Good Wednesday morning! It's time to get down to brass tacks and talk about our scrapbooking plans for the year. How do you envision documenting 2012 in paper or pixels? What is your intention for scrapbooking this year? Do you want to push your creative limits? Or is your goal to get more stories told? Do you want to share more with your immediate family, or with your loved ones far away? Scrap more pages about yourself? Your significant other? Your dog? Take some time to think about what you want scrapbooking to mean to you in 2012.
Mine is a combination of the first two. While I am happy with every single page I made last year, either because of the page design, or simply because the page told an important story, I feel like I didn't push myself creatively in 2011. I simply maintained the status quo from the happy scrapping groove I developed in 2010. At the same time, now that Kieran is older and curious about everything, I also want to have albums accessible for him (and others) to look through. I have learned the hard way that my usual scrapbooking pages are still a temptation for him to try to pull embellishments off the page!
My two pronged approach will be to push my creativity with my Design Team work as well as with creative play, while at the same time documenting our day to day life in family albums.
My intention for pushing my creativity is to make use of all the inspiration I have saved to various boards on Pinterest as my jumping off points. And also make use of the WCS Inspiration boards too!
For the latter I plan to develop my own version of the very popular Project Life system by Becky Higgins. Are any of you users of this system? I think this would work very well if you're planning on doing a 365 photo project.
At various times last year I kept having this nagging feeling that I needed to do something more with the day to day photos. While I consider myself more of an everyday scrapper than an event scrapper, I still felt like I wasn't telling all the stories I wanted to tell. When I found out about Project Life something clicked and I knew I needed to adapt the idea to suit me. I already have way too many supplies to justify buying the system, hence my decision to make my own version. I'm not the first person to have thought of this either! Former collective member Marcy Penner developed her own DIY Project Life last year. You can see all her 2011 posts about it here. I am really inspired by her approach and motivated to get started! I still haven't worked out exactly how this will work for me, but plan to have everything set up by mid-January.
If you are interested in doing Project Life you can get more information on the site. Also check out this great post by Ali Edwards where she recaps her experiences in using Project Life in 2011. Do you know who else does Project Life? Cathy Zielske! You can see some of her posts about it here.
Another great year long project I have come across, and which a few of you mentioned yesterday is Ella's Take 12 Project.
It comes in the form of a guided inspiration kit, with monthly photo checklists, 12 sketches by Donna Januzzi, bonus project ideas and more! The kit is authored by Angie Lucas and Elizabeth Dillow (both WCS alumni) and its goal is to help you take 12 photos on the 12th day of each month for a full 12 months—and scrapbook them! This could be a great starting point for a beginning or very busy scrapper.
What other projects can you undertake this year? In both 2010 and 2011 I tried to make one page every month to highlight my goals & plans or my theme for that month. I didn't manage it every month but now I have a bunch of layouts just about me to add to my albums. Is there an area of your life that needs to be scrapped about more? Why not set a goal to make just one page a month about it? In a year's time you would have told 12 stories!
If you want to kick things up a notch at any point in the year, you can also take on a more intense project such as Ali's Week in the Life or her December Daily during the holidays. Or use the photos from one of the monthly photo challenges we discussed yesterday to make a mini or full sized album for that month.
So those are a few ideas to get you started thinking. Notice I said thinking. It's only January 4th, so give yourself some time to think and plan. If I learned anything in the last few years it's that meeting my goals is a year long process, I don't have to go from zero to complete acheivement on January 1st! I also learned that if I map out my year I am more likely to get things done, rather than just jumping into projects when I come across them and trying to figure out how to fit them in.
I do want to point you towards a great free online workshop that is currently running. It was put together by Nathalie Kalbach and the contributors are scrapbookers and artists from around the globe: Creative Jumpstart. The workshop is set up to help you get into your creative groove for the year and will run all month long. Once you sign up you will receive a daily e-mail with a link to the day's video. As the class has already started, you won't get the e-mails from the previous days, but Nat assures me that at the end of January she will be posting all the links in one place.
Tomorrow is give.away.day! That means you get a breather to work on your plans. But do still drop by to enter the giveaway. I'll see you back here on Friday!
And please, do tell me about your scrapbooking plans for the year in the comment section.
