Project Life & Library of Memories

After a big slump in motivation to scrapbook over a couple of years, jumping into Project Life in 2013 has reignited the flame.

I began scrapbooking in the late 1990s and took an approach of an *älbum* for each of my chidren - which ended up being of between three and five volumes, depending on the child! These tracked their lives chronologically from birth until their 21st birthday, or thereabouts. I then moved onto my own life, that of my father and albums for each line of family history on my side. There were albums to record my NMAA/ABA history and even one just for the dog! Last time I counted, there were 40 individual albums of photos!

In 2010, I dove into Project 365, taking a photo a day and recording it in a Project Life album. While this was 100% successful, I produced few layout-style pages that year. In 2011, I aimed to clear out the prints from our pre-digital life and started well, completing layouts of nieces and nephews, pets and occasions and events from my children's childhoods which were shared and not, therefore, included in their individual albums.

In 2012, I immersed myself in art journalling, with my scrapbooking mojo dead in the water. Even that petered out when RSI impacted on my ability to do any creating without pain.

So - here I am in 2013, with a backlog of a couple of years (including the minor event of my daughter's wedding) and an urge to get back on track. I am loving the Project Life format and can see this as the ideal way to work with lots of photos without the intensity of traditional layouts. And it also seems just the time to move over completely to Stacy Julian's Library of Memories system of albums.

I have slim albums for each year of 2007 - 2011, plus mixed albums of the pages I scrapped from the boxes of prints. I already tend to use Stacy's categories to store my digital files (but also use chronological and named folders) and getting my digi files organised is an ongoing task this year.

Stacy's categories - Us, People (we love), Places (we go), Things (we do) - will fit our current life stage: with three adult children, a grandchild due any day, pets, extended family and a variety of interests and activities. As I have become the family memory keeper (my daughters perfectly happy for me to scrapbook their lives, without the time/interest to do so themselves), it makes sense to do so in a mixed format. My granddaughter and her future siblings and cousins will get their own albums but otherwise, all our lives will be combined into the four categories.

My approach from here will be to continue recording every day in Project Life, expanding to multiple pages for events, which will then be moved into Things We Do at the end of the year and any traditional layouts I do will also then move into the categorised albums at years end. This way, they will be easily shared through the year and then easily accessed in the future. I will continue as I have started, moving backwards recording the past couple of years in PL style, which will go into the LOM albums and once I have achieved that, I will steadily work through the boxes of prints over time. Because I am not focusing chronologically, there is no behind or ahead, just a steady progress.