I am so excited to be sharing my very first Project Life spread with you! First up, I have to thank Elise because it was through her amazing blog that I found out about Project Life. In a nutshell, Project Life is a scrapbooking system developed by Becky Higgins that allows you to focus on the memory-keeping rather than being caught up in the stress of the scrapbooking process. I’ve spent so many years fantasising about the ultimate scrapbooking method, and seriously, this is it my friends. This is it.
One of the underlying premises of Project Life is that you capture one week in one spread. This is rather revolutionary for me, because it allows me the freedom of choosing the best moments of the week to capture, rather than feeling like I need to scrapbook every single one. More importantly, the flexibility of the Project Life system is pure genius. Pure genius.
Anyway, I’ll jump right into my first spread, and hopefully as the weeks go by, it’ll become clear to you how amazing this system is! Also, let me encourage you to do a Google image search for Project Life and you’ll see what I mean by how ridiculously flexible it is. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge them.)
This is the entire left hand page for week 14. I’ll go through each most of the sections separately to explain what I did. You need to decide before you begin whether your week begins on a Sunday or Monday. I chose Monday. Also, even though the idea is that there are NO RULES and you can do whatever you want for each week, I have to admit I spent a bit of time working out what I thought my ‘style’ would be, and how I was likely to scrapbook each week. A lot of this depends on what materials you have and how you like to capture memories. In doing my first spread, I learnt that I was more naturally a ‘digital’ scrapbooker rather than a traditional scrapbooker (mainly because I can’t stand my own handwriting). (Sad, but true.).
I decided to put my favourite shot of the week – aka the ‘hero shot’ – as the very first image. This happened to be a photo that I took of all three boys on the Thursday morning, while they were all standing at the front window watching the cars go by. No words needed to explain this shot. Just one of those everyday moments that capture in itself what life with the boys looks like right now. I added the photo’s date to the bottom left hand corner, and you will see that I’ve done this with every other photo as well.
You’ll notice if you look at photos of other people’s Project Life albums, this first photo of the spread is usually the one that intros the week, and almost always has the first and last dates of that particular week on it. I like the way Elise has a Kraft circle dot and the two dates stamped on two lines, but I didn’t think that it would tie in way with the rest of my digital design (I also had some inexplicable difficulty with working my stamp – most likely just lack of co-ordination of my part, but let’s not dwell on that for the purposes of this post.) So I settled on this beige arrow with white text on top – which is admittedly okay but not fantastic. For now, it’s fine, and the best thing about this system is that if I decide to change it down the track, I can always just re-print the photo and re-insert it! Awesome, right?
I took this photo at Dee Why beach on the Thursday evening, on my way back to the car from the cafe having picked up a couple of coffees for Rick and myself. It was just beautiful. I decided to just typeset the words ‘Dusk at Dee Why’ in Rockwell font over the photo. I foresee a lot of these ‘Dusk at Dee Why’ shots throughout the album.
Below the two landscape 4×6 pockets are four portrait 3×4 pockets. In this first pocket is a brief overview of the week, including special highlights (like Jamie starting to cruise!) and events. I designed the card in Adobe InDesign (which is also what I use to add text and arrows and other design elements to all the photos) and will be re-using the template for future weeks. The photo to the right is one of Pete and Jamie at lunchtime on Tuesday, eating cheese. We like our cheese here at Casa Mason.
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