Hello everyone!! I’m glad to be here with an exciting craft challenge idea for myself. I know a few months ago I came up with a new sewing challenge, to sew all of the patterns I have before buying any more. Well, that lasted about a day and then I got a good deal on some cute patterns for my boys, and you know me, I just couldn’t resist. I think that was the only slip up since making that promise to myself, but I haven’t really had a whole lot of time to sew lately and I’ve been getting more and more interested in scrapbooking again. I haven’t been using my Silhouette that much lately and that bothers me! I LOVE my Silhouette and I wish I had time to use it every day, but who has the time for that? If you do, PLEASE, tell me your secret!! I want to start using it! hehe

Anyway, I’ve decided to scrap the sewing challenge and move onto a scrapbooking challenge (Hehe, pun not intended:). I’ve been reading up a lot on project life and I finally made the plunge and bought my first Project Life kit last week! Ahhh!! So, I’ve been watching a lot of videos on youtube on how to get started on different organizing solutions and what not. I have yet to actually put together my first real Project Life page. I’ve been using the cards from the kit, but just in normal scrapbook layouts, not the project life ones. I need to finish up a few scrapbook pages before getting started in a full on Project Life Album.

So, my new challenge to myself is to scrapbook 31 pages in a Project Life Album by my birthday, April 29th.  Why 31? Well, because I will be 31 years old. I also don’t mean just one side as 31. A lot of times people count a project life layout as a two page spread since they scrap by the week. I don’t think I will be scrapping by the week, but I want to use this same page count idea. So I will actually have 62 pages completed total, but only count them as 31. Does that make sense? 🙂

I am stuck back in August 2007 and it’s driving me crazy! I want to finish scrapbooking 2007 the normal way and then I will start doing the Project Life kind of scrapbooking to start out the 2008 year. It’s a little bit different way of scrapbooking. I’ve never really done anything like it before so I’m a little nervous. If you know me, even a little, you know that I LOVE taking TONS of pictures!! If there’s an event in our life, you can count on me documenting EVERY second of it, and I like to put a lot of those pictures in my scrapbooks. So, you can see how I’m nervous about doing a Project life scrapbook. The way most people do Project Life is by the week. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a project life layout done day to day or event by event or moment by moment. It just makes me feel so confined to a certain way of scrapbooking and I don’t really like that idea. SO, I think I’m going to play around with it and get down a good routine for me. The reason I like the idea of Project Life is that it is all mostly done for you, you just pick out the colors you want to go with your photos, crop your photos and stick them in. That’s really what I need to get myself motivated to get caught up on my scrapbooking! I can totally do this! 🙂

This is my plan:

I’m working on August 2007 right now. I have a lot of pages already scrapbooked digitally so all I need to do is print them off and stick them in an album. The rest of the photos I already have printed I just need to put them on paper. I’m not going to count these pages as the 31 because I want to stick with the Project Life theme idea and see how well I like it. If I end up not liking it maybe I’ll go back and redo the challenge idea. We’ll see how it goes!

Since I have 5 months to get through in 2007 before I start on 2008 I am going to say those 5 months will take me 2 months to scrapbook. I’ll start working on my 31 Project Life layouts in December and that will give me 150 days before my birthday to finish the 31 pages. I figured out that I will have to do about 2 a day to get that many pages done. I don’t know about you, but my work flow often depends on my mood and what else I have going on in life, so of course that 2 page minimum per week isn’t a requirement, but more like a guideline and a hope. Some days or weeks I’ll only get one page done, most days it will be none, I’m sure, so the days I actually have time to scrap I will most likely be doing it really fast and crazy so I can get more done.

But, that’s my plan, scrapbook 2 pages a week starting December 1st. If I have time for more than 2 pages, great, if not, that’s fine. Really, what I want to get out of this challenge for myself is accomplishment. I want to accomplish this task I’ve given myself to preserve these memories I’m making with my kids and our family.

What do you do to keep up with scrapbooking your memories? Are you caught up or are you really behind like I am? I’ll definitely show you my progress as I go along. Here are a few pages I’ve done so far with my new Project Life core kit journal cards.

This is the first core kit I bought from Michael’s. They’re pretty pricey, $29.99, BUT you can use a 40% off coupon to make it a really good deal! I used a coupon and only paid $17.99. I also bought some of Becky Higgins’ page protectors 2 weeks ago when they were having a buy one get one free sale on album refill pages. So, basically I got $103.95 worth of products for only $54 (not including tax).

Here’s a look inside the kit before I opened up the little packages. It looks so pretty, doesn’t it?!! 🙂

This is the first page I made with the journaling cards.

Here’s the 2nd and 3rd layouts. I’m SO in love with these layouts! They took about 20 minutes each and that’s mainly because I was just looking through all of the journaling cards and figuring out what colors to use.

I made this card for my husbands birthday this past Friday. I thought it was nice to add the journaling cards from the kit. They just added a little extra something:)

Oh, and I have to apologize for the picture quality in this post. I wasn’t planning on blogging these pictures so I just used my phone. I’m addicted to instagram these days and that’s mainly what I took these pictures for. If you want to follow me on there look me up! I’m craftymeggy.

Well, thanks for stopping by! I’m off to do some more scrapbooking! Hope you’re having a great weekend!