Welcome to the first of 20 posts in which I take inspiration from Shimelle Laine’s newest class, The 20 Project, to inject some life into my scrapbooking!
What is The 20 Project?
You’ll have to head over to Shimelle’s blog to read all about it, and if you want all the inside details, you’ll just have to take her class … but suffice it to say, it’s a way of taking twenty different prompts and using them as inspiration to make a layout. Those prompts may be wish list items of products to use or techniques to try, or they may be twenty different UFO’s (UnFinished Objects) that need to move out of your crafting space! Shimelle has her own jar of twenty prompts, I have mine.
In the video below I explain all this plus pull out my first prompt … and it’s a doozy! Check it out!
Prompt #1 – Evaluate Marley’s 1st Year Album
I have developed my own philosophy on how to tell the story of my children’s lives. Their albums start with a First Year Album. Instead of being a comprehensive album of everything that happened to them in their first year, this is an album documenting their growth. We took photos of all our girls every month and these are what I am using to tell this story. I was very good with my eldest (Marley) at making sure I also documented her height, weight and other points of interest each month. With the next two I was progressively less diligent.
It’s a sad truth that the first kid has a billion photos and the last is lucky to have their birthday remembered!
Okay, I’m not quite that bad … yet!
This prompt was not one I was hoping to pull out of the bowl so early. Typical, right? Marley’s album is in great disarray – as you saw. But with the few minutes I took to look through and make some notes, I am ready to create a new layout to start to make it what I want it to be. In this next video I do just that. Take a look.
And here is the finished layout.
1 Month Old
I don’t think it was super clear in the video, but I have a box of baby girl-esque supplies that I gathered when I was working on my youngest daughter’s 1st year album. The two scraps of paper came from that as well as the vellum butterflies, the Thickers, the word phrase stickers and the journaling cards (recently added to my stash from a Simple Stories Wharehouse box).
One thing I noticed as I was finishing Christine’s album (that’s my youngest daughter), was how tricky I was finding it to only use the baby girl papers I’d put aside for the project. Knowing that made it easy to decide to add other papers from my stash into the mix. I just picked up a 12×12 paper pad from Shimelle’s Starshine collection so that was the most logical place to start. Adding just one or two new items to your old stash makes everything feel new again!
I had already created several layouts in my youngest daughter’s album when these month journaling cards came to me, so I saved them for this album and continued using other journaling cards for Christine’s album.
To emphasize the chronology of these layouts I will add a bolder title – like this one – to each page I make for this album.
Oh, and aren’t those Thickers fabulous?! I picked them up from a fantastic Canadian discount scrapbook supply site called Ninabrook . They have great prices on adhesive in particular! If you’re a fellow Canadian and you don’t have a local scrapbook store, I encourage you to check them out. They don’t have current collections, but the deals on the older, still gorgeous, lines are fantastic!
I’ve been meaning to clean off my desk for awhile. It’s slowly getting cluttered with off cuts, extra punched shapes that I didn’t use, bits of ribbon and even the odd brad! Thank goodness I hadn’t got around to it yet though! That dark pink ric-rac ribbon was just what I needed to hide the imperfections in my photo sizes! Adding the layers of washi tape, paper, and stickers completes the job.
And there you have it. A start to an album that’s been hanging over my head for awhile now. And a new challenge to keep me busy for weeks to come. Unlike Shimelle, I will not be doing a layout every day, I plan to stretch this out over 20 weeks. I hope you stay tuned to see how I do.
I can’t wait to see what the next prompt is that I pull out of the bowl! See you soon!
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