Project 12:1

A few years back, Gossamer Blue added Life Pages to their kit line-up, gorgeous 3x4 and 4x6 cards designed by Traci Reed that coordinate with the monthly kits.  I immediately jumped on board adding the Life Pages kit to my monthly subscription, and I made my first attempt at doing a year-long project to document our lives on a regular basis.  Back then it was more of a monthly project, titled Project 12, and it worked great for me.

For 2014 I decided to do a weekly approach, as Gossamer Blue had added some amazing Life Pages design team members (Michelle W., read her blog HERE!), and I was SO INSPIRED!  I jumped in with enthusiasm, ready to create this fabulous album for my girly!  And then I stopped.  It wasn't fun anymore, I was having trouble filling all those pockets, some weeks I didn't even take a single photo. Bleh.

Fast forward to January 2015:  the desire to get back on track with Life Pages hit me when I opened the beautiful January Kits from Gossamer Blue.  And that's when I realized:  hey, why did I stop doing the monthly project?

Here's the Why and the Why It Works for Me behind Project 12:

• I'm using photos that don't always make it on a scrapbook page
• Telling more of the daily life story
• Miss Q gets a monthly play-by-play of her childhood
• It doesn't detract from my first love:  12x12 scrapbook layouts
• It keeps our memories fresh
• A two-page spread takes hardly any time to put together

My approach is rather simple, as I already receive the Life Pages kits each month.  I always added at least one LP kit to my monthly purchase as a subscriber, and as a DT member I can choose to add those kits on as well.  I like that each month is a new color story, so every two page spread in my Project 12 album will have it's own colors and/or theme.  For my Project 12 cover page I used the January kits which included some 2015 cards.

I like to add embellishments on top of the page protector, so I'll be photographing my pages in the protectors.  I get a few glares sometimes :)

My One Little Word this year is Go, so I had to make reference to it on the cover page!  Read more about One Little Word HERE and HERE.

Here's my January pages, up first is the left side:

And now the right:

My pages will mostly be a 50/50 mix of the LP cards and photos. I'm using a Project Life album and page protectors by Becky Higgins as I already had a box of them from my failed attempt at the weekly approach.  I considered switching to We R Memory Keepers albums and page protectors, but decided that if I use what I already have it allows me to buy more stuff for the pages, haha!  I like adding Thickers, flair, stickers, etc., on top of the page protectors, as some of the dimensional embellies don't fit in the pockets.  Some Thickers do fit in the pocket, like the Dear Lizzy letters I used in this spread.

I found my Shimelle (by American Crafts) date stamp from an older Gossamer Blue kit in my stash, and I like that's it just the date, so that will be my go-to for dating cards and photos.  StazOn ink stamps great on photos and stickers, so I'll be using that as well.

I'll share my monthly layout around the first week of each month.

Thanks for reading this whole post, I know it was a long one but I just have so much to say about memory keeping in the monthly format!