And so it begins. 2012 will mark my first journey into preserving our family photos and telling the story behind them with Project Life. Not familiar with Project Life? Developed by Becky Higgins, Project Life is a no-fuss, back to the basics approach to getting your photos off of your computer or camera, into albums and documenting the stories behind those pictures. Gone are the days of deciding where to place your photos on a blank piece of cardstock, spending ungodly amounts of time choosing the perfect piece of patterned paper to go with your photos or running out of adhesive at midnight while you are in "creative mode" working on your albums. Becky's Project Life takes all the guess work out of it for you. By using a wide variety of divided page protectors and her professionally designed,Project Life Core Kit collections, Becky's Project Life is the way to go if you are looking for a stress-free way to scrapbook. If you want to learn more about Project Life, it's products and how to get started, click on this link to Becky's "Getting Started" video. Take some time to look around her site. It is full of inspiration on how you can get started with Project Life. And not only are Project Life products available in paper form, but there are digital products as well! Whoo hoo! Her digital kits are available through JessicaSprague.com. AND she has also partnered with Shutterfly where you can make an album using the Clementine or Turquoise Project Life editions!
I am a week and a half behind with my Project Life (I wanted to finish up my December Daily album), but I will be up to date by this Sunday and will post my layouts from the first and second week of January. But I did manage to get my title page done and wanted to share it with you and explain a little bit of what I did to bring a bit of my own style to it.
Above is my title page. It is actually a page and a half. The inspiration for the 6x12 page came from Cathy Zielske's blog. Cathy has a free 6x12 title page download for you to print and place in your album. I wanted a little more texture to my title page and only printed the bracket frame from the psd file she provided. I added our names to the title, printed it and mounted it to a piece of 6x12 brown cardstock that I covered with 1" cream-colored circle punches.
Project Life has a variety of divided page protectors and each design is given their own letter to tell them apart. For the 12x12 title page, I used Design A. The Project Life Core Kits have pre-cut papers that are designed to fit in the pockets. On the back of some them there are suggestions for placement of these papers on your title page and the last page of your albums. Feel free to follow the suggestions or just do your own thing! I did a little of both.
You can to choose to keep embellishments to a minimum when putting your album together or you can jazz things up a bit. For the upper left-hand corner of my title page, I decided to cut 2012 in different sized from the Alphalicious cartridge on my Cricut. I like that the colors coordinated with the word art card that is diagonal from it.
"Life in the Empty Nest"-that is going to be the focus of my album. Oh sure there will be photos of Dustin & Ryley here and there (as a matter of fact there will be in week 1), but Dustin is a college graduate and Ryley is a freshman in college. They are in the States, Chris and I are in Europe. I am really going to enjoy working on album where the focus is the two of us! If you are scrapping life without children check out this post on Becky's blog. Anyways, for the upper right-hand corner of the page I folded one of the grid journal cards in half, stamped the word "life" and wrote "in the empty nest" using a gray pen, and finally stapled it to the card. Simple.
Moving to the mid section of the page...the photo doesn't show it well, but the word art circle is actually mounted to a black piece of cardstock and attached to the card with a pop dot to give it more dimension. There was a word art circle printed on the card itself, but I wanted to add a bit more texture to the page and punched a different one from the printed card below:
Right after I punched that circle from the card, I realized I really didn't have to!!! You see, before the Project Life Clementine Core Kit was available through Amazon, the digital version was released on JessicaSprague.com. Of course I bought it (along with the Cobalt kit) and what I LOVE about the digital version is that there are extra elements included in the kit! The word art circles you see on the card in the above photo are available individually in png format in the digital version! I love that! Instead of punching the circle from the card in the core kit, I could have just printed one. Oh well! The other good thing about having the digital version is that if I want to used the card from the photo above, I can just reprint it because it, too, is included in the digital version!
If you were following my December Daily, this photo may look familiar to you. It was taken December 26th while walking the beach in Jurmala. Technically, it wasn't 2012, but close enough! I love this picture of us and thought it was perfect for the title page of my album.
