I love looking at all the incredible Project Life albums created be amazing designers and one thing I have noticed in common with all these albums are the gorgeous photos.  I always say to myself, “I could have awesome Project Life pages too if I had great photos like that.”  But I don’t have great photos and that shouldn’t stop me from making a beautiful albums, so I decided to make a “real” album using “real” photos.

I have been creating digital books/photo books since 2008 and I am finally ready to tackle my printed photos from when I graduated high school in 1992 to 2006 when I stopped printing individual pictures.  I call these photos “real photos” because they came right from the camera with no editing.  Back when you had to pay to get a roll a film developed, every single photo was kept even the blurry, ugly ones because you paid for it!    Now I am ready to go through these “real photos” and only keep the ones that matter.

Thankfully the photos are organized and documented, but they are in 6 large photo albums that take up too much space on the book shelf!  With the rising popularity of Project Life and how it is supposed to make memory keeping “easy”  (sliding your photos into pockets and prettying them up with pre made designer cards) this seemed like the perfect way to condense all those albums into one Project Life album.

Stampin’ Up recently teamed up with Becky Higgins (creator of Project Life) and now offer several different Project Life kits.  I chose to use the Happiness Is kit because it had the most versatile combination of colours and journaling cards to span the fourteen years covered in this album.

I sat down last night and started this new project full of excitement and determination to finish it by the end of summer.  After a couple of hours I was already through one of the six photo albums and had finished five pages plus the title page!  This Project Life system can be fast and easy if it is kept simple!  On the title page below, all I added were the 5 photos, 4 cards, a small piece of washi tape to one photo, and the date on a card that was run through the printer.  That was it, and then onto the next page!!  I could have sat there for hours adding little details to each page, but to be truthful, I just want to get through those 14 years of photos and move on to the next project!

I like the simplicity of this page and hope to carry that theme throughout the album.

I will be working on this project for the coming weeks and will post my progress on the Birdwing Paper Designs Facebook page.  So if you want to see more pages of this “real album” check over there.

Leah