The Project Life Planner - What Drew Me To Project Life
So I've been seeing all of these digiscrap people doing this whole "Project Life" thing and wondered a little bit here and there about what was going on, but not really paying too much attention to it. Well then one of my favorite digital designers, Traci Reed (swoon) created a calendar for planning your year to help you document project life. I don't know what it was about that calendar, but it gave me the gumption I needed to test out the Project Life waters. As I looked more into her calendar, I loved the journaling aspect possibilities with it, and ultimately, I think that's what drew me to project life.
See her amazing calendar and all of its possibilities here:
Maybe it will start you on your project life journey as well!
Where Do I Start? - Finding a Style That Feels GREAT (and picking up a few freebies along the way)!
First things first. DO YOUR RESEARCH! I had done lots of research on digital layouts, digital "plastic" pocket covers, stitched grids and more. I visited Pinterest, some of my scrapping blogs, my favorite digiscrap galleries, ScrapStacks and others but none of the project life layouts really jumped out at me screaming, "PICK ME!! PICK ME!!" You need to find layouts that catch your eye, and you fall in love with! During my research, I did find some awesome freebies worth sharing. Who knows?? One of them may be just what YOU'RE looking for!
I really liked this freebie that you can get when you sign up for Traci's newsletter at www.tracireed.com. The plastic pockets are fabulous!! However, it is only the one 12x12 design and I wanted some variety. Here are my 'test' pages using Traci's Document Life Sampler.
Okay, I'm kind of liking this.. I had come across a fellow scrapper who did their whole year with just this template. But I don't like that you can't really see my background paper and I still need some layout variety! I knew I could resize the template to give me the margins I wanted at he edges, but I still needed to see if I could find some more of these plastic pocket templates. I checked out her shop at www.sweetshoppedesigns.com to see if there were any more of these in a different layout, but alas there were none in this identical style. If there were more pocket pages like this, I think I would have very easily ran with this one. But, I didn't want to be limited to just one layout for the WHOLE year. No way! I think I would get bored if I only had one option to choose from and would end up not finishing for sure! She does however, have these plastic slip ins that are pretty nice and available in lots of layouts for a good price.
She had lots of different templates, but I just was still not feeling the love! Silly, perhaps, but if this is a year long project, by darned I better LOVE it before I start.
Along the way, I also stopped at Becky Higgins' www.digitalprojectlife.com to see what she had available for pocket page templates. Becky has some great freebie templates to start you off if you're interested. She also has lots of digital card freebies as well.
They can be found here: http://www.digitalprojectlife.com/collections/freebies. I still wasn't loving this style either because I wanted more of my paper to show in the background and this had such a tiny margin that I still wasn't sold here either. It was great of her to offer two templates, but it's the same template just rotated 90 degrees and I still wanted more variety to test out the waters. I just didn't want to spend a bunch of money on templates if I came to find that Project Life wasn't for me. (Med student wife, remember?? We have to be CHEAP!!)
I was getting a little discouraged and was wondering if I had purchased that planner prematurely. I really did want to try this out, but I just wasn't happy with what was out there. I decided to try my hand at making my own templates. Might have taken me a little bit of time to make the first template, but I didn't mind the challenge and after the first, the rest flew! The result I came up with works great for me and I ended up loving what I had and really started to develop my very own style for Project Life.
Keep an eye out for my next post where I'll walk you through creating your own templates for Project Life using Photoshop!
