Project Life - to a new beginning!

Hi everyone!

It's no secret: I LOVE PROJECT LIFE!!!
I'm doing it religiously (without skipping one single week!) since 2 years and I just started my 3rd year this week. :)

I haven't posted my project life album very often though because there was no response to those posts and I'm often thinking why should I bother posting if nobody reads it.... But this year I already heard of some people that are eager to see my album unfold so I'm going to try and post them more regularly...or, well, post them! :)

So here's to my new album! Project Life 2013!

First off, I chose the Seafoam edition for this year. I did my first year with the Amber edition, my second with the Clementine edition and I was very happy to receive my core kit yesterday and to order my binders today. Let me first present you the cards:

Nice, right?! :)

Ok, but first I started my album without the kit.....

So here's my cover page:

All those pictures were taken at Christmas. I included one family shot, a sweet sister's love shot and a head shot of each of us. 

I then added a postcard like card with our names and ages at the moment.

The card was left over in my Clementine kit from 2012. I made myself a family die-cut using my Silhouette: I used the couple and I cropped and resized the woman to create Arielle and Maya and I positioned them next to me. I cut them in some "decoupage paper". I'll soon make a blog post on that kind of paper. I aded a stamp-like sticker from simple story and stamped a stamp-like stamp twice on it. Oh, three times actually. :) I added in my own hand writing "right now..." next to the this is life in the bottom left corner of the postcard.

I wanted to include the date in the page and I wanted it to be BIG! lol 

So I used again my Silhouette and some stencil font that can be found either with the silhouette or online for free. I mounted some white hardtack underneath it and added a speech bubble that I hand cut in some glitter cardstock from SU!. I already had this little hello laying on my desk since some time. It's a shape I cut a while back with my silhouette from my hand writing. It was perfect to complete my layout. I stitched it on the bubble and on the date card. 

I was pretty happy with that first page, knowing that I didn't want to wait for my kit to come arrive before I start, because sometimes, you just can't wait!

Ok, and then I even started my first week without my seafoam kit!!  lol

One thing I liked very much in my last album (2012) was the small calendars that I had on every page, letting me double check which day was the 2nd for example. So this year I found a free template here and decided it would be perfect for my album. :) I simply circled the days featured this week and stapled it to my date card with the Tim Holz tiny attacher.

Because I didn't have my kit yet, I used some basic square grid cards. Theyr are perfect to write on and to stamp on. The lines make it pretty easy to write straight (even though some people will never write straight, even with lines!) ;) And when my cards arrived, I swapped some of my basic cards that I redid with the seafoam edition cards. It was the case for my One Little Word card. I wanted to write a little bit more so I used a folded acrd. I'm happy that some of the journaling is hidden inside and on the back of the card.

The two bottoms pocket are filled with instagram pictures printed in 2 different sizes (3.5 x 3.5 and 4x4) The 4x4 one (on the left) was staple to a card and I added a simple arrow. And the 3.5x3.5 one was attached with some washi tape to a plain base card. I wish there were more of those in the kit.

I inserted a 12x12 page protector in the middle of the week, like I almost always do because my daughter's artworks simply need to be saved. :) I often jus add a small card and some explanations and that's it.

Sometimes I don't write anything. The artwork speaks for itself.....

One thing I like to do is some work with Photoshop. One the upper picture, I framed 2 3x4 picture onto a 4x6 canvas. A white border around it and some text and that's done. Sometimes I have pictures with no words, but that's rare.... I'll most likely add a little tag to that top right picture. 

Another thing I do is print pictures in a 3x4 format. I often have so many photos I'd like to display in my album that I have to do that. This year I started to write on my pictures with an American Craft photo pen. It's less special than writing with Photoshop, but it works fine.

Here I stapled a journaling card that was on Becky Higgins' website (it's a from Liz Tamanaha. A GREAT designer!) to my instagram picture printed in 4x4. The quality of my Instagram pictures is not the best, but for a project like Project Life, I find that it's just enough. For me this album is more about memories (everyday's little things) than about beautiful and perfect pictures. 

Ok, so that was my first PL week. :) 

I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you'll join me in the revealing on my 51 other weeks reveal. ;)

Thanks so much for being here!

See you soon!!

Marie