Getting Back to Scrapbooking

I really am - I'm working on getting back into scrapbooking! 

Scrapbooking is something I have enjoyed since high school, and I really do love it - the process and the results.  I am one of those people that wants to capture all the moments and hang onto them forever, and scrapbooking is as close as I can get to that.  (sometimes to the extreme - my friends laugh at me because my daughter has not one or two, but FOUR scrapbooks for the first year of her life)  So it has been driving me nuts that in my house where I essentially have two craft rooms, I haven't done any true scrapbooking since we moved in.  Craziness.

Earlier this year I decided to get in on the Project Life movement.  It strikes me as a great concept to help streamline the memory keeping process while still having the flexibility to customize everything and still make it cute and personal.  I ran across a big sale online and bought myself an album and a kit and have slowly been putting it together as I find time (and finding time is HARD isn't it?  Especially free time in large enough chunks to create and during a time of day when I have energy left for doing something other than sitting on the couch).  Ordering a few photo prints here, jotting down a few notes or funny quotes from the kids, slipping a few things in the pockets there.  Realizing that a lot of my go to supplies were old and needed to be replaced (dried up pens and ink pads - ick).  It's a process all right.  But as of today I have all of January completely put together - hooray!
Page 1:  January weeks one and two

Sometimes I don't take a lot of photos in one week so I've already decided that I'm not going to hold myself to making sure I do a 2-page layout for every week.  Some will get just a few photos, some may get 4 or more pages.
The 2014 I created myself using something I'd seen on pinterest for inspiration.  I just did a quick paint document with a blue background and added the numbers in white.  I wasn't quite on with the sizing when I printed it, so I mounted it on black cardstock.  I still prefer to do most of my journaling on the computer so I typed it up (using mostly journaling from my 365 blog, which I try to update weekly) and printed it off, then added some washi tape along the bottom.
I bought the Project Life Turquoise Edition and plan to use the 4x6 cards with the months written on them (there are several colors/patterns) as kind of a title page for each week and then add the dates using my cool new rotating date stamp thing.  (Picked it up in the impulse buy section by the registers at TJMaxx for $3 - oh yeah!).  I'm trying to keep it all cohesive and as easy to assemble as possible.

January Week 3:  

 We took a weekend trip to Myrtle Beach, during Sam's birthday no less, so this one took up more space.  I did an additional 6x12 layout to hold most of the journaling and to highlight Sam's birthday.  Here is the front of it:

and on the back side of the insert:

 I printed the journaling first directly onto an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of cardstock, then cut it to size before adding the photos and a couple of stickers.  I almost never use stickers in my regular scrapbooking, but they seem like a good fit for this style of memory keeping.  It's been a looooong time since I've looked at anything other than patterned paper at the scrapbook store but I may have to start picking up a few embellishments, just for fun and variety.

 

 Finishing up Week 3, along with Week 4:

And that's where I am now.  I have most of February and some of March's photos printed and have started putting them into the page protectors.  It's a start.