Friday, January 6, 2012

Making Project Life Work For Me- NoelMignon style

So I've done it. I've jumped on the bandwagon and decided to do Project Life

After being on Instagram for a while, several of my scrapbooking friends on there would be posting little updates to their Project Life albums. I was intrigued and I loved the artsy look to theirs... I had originally discounted the idea of doing Project Life because the main examples that I had seen looked really rigid and not really up my alley. Plus the whole idea of documenting every week of our life for a year?! That sounded OVER.WHELMING. 

A discussion was started on the NM message boards about it, and in no time at all, I found myself saying that I was going to jump in with it this year! 

This is how I'm making it work for me. 

1. No fancy boxes of product for me... in other words, I'm not buying the pre-set Project Life products, other than some of the page protectors. I'm pulling from my stash of stuff. I have a drawer system for my PL, and one of my drawers is just for stuff that I'm going to use. So far I have the Lily Bee Memento line and Elle's Studios products in there, along with some Authentique die cuts. My main plan is to use my NoelMignon kits each month. The Cabin Fever kit is the perfect start to my album. Noel's kits are always seasonally appropriate, so I can make each month stand out in my album... I know how I am, and I will want a large variety of product in my album or I will get disinterested quickly. 


2. I'm keeping organized via social media...a large portion of my life is simply documented through twitter, facebook, and instagram. They are all, unfortunately, not very easy to search for. Enter Memento, a journaling app. You can write daily entries, add photos, and most awesomely, import feeds from all your social networks. 


Then you can go to your calendar, click on a day with a blue dot underneath....


And see your entries for that day. It has become a lifesaver for me, with scrapbooking in general, with my December Daily, and now with Project Life. I can very easily track what we did each day, photos snapped, and things we're interested in with this little app. 


3. I'm not going to make this more complicated than it needs to be. 

 Last night I made my cover page for the album. I printed off several shots that we used for our Christmas card. 


Culled a pile of goodies from the Cabin Fever kit. 


Cut and laid out the photos/paper. 


Starting adding some embellishments. 







And slid everything into it's spot. I actually added some items on top of the 
page protector for a little dimension. 

 And here's the final product. Simple, easy, and definitely my style! 


Are you doing Project Life? Let's do this together and keep each other encouraged!
 Please join me on  the message board and we'll keep each other going! 

2 comments:

Cindy Vernon said...

I, too am not buying fancy product but will be creating from my stash. Mainly because the product is just so "boring" and I have a ton of awesome papers and embellishments to really create an album that reflects my life, my family and my style.

Ana Sani said...

I've always wanted to do this! I find myself starting and for a couple of weeks it goes great and by the end of the year, its stashed in my closet with dust piling all over it.

That's it! The next time I start- i'm finishing!

Thanks for the inspiration! The page was lovely!