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When you take lots of photos eventually you decide you want some of them in non digital form…and looking for ways to do this led to my discovery of Project Life.

Basically Project Life produces kits of cards in a bazillion different designs (and there are other companies who do the same) that you can slot into divided photo album pages along with your pictures to add colour, thoughts and just a bit of pretty. Playing with colour is one of my catnip things, so I was intrigued as soon as I first read about Project life back in late 2012. I’ve made photobooks of trips and things before (or back in the day had photo albums) but I always felt they were a bit boring to look at and never had a good way of telling some of the story of what was happening. As a kid my nana always used to bring out the family photos going a fair way back and she knew the stories of all the people. I know my uncle has some of the information now and she did write on some of the photos but some of that family history was lost when she died.

Which makes you wonder just how much of our own histories will be gone if we all just leave photos on our computers and don’t look at them and tell the stories about them. So I bought a kit at the start of 2013 and an album and started off doing 2013 and then life got busy and I let things slide. But over my christmas break I decided I’d finish doing my 2013 album and I sat down and picked a bunch of photos out of my 2013 shots and sent them off to be printed and when they arrived back, I sat down for about six hours and made an album.

Projectlifefeedingtigers

This is one of the pages from when my mum and dad and I did a behind the scenes experience at Melbourne Zoo and fed the tiger

Since I bought my first kit the whole Project Life thing has taken off in a big way (seriously, if you google or go on pinterest there are a squillion blogs and posts about project life and memory keeping). Some people do it the paper way that I did this album but you can also do it digitally in programs like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements with cards and other things that people design (including digital versions of the actual Project Life brand products) and then print out (or get printed) and put into albums or get made into photobooks. Late last year Project Life came out with an iPhone/iPad app that you can also use. So after I finished my 2013 album, I decided to use the app to do my 2014 album which I then got printed into a photo book. The app is awesome because you can make a page almost as soon as you take the pictures and then save it to various online services or your camera roll to sync with your computer later.

Projectlifetexas

This year, because I still have physical products, I think the plan is to use a combination of all three. I’ve always wanted to know more about using Photoshop Elements for design type things (and photo processing) so this will help with that. I’m also going to try and do more journalling about things as I go along. Because I did 2013/2015 after the event the notes about the pictures are shorter than I might like. I think it’s important to keep a record of my own story as well as the ones I make up in my head. And I think it’s interesting to take time to reflect a bit on what’s happening during the year. That’s one of the reasons I’m trying to blog more this year. I miss getting my thoughts down and then being able to go back and see what I was thinking about things.

People do Project Life in a variety of ways, some people do two pages a week etc but that’s too much for me to fit in with everything else I do, so in my 2013 & 2014 albums I did a mix of pages about particular things like the tigers or trips or even my watercolours and more general monthly “this is what happened this month” type pages. Some months take 1 or 2 pages and some take eight. And that’s fine with me because it’s about what actually happened and what I want to talk about and how much time I have to play with the pretty at any given moment. So I’ll probably take the same approach this year. Mix up big things and little things and my paintings and whatever else happens or takes my fancy. Because that’s what life is about. Here’s a page I made in the app for this year. I’ve been trying to take a picture of the sky every day in January just because, so I thought I’d put the favorites in the album. This is the first of those pages.

ProjectlifeJanuaryskies

I’m thinking about maybe scanning in some of my old photos that are in albums (or transferring them to project life style albums and trying to get some of those memories down too as a long term project. What about you? Do you journal or take pics? Make albums? Do more traditional scrapbooking type things?

If you want to see more of my photos, I tend to pop a lot of them on Instagram so you can follow me there. They also get put on my facebook pages (links on my websites).

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