I have to be honest… over the last couple of years I’ve been slacking on my Project Life albums. There’s been a lot of changes in my life with my job, friends and home and I just haven’t had the mental or physical energy to stay on top of it. I started the year on a good note because I had finished my 2019 December Daily album but shortly after that I got off track.
This year we’ve all experienced a wide variety of changes to our normal routines because of COVID. For me those changes have been working from home, canceling vacation & travel plans and oddly spending more time with friends. Most of these changes have created a lot of stress in my life and to help deal with that stress I decided to get back to my scrapbooking, planning and design work and use it as art therapy.
In preparation for all the upcoming scrapbooking I decided to get some inspiration and re-join Hip Kit Club with the July Main Scrapbook, Pocket Life and Color Kits. I love having the variety of both 12×12 and pocket scrapbooking supplies. I don’t do as much 12×12 scrapbooking but I like having the supplies for when I do. Plus, you can cut down the 12×12 papers and get a lot of use for pocket scrapbooking out of them. Plus the color kit had that cool stencil from Echo Park that I can’t wait to use on some of my holiday cards. If you’d like to see what was in this kit check out my unboxing video.
I also went back through my old albums and made a list of all the pages that needed to be finished (or started) and set about a goal of getting caught up on ALL my Project Life albums by the end of the year. I want to start the new year fresh and be current. I’ve made a lot of progress on my past albums and I’ll be sharing some flip-throughs on YouTube.
As of today, I am completely caught up on my albums for 2015, 2016 and 2017. I have a few months to finish in 2018 and for my 2019 album the months are all finished, I just need to add my opening and closing pages. I’ve even been able to work on some of my 2020 album. I’m starting to make process videos again and have my first one up for week 23.
Make sure to subscribe to my channel if you’d like to see the flip through videos and how I caught up on 5 years of project life in a matter of months. Also, hit that bell icon so you don’t miss any upcoming process videos or unboxings!
I started the year on a good note because I had finished my 2019 December Daily album. I was really proud of this project because this was the first year that I did a complete album with one page a day. In the past I didn’t have enough photos to do a complete album so I would document the photos I had but would incorporate a couple of years in one album. Not this year. I was very mindful of my goal and took photos every day.
I even purchased a kit to use specifically for this years album. Granted it was the 2018 December hit from Hip Kit that I got on sale but that’s ok. It’s the first year I treated myself and didn’t create a kit of my own. I found the album on sale at Michael’s. It’s a 6×8 Project Life album in teal with a white snow flake pattern. Even though we don’t get snow in Phoenix I loved the colors and thought it was really cute.
I’m really happy with the way it turned out and I’m going to buy another kit for 2020. Here’s a flip through of the finished album.
I was rummaging through a pile of photos the other day when I came across this blast from the past. This is a photo of me and my best friend from high school on the day she moved away. It’s so fun to look back at old photos like this from the 80’s when our hair was all big & crazy and our clothes… Man, our clothes in the 80’s were something else!
Even with the crazy hair and the dated clothes, I LOVE this photo! I don’t have many pictures of us. This was WAY before cell phones with cameras and even before digital cameras so unless it was a very special occasion we didn’t really have cameras at hand to document the beautiful memories like today.
But this photo is special to me. After my friend moved we wrote letters to each other for years. Like real, physical letters that you’d put a stamp on and mail! Man, I love those days. The excitement of checking the mailbox every day to see if the letter was there made it feel like Christmas when the letter finally arrived. Over the years the letters became emails then messages on MySpace than Facebook. We still share old photos and memories but it’s different. The days before cell phones, email and Facebook seemed so magical and I wanted to document this special day.
My layout was inspired by two sketches from Sketchabilities (#129 & #130). I liked the title and the cluster around it on sketch #130 but I liked the cluster on the upper right of sketch #129 so I just combined those elements to make the layout fit my needs. If you’re ever in need of a great scrapbook or card sketch head over to the Sketchabilities blog for more layout inspiration!
I’ve been wanting to use up some of this old kit Gossamer Blue kit I got back in May 2016. The background paper is a Dear Lizzy paper from a paper pack I got at Michaels and the paper for the flags I cut were from Simple Stories and My Minds Eye.
The pink acetate doily and this adorable silver heart puffy sticker are from a recent Freckled Fawn sale box. The feathers, floral corner and the woodchip paperclip are all from Simple Stories.
The “friends forever” title was a cut file from Miss Kates Cutables, the “you & me” flair is from my Etsy shop.
The button and the “heart” Love This embellishment are from Pink Paisley and tag behind the title is from My Minds Eye.
I loved this little envelope from the Carpe Diem bits & pieces set from Simple Stories. It was perfect with my journaling about the letters my bestie and I wrote after she moved. I paired it with a page flag cut from some My Minds Eye paper and this Simple Stories chipboard flower sticker.
I just finished a process video for my new YouTube channel if you wanted to check it out.
Ok, so it’s probably no secret to the majority of scrapbookers that Becky Higgins finally released the Project Life app for iPhone and iPad. It’s not the first scrapbooking app out there (Martha Stewart Crafts, Rhonna Designs, etc) but I know tons of people, myself included, love Becky’s style and were waiting for her to develop an app where we can create Project Life pages on our mobile devices. The release of the app was perfect timing for me because I had recently watched Social Media Scrapbooking by Megan Hoeppner on Creative Live and had already started playing around with other apps that are a great compliment to the PL app and I incorporate designs from those other apps in my PL pages.
This is one of my first PL pages from the app. I just wanted to play around with the app and get acquainted with it. I have a bunch of photos of me with my friends’ pets so I thought that was a good place to start. Since there aren’t any PL kits for scrapbooking pets on the app yet I decided to make my own card to add to the page and here’s what I did…
First, I used a fantastic app called Studio (madewithstudio.com). This app is absolutely amazing!!! And it’s 100% FREE!. Its main purpose is to create decorated photos and meme’s for Instagram but you can do so much more. The main downfall is because it’s designed to upload to Instagram it creates square images. This isn’t necessarily that bad because there are plenty of square pockets on pages in the PL app. Also, because the app was designed for Instagram and social sharing, by default your designs are shared on the Studio network for others to remix. But don’t worry, if you select the little person icon on the bottom right of the home screen then select the gear icon in the top right of your profile you can find the option to make your designs private. This is also the place where you can select to automatically save your designs to your photos on your phone.
After you download the app you can go through and choose several themes of digital stamps to install! There are over 40 themes (I have most of them) and each theme comes with word art stamps and image stamps. Once you choose a theme then you can start designing. You choose one of your photos or a digital paper you want to embellish. I choose this lovely polka-dot background that I had uploaded to my phone via DropBox. After you click next a list of the themes you have will appear. I opened the Dog Lover theme and chose the paw with the heart. It appeared on the screen and from there I can change the color, opacity, shadow style and color as well as size, move and rotate the stamp. After I clicked done I went into the Cat theme and choose the cute kitty face outline. I choose the same color, resized it about the same size and then rotated it the opposite direction and moved into the top left corner.
After that, I added two separate text boxes. I could have added the text (stacked one line above the other) in one text box but the app doesn’t have as many options to reduce the line size as it does to increase and there would have been a lot of space between the two lines. By creating two separate boxes I was able to stack the lines closer together. This will also allow you to rotate one line or change the color of one line. There are dozens of really fun fonts to work with that are very scrapbook friendly. For the caption on the bottom right card “Piggy in a blanket” I used Sniglet for “Piggy” and Sacramento for “in a blanket”. Using two text boxes allowed me to overlap the bottom line on the top. One of the coolest things about the Studio app (besides that it’s totally FREE) is that you can layer things and move the layers around.
So after you have your design the way you want it you click finish and the app will ask you for a comment. You can enter a brief description or even some hashtags if you plan to share your design on Instagram. You can also save your design with no description. You have the choice at this point if you’d like to email the design to yourself or a friend, directly share the design on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Now the design is in your photos and ready to use on the next page you make on the Project Life app.
I have a few other apps that I use to layer elements from digital kits and save them as 4×6 images. I’ll be sharing those other apps with you soon!
I was rummaging through a pile of photos the other day when I came across this blast from the past. This is a photo of me and my best friend from high school on the day she moved away. It’s so fun to look back at old photos like this from the 80’s when our hair was all big & crazy and our clothes… Man, our clothes in the 80’s were something else!