PROJECT LIFE 2023 (megaaa!) thread

The first set of Styles I ever bought was this set of drop shadows by Snickerdoodle Designs (now selling as Karen Schultz). I use them on pretty much every single element that goes onto my pages. Every now and then I will make my own shadow, but most of this time I use one of these. 



Are you using Photoshop? I was using Adobe Bridge to keep track of my elements, but when I changed over to a MacBook and started storing my kits in my iCloud, it didn't work any more. 

I am meticulously organised when it comes to my digital supplies and photos, which is funny because in almost every other aspect of my life I am completely DISorganised!

This might be a long and boring post, but I will explain how I organise my supplies. Keep in mind that I use a MacBook, so if you use a PC or Windows based laptop, it might be a bit different, but you can do pretty much the same thing on both.

As soon as I buy a kit or other product, I save it to the relevant folder. I have folders for the following:
Alpha
Brushes & Stamps
CU Designer resources
Cut Files
Elements (then lots of sub folders)
Frames & Borders
Kits
Masks
Overlays
Papers (I only put papers in here if they are not part of a kit)
Styles & Actions
Templates
Word Art

There are also several other folders for my layouts, templates I've made, my Project Life stuff, challenges, sketches, tutorials, layout ideas etc. 

Once I have saved the kit or product, I add a copy of the kit/product preview to the folder, and I add a tag with the name of the store, or designer. I also add colour coded tags to kits for various themes: summer/beach, winter, Christmas, birthday, Easter, baby. So if I only want to see kits that are beach or summer themed, I click on that colour tag and all the beach/summer kits show in Finder, and I can see a preview of them all. If I am doing a challenge at The Lilypad, and only want to look for kits bought at The Lilypad, I click on that tag. 

Just in case you're not sure what I mean when I say I add the preview to the folder, this is what I see when I open my "Kits" folder in icon view, instead of just the blue folder in Finder (or yellow folder in Windows Explorer):



So if I am looking for a kit that uses particular colours, I can quickly scroll through to see which kits could work with my photos. 

You can also see my colour tags on some of the kits: Red - Christmas, Blue = birthday, Grey - winter

And then when you open a kit folder, it has folder previews for all the different parts of the kit (alpha, papers, elements etc). 





Some designers (like Just Jaimee) already have the folder views set up when you buy the kit, but most do not. It doesn't take long to do it, if you do it as you buy. I just timed myself, and it took 17 seconds to save the preview onto the folder and add a tag for the store.  

I have had a serious lack of mojo over the last couple of weeks. I did a couple of pages and struggled to get back into the groove, so I pulled out an older album to work on as that seems to remove the "too precious, must be perfect" feeling I sometimes get with really recent photos.

I discovered I only had 8 pages left to complete in my 2021 album, so I've been working on those this weekend, and am now down to 6 unfinished pages. All the photos are printed and in the page protectors, and I have notes of what happened in each of those weeks, so I just need to choose supplies and put the pages together. I'm sure I'll move onto something else before I finish these last few pages, but it's exciting being so close to the done.

How is everyone else going? Do you typically work on your albums more, less, or about the same at this time of year?

I finally pulled out my album after cleaning my space up from the WITL project. Last spread was from March 19 😳 so I'm probably going to batch print this weekend and then start to play catch up.

I definitely do less during the summer since my kid doesn't have school and her summer camps are only 3-4 hours long. I'm behind on my photo editing but I can usually bang that out in a night while watching trash TV.

Last year I didn't even start working my book until September. I am happy that I now have 2 months of 2023 done. I want to get caught up then start an older year. (or do a travel book)

I'm still struggling with mojo but managed to finish a layout tonight that I'm really happy with and I'm now down to just 4 layouts left to complete for 2021.

At a scrapbook retreat this weekend and managed to catch up on my album through the end of June. I got everything in the pockets. No journaling or embellishing yet. I keep saying this but I really need to at least start printing my pictures weekly or monthly. Or I need to go digital. There's just too many photos to sift through, especially during the summer months. It took me all three days to get caught up on 4 months. I love PL but it takes up all my scrapbooking time and I can't get to anything else.

Also: wonky pocket sizes is driving me batty lol.

jediannie I switched to monthly last year but I don't think that translated into less layouts lol. I just don't worry about dates or chronology within the month.
I like your idea. I think at the very least I need to go through and delete all the bad photos at the end of each day. Small kids move fast so I have to take a lot of pics to get one decent one lol. Making the 3x4 photo collages in the PL app is also time consuming for me so I have to find a way to stay on top of it. My scrapping woes lol.

I have a lot of holes to fill in. I’ve mostly (all but two weeks, I think) at least printed photos and placed them, as like space holders. And with some also having journal cards in place - so the “skeleton” of the page is mostly there, but needs all the rest.

I am making good progress finishing off weeks where that skeleton was in some stage of “almost complete”.

I have realized I have a bad habit of getting a spread nearly done, then turning the page to get started on the next, and again and again. I need to stop that. Finishing a page 100% really benefits my mojo, and that dopamine powers me up. All these partially done pages sucks my energy! So yesterday I flipped to the beginning and started finishing up pages fully and I made so much progress. That feels really good.

I’m in a conundrum with the actual album. I had one b&w striped BH PL album, which have gone in and out of stock for a long time. I started the year in one of those, knowing I’d need another for the second half of the year, and haven’t been able to get it. So I guess I’m going to transfer all the pages into a black album, because I do have two empties available. Kind of annoying!

Over the weekend, I flipped through my 2022 album and got so annoyed at the photos, etc. falling out of the pockets!

So I ended up going in with washi and sealing at least half of them. Not sure which brand of page protectors was the culprit, I have a few different ones that I used. Grrr!

I think I’m done with project life. I started back in 2011 or 2012. Documented 5 years before burning out. Skipped a year then started doing monthly. That was better but now I’m back to not wanting to do it. It’s almost September, I have documented birthing for 2023. I have so many other memory keep projects to fill my time. WITL, DITL, December Daily, 12x12 albums, travel albums. I bullet journal and junk journal. There just isn’t enough time.

The hangup, I really love getting my monthly documenter kit from studio calico. 😂

Fun! I hope you post your pages! I stopped sharing mine as I was just doing it on that challenge thread but I don’t participate in that anymore (adding up points was not fun for me lol). I’d love it if anyone shared some PL pages on this thread sometimes.

I have done previous and current years at the same time, but what works for me is what is driving honeypea crazy.

I find I get more done if I work in batches, so I'll print a month's worth of photos at once and put them all into page protectors. Then I'll add any specific things I want to include (real life ephemera, or a card that includes the month name, or anything that is themed that works with my photos). I usually have a small pile that I've pulled from my stash for this, so as I was tidying my stash last week I found a couple of puffy stickers, a 4x6 card, a wood veneer tag from BG, and a die cut piece with pumpkins which all went with June or July photos and stories I knew I was printing this week. Once the photos were printed I just added those other pieces into the page protectors as well.

I then go through and add journaling cards, and then patterned/text PL cards to all the spaces I can. I use pp for the other spaces so I tend to pull that when I finally finish up the spread. My pages stay like this until I finish them, which I also often do in batches, adding journaling, and final embellishments.

Sometimes I'll do this entire process for one year, and then repeat it for the other year I'm working on. At other times I'll be in the groove for printing so I'll print all my current year photos then start working on the older album.

I hope you find a process that works for you.