Still Sticking a Life Project

"The life of a person is not what happened, but what he remembers and how he remembers it" Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

I spotted this in my notebook the other day and it has stuck with me as I've been putting together a few more pages of my Sort of a Project Life.

Because I've been going back to the Me On Monday posts I want to use as a basis for my spreads, and I've been finding myself wanting to change them. Not on the blog, no: I'm not planning on editing posts; but as I lift the pictures and text to turn them into a personal family album I'm finding that I want to add, or even subtract. I want to shift the emphasis slightly, tell the story a different way. Has the story changed?

Does every story change with time even if we have already written it down? At the beginning of March our fence blew down. We have good neighbours, and it was easily fixed. But we discovered a whole new story later that week when we stood and chatted over a newly mended fence. The night of the storm, our neighbours had been round at friends, they phoned home to see if the family was alright, they heard about the fence. So their friends asked about us and whether we'd be easy to work with and they named names and the friend said she had lived beside a family with our name, back in the 60's : three girls and a baby boy with black curly hair. They used to knock on the door and ask if they could push that baby up and down in his pram. Well, that's years ago now: that baby's hair is still pretty black, though, and definitely still curly and he's married to me and living in a house with a dodgy fence. Our weekend of making space, as I called it when I first recorded it, had turned into a weekend of discovering just what a small place the world actually is. Same story, different story.

Or how about same story, different pictures?

I recorded our pizza meal with Little E in a blog post at the beginning of March; but I didn't use these photos partly because I thought I might keep them for something else. When I went back, of course I realised this is where they belonged. There he is: same story, different pictures. 

That's Sort of a Project Life.

Details, Details

No extra pictures today. Just a couple of quick extras

- That "make stuff" stamp is from Gossamer Blue

- The diecuts are all from one Simple Stories packet

-  My pages are curling as I feed them through the typewriter and that's making them hard to photograph. Either I need to flatten them under something heavy first (no!) or I need to give up trying to force them through the creaking rollers of my old typewriter. This is a possibility. If I break my Dad's machine I'd be sorry. Our printer won't print onto card, so it might be handwriting from now on. We'll see. I'm not caught up 

More Of Sort Of A Project Life

So far this week I've been spending my scrapbooking time sort of keeping going with my Sort Of A Project Life. And that means I'd love to thank everyone who cam up with suggestions to improve my album situation. Thank you! I did have another look through my supplies and I found some 8.5x11 page protectors in the back of a Journal Your Christmas album I made in that size; and so that's where I've sort of lodged my Project Life for now.

How I'm Working It

A few observations:

- I've never been much of a project planner before. But because I had decided on a clean "magazine-y" look, I started out by flipping through some pages in a couple of favourites and then I made some rough sketches of the look I was after. Drawing little boxes on graph paper turns out to be deeply satisfying and I can see a lot more graph paper planning in my future.

- This kind of planning  speeds up what is, undeniably, a laborious process of deciding which photos need printing, which new images to include, what needs to go large. I turned myself into a batch processor, which is also a new way of working for me.

- Looking at magazine spreads gave me a chance to think about design details: maintaining margins around the edges, letting things bleed off the side of the page, when to leave some space and when to cluster things close; all useful stuff to keep in mind on any page.

- I had thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out a photo printing service - maybe Prinstragram? - but I've had good results with my own little Selphy printer. It's not even the wireless version which prints from a phone (now that would be nifty!); but it can print two little or one big square on a 6x4 print and that's working for now.

- So that I can use my Dad's old typewriter I've had to trim a tiny sliver off the 8.5x11 card. If I don't it doesn't fit and the thought of jamming up one of my favourite possessions is too much to bear: 8.25 is just fine by me. The typewriter makes it simple to place journaling wherever I want on the page: doing this with our printer would involve some head scratching. I don't get on with our printer. It won't print on card, although it will

- print on sturdy photo paper, so at least I can do full page photos. I've considered flipping the photo paper over to see if it will print onto the other side, which would at least give me something heavier than paper for labels and the like.

- I still haven't worked out a way of photographing my pages to my complete satisfaction. They curl at the edges after being in the typewriter and I have to gently coax them back into shape. 

- But it's fun! I don't often play around with so many photos and thoughts all at the same time. I'm enjoying it. (She's trying Girls Rugby, I'm trying multi photo pages. it's all change here..)

- Most of the small scraps of paper are by Gossamer Blue, Pebbles and Simple Stories, from the February Gossamer Blue Kit, as are the diecuts, which are Simple Stories Life Documented. The stamps (including the very useful typewriter in the previous post) I bought from Crafty Alchemy on Etsy

And that's it for today. I'm sort of hoping I'll have a chance to do some more pages later. Sort Of A Project Life? It's completely addictive.

Sort Of A Project Life

Question: Where have all the 8.5x11 albums gone? 

I've been working on the first few pages of something new for me, something which in its planning I've been calling Sort Of A Project Life, and when I went to order an album, I couldn't find one. Anywhere. So if you know where they're all hiding, I'd be happy to hear from you. All suggestions welcome...I've come this far, I don't want to stop now.

I've actually come so far, now, with this thing I've been thinking of as Sort Of A Project Life, you could almost say I was on a roll. It begins like this:

and if you flip to the next page you'll find this:

and before you turn to the next page you might already have an idea about what there would be waiting. Because what I've done is go back to the beginning of the year and start putting my Me On Monday posts onto pages.

I've been playing about with ideas for Project Life for months now. I messed around making a few PL cards in Picmonkey, I gathered together the bits from kits I knew I had, I even bought a little green and kraft 6x6 album and various assorted page protectors. But I did nothing with any of it. Until I woke up one day recently knowing the look I wanted my album to have. Sort of clean, sort of simple. Sort of magazine page-y, ..

and Sort Of Project Life. 

Now you and I both know it was never going to end up entirely simple. A couple of pages in and I was itching to add an embellishment here, more patterned paper there. I even threaded the machine with a new spool of navy thread. I stitched;

But I'm reining it in. I want to keep it simple. This is about enjoying using those Monday photos, and about going back and enjoying those Saturdays and Sundays and even about taking the opportunity to add an extra picture, or a quote, or anything else  I might find on my desk. But I do need an album. Soon.

More next week, I hope. I have a bit of catching up to do!