I spent most of November and December stressing over my Project Life plan for 2015.  This year will be my fifth year of doing Project Life and I really wanted to mix things up a little and take a slightly different approach.  Don't get me wrong.  I love my 12x12 albums and the Design A page protector....they are my go-to, my easy fix, the ordinary.  But I wanted something a little less ordinary.  I wanted something that let me use all of my photos and get them printed and into an album.  I take ALOT of photos people.  Like a whole lot.  And I love taking photos.  That's definitely not going to change any time soon.  But sometimes when I tried to pull a spread together for my PL album, I had to pick and choose which images to use and then the rest from that week kind of got left behind.  That kind of bugged me.

Another thing I know about my style is that I tend to tell the details or my feelings about a photo, but not necessarily big long stories.  This used to bother me because I felt like I should be telling more stories....kind of like I was doing something wrong, but then I realized that maybe that's not my style and that's ok.  I'm in awe by pages and PL spreads that are so full of stories.  Pictures and creating are my favorite so I'm sticking with that.  

So after lots of contemplation and thought, I finally came up with a system that "might" work for me. I'm saying might because it's January and I am only 6 days into the month, but so far, I love it.  My Project Life approach is going to go something like this (hopefully):

Monthly Project Life BOOKS

I love taking photos, making mini albums and Project Life, so why not combine all three, right?  I'm hoping that monthly PL albums will allow me to get all of my photos in one place, as well as all of our memorabilia, artwork, etc.  And well....mini albums, gosh, I just love them.  I love making them and finding new ways to make them.  My favorite part of my December Daily® album was all the "inserts" and extra photos I added.  I like being able to "touch" and "feel" my pictures and "stuff", and sometimes the plastic page protectors make me crazy.  With the monthly PL book approach, I'm planning on adding in lots of extra bits and pieces of our life.....stuff that probably got left out, or trimmed down to fit in a pocket.  

I'm planning on still using some page protectors throughout my books and I will definitely be using the Studio Calico Project Life kits, but I also want to use MORE of my supplies and kits.  I want to use my stamps and stickers and alpha.  I want to get creative and really push myself to make our books fun and different (this is totally January Stephanie talking, can't you tell???).  I want to include art journal pages and my children's drawings.  I want to include smaller layouts and photo collages.  Lots of photo collages.  I want to have enlarged photos and full text pages.  Basically, I don't want any rules.  I know Project Life doesn't have rules, but I totally made some up for myself over the past few years and kind of got stuck in those rules.  So I'm throwing all of MY rules out the window and going with the flow!!

My hope is to do 12 different sizes of Project Life books, but who knows.  The more I think about it, there are really only so many possibilities, so I will likely do some duplicate sizes.  Regardless, each month will be super fun (for me, at least) and full of memories.  I know it sounds like more work than just a typical 12x12 album, but I'm really needing something different and something that gets me excited, you know!  We shall see how it goes!!!

I used the Far Far Away Project Life kit to set up my January book and have mixed in the other kits, stamps, etc. for my January photos so far.  ( You can the beginnings that in the Creative Team gallery).  It's been fun and thrilling and I'm looking forward to continuing this process.  I'll also be sharing a walk through video of my January Project Life book on the Studio Calico blog later in the month, so stayed tuned!!  :)

Ok....so what do you think???  Sound interesting, fun, crazy, all of the above?  Do tell!!