Project Life- Week 47

Week 47. And the epiphanies just keep on coming.

I’ve made it no secret that I have been struggling with Project Life for a while. Struggling with products, struggling with time commitments, struggling with my process. Making things way too hard. But I keep on plugging away, tweaking things. Because I think that this is so worthwhile. To me, if nobody else.

But I finally feel like I’m turning the corner. And I’m so excited. I mean like super duper jump up and down excited.

Because I started printing my pages!!!!!

See?

Sorry for the bad blurry iPhone pic. Now I see why all the physical PL’ers complain about glare. I promise I’ll use my big camera next time.

Before I go into the pages themselves, I wanted to briefly explain my change in format. I had always thought that I was going to print up my digital PL pages in a book. That was what I did in 2010, and what I still plan to do for 2011. I have used Artscow in the past. They weren’t the best quality, but they were super cheap. When I switched from one to two page LO’s this year, I decided to go with Blurb because they are the only ones I could find that did 150+ page books. Unfortunately this weekend was not a good time for my relationship with Blurb. (It’s a really long boring story). I won’t be using them for my 2012 book anymore.

I had already decided to do a more hybrid approach next year anyway, so why not give it a trial run for Week 47 and see how that goes? It took a lot of trial and error to get it how I wanted, but this was the perfect week to really see if I could make it work. It was the week we went to Nashville, so I knew I wanted extra inserts.

I decided to just use what I had on hand. I didn’t want to buy anything in case I ended up not liking the result. I have three old American Crafts 8×8 binders left over from when I first started scrapbooking. I now use 8.5×11 binders, so they were just sitting on the shelf empty. I found a few 8×8 page protectors to go in them, and I was ready to go.

Originally I had planed to do a couple of 4×8 inserts. I made up a few templates for myself, and I was going to cut down my page protectors to make them fit.  But I came across a couple of old 4×6 sleeves from a photo album I wasn’t using. Lo and behold, they were a perfect fit! I was so excited over this discovery that I decided to go in a different simpler direction, and just do a photo collage for each day of our trip. I made up a little quickie template for that, schlepped in the pictures, et voila, instant inserts!

So to make a long story even longer, here is my Week 47…

Page one-
Insert page 1 with pictures from our trip up to Nashville.

Insert pages 2 and 3 from Thanksgiving. They face each other.

Insert page 4 from Black Friday.

And here’s the second regular-sized page with pictures from our trip home, which I just realized I haven’t blogged about yet.

I have to say, I really love how they turned out. That was such an eventful week and I was able to cram almost 60 pictures in! Yay!

I’m more excited and hopeful abut PL than I have been in a long time, and I can’t wait to get started on the next week 🙂

Project Life was created by Becky Higgins. You can learn more by clicking here. More of my Project Life posts can be found here.