Thats about 2000 (I hope its not more!) pho­tos. Daunt­ing and Scary. I had about one hour of free “me” time and there was no way I was going to search for a story to scrap­book in that chaos. So, instead I chose pho­tos of our sec­ond baby girl that I had taken the day before.  And made this lay­out in like 30 min­utes flat.

Project life is.that.good. I loved the col­ors of the kit and it was very sim­ple to get this lay­out together…

Our lit­tle baby has already turned 5 months old. I seri­ously can­not believe she is grow­ing up SO fast!

But I digress (as I so often do these days…)

I had so much fun mak­ing this lay­out. Unbe­liev­able fun and com­plete sat­is­fac­tion. I loved scrap­book­ing the NOW. The jour­nal­ing came together so eas­ily and quickly because I was writ­ing stuff that hap­pened yes­ter­day. I really need to be doing this more and more. Scrap­book­ing the NOW. A new new years res­o­lu­tion

Now I had an amaz­ing kit, and an amaz­ing lay­out out of Project life. But I still didn’t know where to go with this. I want to make my lay­outs with a goal in mind, an end des­ti­na­tion. Where do I see these lay­outs finally being stored? Do I print them and add them to an album? Or do I make a pho­to­book out of them? Are these lay­out going to be a gen­eral doc­u­men­ta­tion of our 2012 life? Is is going to be our sec­ond baby’s first year scrap­book? Do I make a dou­ble spread every month, and then print them into a pho­to­book… The options were end­less and yet not quite enough…

I chat­ted about this dilemma with my friends a bit and thought all day… And then it struck me!

I am now going to make a project life book, with one two page spread about each month. In the two page spread, I will have one page each for each girl. Some months I might merge the pages, like in Octo­ber when we go to the pump­kin patch, but basi­cally I want to use Project life to doc­u­ment how the girls change each and every month– whats new in their char­ac­ter­is­tics, what new things they have learnt thmonth etc.

So for the month of Jan­u­ary, I already have a page done for our sec­ond daugh­ter, the “5” one above. I will get another lay­out done for our old­e­girl and then Jan­u­ary will be done. I like this plan already

At the end of the year I will just print all of these into a photobook.I like hav­ing a des­ti­na­tion for my lay­outs, as opposed to just mak­ing them and then think­ing where to fit them. So this makes me happy.

As a bonus plus point, I can just order extra copies of the pho­to­book for the grand­par­ents, and won’t that make them happy?

All of this think­ing hap­pened dur­ing the day, while chang­ing dia­pers and get­ting meals ready. It was a crazy thurs­day, and when I saw that there was an One hour chal­lenge at ClubCK, I so wanted to play. That’s when I made this lay­out, which is going to be the title page of my Project life book…

(To get 45 min­utes of com­puter time to do this, I had the baby in the Baby Bjorn and had to bribe the elder sis with car­toons, pho­tos, and she got to play with my rib­bon stash…Phew! It was very dif­fi­cult. I can see that I can longer do One hour chal­lenges, unless they are at night when the girls are in bed.…)

But I had had the idea for this lay­out brew­ing in my head, (inspired by here) and I had the jour­nal­ing ready from my new years day blog post so I fig­ured it would be a quick lay­out to get done. The pho­to­graph rep­re­sents our life right now– with all of us barely in the frame… I love it

I am also join­ing in on the Project life Tues­day at The Mom Cre­ative! Since  my Project life is going to be monthly, I will post on the sec­ond Tues­day of every month… (I still have one lay­out due for this month, which I will hope­fully catch up with next week…)