Project Life Week 2

I am so excited to share more of my scrapbooking with you. Today I have Week 2 of my Project Life album to show you. Longgggg post, so if you stay with me....good for you!

First, I wanted to share some thoughts on how my scrapbooking has progressed this year. (Progress being my One Little Word for the year). Last year I had full intentions of scrapbooking but I hardly did any pages other than adding plain photos to my Project Album. Which I stopped in May due to my gall bladder issues, vacations, softball games, trips, etc. This year I wanted to make some major progress with my scrapbooking. So I've done a lot of thinking about how I can get all the scrapbooking done + my other Design Team responsibilities + run an Etsy shop + devote time to my family, etc.

I knew Project Life was the answer because of it's all inclusive scrapbooking system. But as I completed my first week, I knew that I wanted more. I wanted to add more creativity to my pages. More scrappy stuff using supplies from my stash. More stamps. As I scoped out other blogger's Project Life pages and the gallery at the PL Community, I began to see how others personalized their PL pages. They were using little snippets of receipts, tags, smaller photos, creative journaling, old typewriters for journaling, instant camera photos, etc. And I LIKED it! A lot. Some of my favorite inspirations came from Ali Edwards, Lisa Truesdell and my good friend Heather Nichols.

So that brings me to how I want to do my Project Life album now. I had thought that I simply wanted to add the photos, do the journaling cards and then do lots of other insert pages that were full blown scrapbooking. However, I have to be realistic. I won't have time to do that and keep up with it. And I'm not good at catching up. So I've changed my approach and here's what I'm gonna do: I am going to get scrappy with my Project Life daily photos. I'm going use products from my stash. I'm going to sew on my pages. I'm going to use my old typewriter for journaling. I'm going to cut up Becky's journaling cards and get creative with them. Plus I'm going to add in additional pages of my own in between the PL pages. I'm going to treat the two page layout of one week as a scrapbook layout....blending it all together to look like a layout. To be honest, full size 12 x 12 layouts intimidate me. I think it's because I'm used to making cards which are a smaller size. With the PL pages, the size of the inserts are perfect because they're about the same size as a card. Not intimidating at all.

But to get more scrappy with my PL album, I had to switch gears. I need to scrap in my studio now to be close to my supplies. So I've moved my album to my studio and set up shop on a second table. I re-purposed this Pottery Barn unit (which was originally listed in PB Teen as a makeup table organizer a few years back) and it now holds my basic scrapbooking supplies. I will tweak it as needed but for now it has my stamps that primarily used for scrapbooking (lots of Ali Edwards stamps from Technique Tuesday), letter stickers, my Tiny Tim stapler, a label punch and front and center are my journaling cards + extra supplies from the Project Life kit. It's all right in front of me and I'm loving this process. Note: Instead of printing my photos just daily now with my Canon Selphy, I've also been printing my photos in batches at my local developer and scrapping one week's worth of photos . This way, I am treating one week as a full scrapbook layout. This week's two page spread took me about two hours to complete.

So with all that said, I'll try to keep the actual photo part of this post shorter. Here is my Week 2 photos of my PL pages, which includes a 6 x 12 insert page in between.
The left page.
And the right page.
And here's how it looks with the 6 x 12 page insert, each side having a layout. 6 x 12 page protectors are from We R Memory Keepers.
Here's where the scrappy details come in to play. Sewing, chipboard accents and stamped labels. I love to use my small alphabet stamps for journaling. They are an essential tool for me.

On this photo, I added a few hearts and stitched right on the photo.

Here's a closeup of the 6 x 12 insert page.
This is a journaling block created with Ali's stamps from Technique Tuesday.
And the back side of the 6 x 12 layout. The ledger pockets are from KI. See the photo of that old stone well? We found that while out cutting wood one day. I must get the story of it from my dad. I never knew it was there. It's all about the stories, right?

Okay, that's wayyy too much typing, even for me. How are you coming along with your Project Life album? Are you keeping up? Let's keep each other going, we can do this. Stay tuned this week for Week 3 of my PL album....and a few more insert pages that I did of some fun events last week. Thanks for stopping by!