Project Life 2012 Album

Last year I tried my hand at Project Life.  I wouldn't like to say that I failed because I do, in fact, have an album to show for my efforts.  The album encompasses the entire year, but it is far from the in-depth look at our lives that it was intended to be.  Part of that was because I was pregnant.  I am not ashamed to say that I don't do pregnancy well...Okay, I am ashamed to say it, but it is true (that's one of the many reasons I'm not planning to do it again).  As a result, the photo-a-day component of the project was far from complete.  To be honest, there wasn't even a photo every week sometimes.  It's difficult to scrapbook without pictures, and it's difficult to drum up the effort to do it when pregnant and tired.  Apologies aside, I do love the album I have, which is a general overview of our lives for the year. Here is a sampling of digital pages from the album.

I used the Wendyzine Photoshop Actions for the pocket page style designs. They are available at JessicaSprague.com  as templates.  I really haven't been good about keeping track of the supplies that I used for each layout.  You can ask me, if you're interested and I'll try my darnedest to figure it out.  I'm going to try really hard to be better at it this year. Around April (when morning sickness set in), I started  doing one layout a month, with a few extras thrown in there if I felt like it.  At the end of the year, I still had some catching up to do, so I used my pocket page actions with pictures and journaling cards, then I wrote in the blank spots after I had them printed.  To be quite honest, I had to go back and do June through November at the same time because I was that far behind.  The Studio Wendy actions make that pretty easy though, and since I didn't hold myself to doing the journaling before the pages were printed, I got all those pages done in under an hour.  The most time consuming part was deciding which pictures I would use.  You can get Wendyzine's scrap actions at scrapbookgraphics.com.  I love them!
I'll be using some form of Project Life this year.  I'll be using the 365 photo app on my phone again.  I really like how it's set up, and how easy it was to see which days were blank so I knew to look on my other cameras for them. However, I need to recognize that these projects are supposed to be fun, so I don't want to put the pressure on myself of having to take a picture every single day.  I'll consider it a success if I have a couple every week.  I think I will use dropbox this time to transfer photos onto my phone from my other cameras to make it easier to keep track of the photos.  I'll also be using the Photo Freedom sleeves for some of the paper layouts, I started using them at the end of the year last year and really liked them. I'm still aiming for 1 layout a week, but we'll see how that goes.  If I get behind again, it'll be back to the pocket pages for month-in-review layouts.