January project life.

I am so excited to share my 2014 project life pages with you all!

I have spent the past 4 years scrapbooking all digital.  I love digital scrapbooking for a lot of reasons including the lack of mess and the ability to scrapbook a lot of pictures on one page more easily.  However, I have only printed 1 of the past 4 years of scrapbooks even though 2 additional ones are ready to go.  They cost a pretty penny when you have about 500 pages of pictures per year!

In any case, I started doing Baby Joe's scrapbook using traditional scrapbooking methods and the pocket scrapbooking or "project life" style.  Once I started putting it together, I realized how much I really missed feeling the pictures, and cutting, putting everything in its place, and most importantly being able to actually hold and touch the finished product in my hands as I continue to make progress.

Because I was home in February, I decided to order every single picture that I took in January from persnickityprints.com (I like their prints because you can order 3x4 prints that fit perfectly in the project life sheet protectors, you can also order the photos with corners already rounded).  It didn't take me long to put these photos together in their pages, and looking through the pages makes me so so happy!  

A lot of people do their pocket scrapbooking/project life pages by week.  I've never really done that.  When I was doing digital, I would just group my "extra" pictures and make a few pages of collages for a month.  Looking back now, I know this has made my scrapbooks super chaotic and without much organization.  Nevertheless, I can't do the week by week or day to day.  It's too hard to keep track of, and it is too easy to feel "behind."  Nevertheless, I do love my day-to-day pictures, because that is what life is all about.  So, for this month (and Feb/March are a lot different, more on that later), I just put all of January in the January pages without much regard to what date things happened.  (does it really matter that I went to the zoo on this day versus that, or just that I went?!)

So, without futher delay, here is January 2014 in my life:

First page-- divider for the month of January Project Life, hand painted with White Acrylic paint.

(Clockwise from top left)-- 1) I designed this in the Studio App for iPhone and glued it to some paper that is circa 2006 Elsie Flannigan paper.  2) our family in Joe's bed) 3) journaling about making the baby come! 4) pineapple orange juice for inducing labor (note the smeared handwriting on my label--I clearly haven't been doing paper scrapbooking for awhile b/c I forgot about how that kind of stuff happens! I probably will never fix this, and that is ok with me. 5) maternity photos 6) Marley 7) see #1 8) photo actually taken on the 1st, photo designed in Studio App for iPhone (see #1).

close up of my month dividers.

** Yes, I know I spelled February wrong.  I am a college educated person that totally screwed that one up.  But, I decided to just leave it because I thought it was proof of the delirium that was February of 2014-- new baby, new schedule, just crazy.