The Challenge: Daily PL Layouts & What I've Learned

As the end of 2013 rolled around, I was thinking about what I wanted to change about my life for the upcoming year: what did I want to change in my life to become more of the person I wanted to be in 2014? While some of my goals for the new year were more personal in nature, quite a few revolved around me wanting to find the joy in everyday life with my two boys, record the memories from this fleeting time, and embrace my creativity by pursuing my passion for graphics design and scrapbooking.

ENTER PROJECT LIFE: 

I have been admiring “Project Life” layouts and supplies for a long time. In fact, I even bought myself the “Project Life Designer Paper - Baby Edition for Him” back in July of 2013 to put together what I thought would be a quicker and easier scrapbook on my first son’s first year. I was excited! I was motivated! I tracked the package of my cards, grids, album and dividers and when it arrived I dutifully sorted everything by color and topic, got things in order for how I wanted to create my pages, started looking though all my digital files to figure out which of the thousands I’d put in my album… and FROZE. Suddenly it was all overwhelming. I wanted to plan out each page with appropriately cropped images of details and distance shots, coordinating colors, and meaningful journaling cards that balanced the page. How could I visualize all of that separately prior to having printed pictures to match up with my physical cards?

In mid-January 2014, I asked my neighbor Therese who also does Project Life if I could see her album to see how she puts it all together. I figured there MUST be some better way: I probably spent 2 or 3 hours looking through pictures and visually planning my first two page spread. After talking to Therese about her process (she’s also obsessive like me it turns out) and looking at her book and how she modified the canned cards to be even MORE amazing… I realized that this could turn into a MUCH bigger thing for me. I loved it conceptually. I loved the idea of adding embellishments to individual cards. I loved the simple storytelling of daily life and particularly loved how you could scrap multiple stories on the same page. But the idea of planning out my pages TWICE - once with a combination of having my physical supplies out and flagging all of my computer files - and then a second time once I was able to get all my pictures printed - sounded both overwhelming and disappointing. I didn’t have the time to do things twice! I also was afraid I’d plan something the first time and not like the layout or forget my concepts by the time I had everything in order to physically create the page I mentally laid out.

So then I started thinking DIGITAL. It seemed to me that this would give me all the benefits of the Project Life style and fix all those things I was worried about: I could have the instant gratification of ideas and completed project coming together at the same time AND I could satisfy that perfectionist side of myself that had everything cropped and resized as many times as I’d like without ruining my original supplies.

THE CHALLENGE: 

I decided at first to start taking pictures daily with the idea of doing Project Life weekly spreads. I researched Project Life online through blog posts, galleries, and forums, downloaded iPhone Apps to help me record daily journaling and photos, and began my FIRST layouts January 29th.  I was going to create a double-layout for the first week of January, but like some kind of drug addict, this suddenly wasn’t enough for me. It started gradually: I thought I wouldn’t limit myself to a certain number of pages per week - just document the stories. I made 5 pages for my FIRST WEEK!!

Then I started thinking about what I was hoping to get out of this: I’m not just in it to scrapbook my memories. I’m also in this to improve my craft. To get good enough at digital scrapbooking to eventually do something with it as a career: make my own papers, be part of a digital scrapbooking team, etc. If that is truly my goal, I need practice. As much as I can get in as short of a time as I can get it. If most people are scrapping one page or two pages a week, and I scrap 6 or 7 pages a week, I’m compressing years worth of learning into a much shorter time period!

With that in mind, I decided to challenge myself to create DAILY digital Project Life pages in 2014. I didn’t want to put a number like 365 on my challenge goal since I knew that time, life, and baby needs are so fluid that you can’t plan for everything… but I wanted to commit to working on this “hopeful career” as often as possible.

Once I made this decision, I was suddenly “on a mission”. Actually, more to the point: I was hook, line and sinker obsessed. I’ve been following blogs, reviewing galleries for inspiration and new techniques, and “pinning” like a crazy woman! I use all that I’m voraciously devouring to help inspire my daily pages and attempt to try something “new” with each page I create.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED THUS FAR: 

I’m now just about 2 months into my challenge [see my gallery here], and I’ve learned quite a few things along the way.  I’ve tried to boil this down to 5 key items:

1) Everyone has to develop their own Project Life process that works for them. 

Regardless of the details of your process, I believe the basic stages boil down to: capture, plan, learn, execute, reflect. My NEXT weekly blog post will go into detail on this very subject!

2) Pictures should tell your story. 

When I first started taking pictures in January, I was JUST trying to capture cute shots of my boys. When I started putting layouts together, I began to realize that the pictures can and should tell a story all by themselves. I began to take pictures differently - focusing on capturing the activities I wanted to tell stories about.

3) Be flexible about “the challenge” to keep yourself motivated and not buried. 

I had thought that I could or ::should:: create daily layouts (as in at least 7 layouts a week). The truth is, if I keep this up I will totally burn out. For me, I need a “day off” of capturing images at least once a week. I similarly need at least one night off where I’m not working on anything to catch up on some ::gasp:: sleep!! Do I even know the meaning of that word?!? And since I determined that I need to keep up a regular blog to keep myself honest, document what I’m learning, and hopefully develop a community of similarly-minded individuals who can all discuss this together, I need a night where I work exclusively on blogging and keeping up with forums. I have decided to adjust my “challenge parameters” to scrap at least 5 PL layouts a week. This is more realistic for me and has thus far kept me from burning out. I may need to adjust this even further over time. The key is that I’ll adjust as needed so that I can keep swimming strong and continue to push the envelope as much as possible.

4) Inspiration is everywhere! 

Organizing 10 million ideas is a challenge. It’s amazing to me how when you open your mind up to creativity, EVERYTHING seems to spark ideas. Now that I’m forcing myself to create daily, I find inspiration in fabrics, nature, or even a trip to the grocery store. It’s fun to capture these ideas. Of course I find the MOST inspiration in the creative work of others - traditional AND pocket scrapping. I have created pinterest boards for a variety of different types and sources of inspiration to gather some of my thoughts for future use and review when I need an idea for a color scheme, card layout, or quote.

5) Learn through doing. 

I have found that no one really knows what they’re doing at first. The key is to TRY. You learn through actually getting your hands dirty, even if the results aren’t “perfect”. Don’t be afraid that you’ve never done it before or it might not be the “best” watercolor technique ever created, just worry that you attempted it and came up with something that works for you! Each time you do it, you’ll be better than the last time!

WHAT DO YOU THINK? 

What challenges have you created for yourself? What have you learned thus far? What keeps you motivated?