Project Life Kits

I am having a blast finishing up my 2015 family scrapbook using the Project Life "Rain" kit. I don't know who designed it, but I've found it to be a really cohesive, easy to use kit. The colors are great, and unlike other kits, which while using them I've found the frequent urge to add in something other than project life cards due to the pages being lackluster, in this kit I've only occasionally brought in some different paper to enhance a layout. 

Now that I've purchased 4 core kits, I'm swimming in excess cards, so for 2016 I'm trying something different. I've obtained smaller, value kits (Lucky Charm and Live Brightly), and will probably have a more eclectic, less color coordinated album, with more embellishments. It's a lot of fun! With the very simple style I use to create pages, I should have my 2015 and 2014 albums, as well as both girls' baby albums, done in no time! I'm going to be so done with all my recent photos that I'll be searching out older stories to scrap! We will see...

Scrapbooking

It’s winter, so instead of being outside, I’m spending hobby time inside scrapbooking. Since having kids, I take a ton of pictures daily, and I enjoy making scrapbooks to record the stories of our everyday special moments. I started scrapbooking in high school. Before the pocket scrapbooking craze began, I had purchased pocket pages as a way to add a lot of photographs into my books, as a supplement to traditional 12x12 pages. 3 years ago I learned about Project Life, and bought a kit to finish out my first child’s baby book. Since then, I’ve used 4 different Project Life core kits to start 4 books. In 2014 and 2015, I made a family album as well as concurrently making my youngest daughter’s baby book. Now that she’s over 12 months, for 2016 I will be focusing on just my family album. 

So how do I use the pocket scrapbooking technique? About once per month, I go through all my recent photos and choose which to print for my scrapbook. In reality, I don’t have that much time to do this, so I just move all the pictures into a folder on my computer to go through them when I get a chance. By organizing them in a folder, I’m able to keep my photos organized so I can scrapbook chronologically.

The Project Life products are nice because you can just choose a kit, and then all the cards you use to journal on and decorate the scrapbook coordinate throughout the whole year, although I have found some features of the product that I don’t like. When lining up 4 journaling cards (which are 3x4 size), it usually looks busy and doesn’t match nicely, the phrases on the cards can get repetitive, and there aren’t enough just plain, pretty cards to decorate the page. Many scrapbookers get around this by adding tons of other products and embellishments so you don’t have to rely on the cards from the kit in making the page look nice, but if you aren’t able to dedicate several hours per week to the hobby, this isn’t very feasible and almost defeats the purpose of using Project Life to streamline everything. I’ve also found that the Project Life cards often require being either horizontal or vertical, so depending on the page protector you use, you might have a hard time finding a card to fit the space you have. 

This year, I’m using a smaller, “value kit,” because I find a core kit has way too many cards for a year. I’m also planning to organize the book by months, so all of January’s pictures will be together, then February’s, and so on. I’m finding that most of us scrapbookers love to be organized. :) 

So that's what I'm doing. So what do I not do when it comes to scrapbooking? Worry about "getting behind." Those words don't exist for me in this hobby. I am under no obligation to anyone to finish anything before I start something else. Which is a really nice way to scrapbook! I also don't take great photographs. Some are really horrible quality! But they're still valuable to me. Lastly, I don't feel obligated to take any pictures. I don't feel guilty if I don't take a picture for a couple weeks. Life is busy! I just scrapbook to collect the memories I did choose to photograph. 

So here are a few pages I've made recently. Nice and simple, but still pretty:

 

  

 

Anyone else enjoy scrapbooking? If so, what sort of system do you use? Have you made plans for memory-keeping in 2016?