Becky Higgins Project Life has been around since 2010 and has revolutionised the scrapbooking world. Big words I know – but a fair assessment. Essentially Becky has provided a foundation for scrapbooks that is part creative genius and part 1980s pocket album. It gets memories recorded, fast AND satisfies all the urges for buying of pretty/shiny/glittery things that ‘normal’ scrapping provides. Perfection.
So why pocket scrapping? Well…
- Its F A S T and I am time poor;
- There are LOTS of templates and other fun shopping opportunities available;
- It gives our everyday stories a home;
- The year-by-year format allows the through line of our stories to show more clearly;
- It gives the big stories space and makes our family album more special.
I build my pages digitally using whatever templates take my fancy. For 2015 it’s Just Jamie’s Ready To Go templates from the Storyteller series – just lovely and because these are layered templates, all the hard work is done!
The pages for each year go into ring bound albums (usually two will hold a year), mostly because I don’t have the patience to wait a WHOLE YEAR before printing and because I like to have a home for all the detritus we collect in the shape of certificates, tickets, drawings, school reports, birthday cards and other assorted memory tied things. It all goes in the ‘big book’, as my boys call it, in Marbig plastic sleeves from Officeworks.
Right now I am still working my way through 2014, I’m up to October, and no, I don’t feel like I’m ‘behind’. Stories can’t be told until they have happened and I like to have some distance from things before I write about them. It lets the stories mature somehow and I prefer my journaling when I have let that happen. I also scrap as things happen. No counting pages or weeks, some months have just a two page spread and others have five or six – or more. Birthdays always have more. August and September are birthday season around here and usually run to about twenty pages! Whatever it takes to feel like the year has been recorded. Our life is the formula.
I have to say I am loving this format. It has provided a home for our everyday stories and left space in my scrapbooking albums to really dig into the deeper stories. If something gets a page in there you know it’s something special and that’s how I want that album to feel.
The templates I used for 2014 are Katie Pertiet’s Pocket Pages Layered Templates. I had done none of 2014 by the time May rolled around and was looking for something I could smash out quickly and with minimal fuss – have to say I am well pleased with the results!