Project Life

Its all over the internet again, Becky Higgins has released this year's kit and everyone is taking up the craze. Everyone is jumping on the band wagon of quick yet creative scrapbooking and even Hobbycraft are in on the act, devoting a whole section to PL goodies. It seems it is the next best thing to sliced bread in the scrapping world. Every year I get a little swept up in the hype too but  my take on it is a little different.

When I was little one of the great things I enjoyed was when my mum/dad got out the Roses tin full of all the family black and white photos and go through them with my brother and I, telling us the story behind each one as we went (even though we had heard them many times). The one of my dad during his National Service in Singapore, stripped to the waist in his army issue shorts, walking up the trunk of a leaning palm tree; the one of my mum wearing her 1950's one piece swim suit (a la Ester Williams) clinging onto a road sign, taken on the day she nearly called off her engagement because after 4 years courting my dad still hadn't set a date for the wedding; oh the stories were endless and going through the pile of scattered photos was magical. 

Along with the loose photos came a couple of old fashioned photo albums. They had ornate padded and  decorated covers, silk tassels to mark your page, and on opening each black thick card mounting page was separated by the most amazing frosted glass paper to protect the photographs which were held in place by beautiful little gold paper photo corners. Each photo (those that had not fallen out) was provided with its own little caption telling its own special story, and carefully dated in neat handwriting completed in a lovely clean white ink. Before we were allowed to open them we had to ensure our hands were clean and were admonished to be very gentle and careful.

The memory of those photo albums haunts me every time I pick up a pack of Project Life divided page protectors, because to me they seem to be a poor relation or bad echo of those earlier beautiful books so I end up taking the pages out of my basket and scurrying off home to do a PL look-alike scrap page using traditional scrap-booking methods on a 12x12 card-stock page, trying to use all my creative talents, making all my own embellishments and attempting to make my page do justice to those early scrapbooks.Then because it took so much time and effort and didn't meet my style of scrapbooking, I usually tailed off doing it by March.

This year though, I have finally surcome because my photos are simply loitering inside my hard drive and going no where as it seems my craft room is still a faint glimmer in the future, I am desperate to do some scrapping so I have finally bought a set of PL pages, downloaded some freebies and set to work on last year's photos. The biggest thing that altered my mind though is that I have discovered that since I can change my Dell notebook into a tablet, I can load up a picture and then use the pen to scribble all over it to my hearts desire. At last I am not just bunging photo's into pockets, I am being creative!

I don't take enough pictures to fill a double spead a week but I am more than happy with a page a month, so here is my first attempt and hopefully I can complete the whole year this time.