I'm A Project Life Convert! (or Am I A Scrapbooker Now?)

First I'll give you some background, for those of you that may be newer followers of my blog.  I've always considered myself a collage artist vs. a true scrapbooker.  While I keep scrapbooks for my kids (here, here, and  here), I do them in more of a collage style than a scrapbooking style.  I love the books I've done, but as we have added children to the family, it's become more and more difficult to keep up with journals for all three kids!  I've tried to make sure I do spreads for the younger two, but as a result, I've neglected doing them for my oldest.  The last spread I did for him was when he turned five, and he's almost 6 1/2 now!

So lately, I've started hearing about Project Life, a new scrapbooking system by Becky Higgins.  It consists of divided pages that house 4x6 items and 3x4 items.  In addition, you may then purchase kits that have 4x6 and 3x4 decorated cards to fit into the slots, to supplement your photos. 

I thought it may be a perfect solution to my dilemma.  I can keep up with the collage style of book for Avery (until she turns five), and then use Project Life books for Noah and Riley (Noah turns five in two weeks).

I decided to take the jump and give it a try.  I ordered one set of pages and one core kit.  And, dare I say it, but I think I may be hooked!  I've done three spreads, and they went so much more quickly and easily than my typical collage spreads.  While they lack a little bit of the artistic, more personal aspect of my collage journals, I think I'll actually be able to keep up with them!  And that's exactly what I needed!

I went on a little bit of a shopping spree (if you can call it a spree- we only have one scrapbook store in town other than Michael's, JoAnn's, and Hobby Lobby), and bought some scrapbooking supplies that I thought would be good supplements to the kit, and then organized everything all nice and pretty!

 Anytime I'm going to work on a Project Life page, I can just pull out these two containers, and I have everything I need!   

So now, after a novel of explanation above (!), here are the results of it all:

Since I stopped Riley's last journal at age five, I'm backtracking and doing some pages from the past year.  The above talks about some of his interests- tools and science.

 Then this page talks about some of the things he's accomplished in the past year- "walking" across the monkey bars, riding his bike, climbing the steps of a lighthouse.

And the last page talks about his and Noah's relationship, and how he enjoys the responsibility of being a big brother.


On some of the pages, I added my own 4x6 and 3x4 cards that were cut from scrapbook paper, when  I couldn't find ones from the kit that worked.  I have a feeling I'll do that a lot, just because I can never do anything by the rules (ha ha!).  But what's so great is that the kit sort of give me a starting point, and I can expand from there.


So anyway, there you have it!  I guess I'm a real scrapbooker now!




By the way, thanks to those of you who asked me some questions in the last post!  Daniele, this post should answer most of yours, I think, and I'll get to the other questions soon for the rest of you!  Feel free to ask away if anybody else has questions!