Hi! My name’s Amy Cornwell. I have my own business where I make jewelry to celebrate all of life’s events and I also have a small lifestyle blog where I talk about crafts, family, jewelry and traveling. I’m so honored to be talking to you all today about my Project Life experience.
I’ve been scrapbooking since middle school, using paper & embellishments to make my pages. When I fell away from scrapbooking after having two kids, I knew I needed something different. I still loved capturing memories with my camera, but the thought of scrapbooking it all was daunting. Enter Project Life. I saw the simplicity of it and it intrigued me. I knew I had to have it.
The first year doing Project Life I did the picture a day. It was hard for me, because as a working mother I felt like my pictures were all the same – in the evenings of my kids playing or taking baths. The second year (2011) I did things differently. I scrapbooked events, not putting pressure on myself to take a picture to put in the album every day. I loved doing it this way and easily kept up with my book in 2011. (notice below that sometimes I don’t even journal, I let the pictures tell the story)
Enter 2012. We started the year with our 10th anniversary trip to Mexico and then it was back to real life. I had a conference to attend in April and shortly after that summer hit. As of a week ago, my 2012 book was stuck at March. I have had no desire to work on my album this summer because of general busy-ness and the fact that my pictures were piling up. I felt a little bit like a scrapbooking failure and very overwhelmed. I had done well in 2011 and now I was getting way behind for 2012.
Finally I had my chance to catch up. My husband went out of town for a work trip last weekend, so I organized and edited the pictures I wanted to print (about 200 in all). Once the kids went to bed one night, I got to work! I started at 8pm with 200 pictures and over 5 months to complete. I’m all about simplicity. I love seeing people like Ali Edwards create beautiful spreads for their Project Life albums and wish mine would look like that. But I’m realistic and know my own personal limits. So I do very easy spreads with just a little bit of journaling and sometimes stickers.
For my massive catch-up session I used just a few items: my core kit, various plastics, a black pen and some letter stickers. That’s it. I didn’t use any other embellishments on these pages. In 2011 I rounded the corners of each picture, but for 2012 I’ve left them as-is. I like that look because it fills up every bit of available space in the plastics. My favorite plastics to use are the classic Design A (I think because I’ve been using that for the past three years) and Design C. Design C is great for me because I take mostly landscape portraits, so I just slip them in with one journaling card (or not!) and that page is done!
Here’s the exciting part: By midnight I was DONE. Completely. Journaling. Pictures in. Done. I ended up using about 150+ pictures and 13 page protectors. This is the exact reason why I love Project Life so much – you can keep up with it weekly or you can slack off (like me) and get a massive amount done in one night. My kids love going through the books, laughing at memories and flipping back and forth to see pictures of themselves. That in itself is all worth it to me.
