Salt Lake City Utah family, newborn, baby, child and wedding photographer | carrie owens photography

So I’m just two weeks behind in finishing up my title page for my Project Life album, but it’s been a busy start to the year. Now…just because I have only now finished the title page, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working on the planning of the week and a half that I’m behind. I’ll show you how I keep up as a busy mom and how I can easily get back on track. For my project life album I am using both the Turquoise and the Clementine and mixing and matching as I see the need. I also have printed out some journailing cards from other sources such as Paislee Press, Marcy Penner and there are many other resources out there…you can even create your own!

Here is my title page as it stands now finally complete:

And some little closeups of the project and the process:

After working on my December Daily album (which is still unfinished) I think that sewing on paper is pretty darn cool. All those years of missing out on the fun! But at least now I can put my 11 year old sewing machine to work again. I used many of the suggested inserts from the Clementine kit for my title page – adding things to them like on this first insert.

Here is the nearly completed insert. I added the white doily and a hello sticker (from lily bee design) as well as some American Crafts thickers (Hardcover) letter stickers for the “TWENTY”. After this shot, I added some American Crafts Remarks stickers for the twelve.

The above insert was again one of the recommended first page options and then I used one of the regular page inserts and wrote all of our names on it (I used two so I could cut them the way that I needed) and created little banners that I secured to the card. I like how they’re numbered.

Another recommended insert…I had debated about this one, but in the end, I like how it turned out. I used the same American Crafts Thickers for the “FIVE” and then the 24/7 sticker is from the same sheet that the “hello” sticker came from as shown above. I added some Little Flyers from October Afternoon and tied them up with some bakers twine from The Twinery. The number 5 is an old chipboard number that I have painted white and the little wooden houses are from Studio Calico.

Below I wanted to show some of my tips for how I’ve got my Project Life set up and how I plan on staying up to date (and how I’m going to be ok when I’m not able to stay as current as I’d like). I do have a scrapbooking side to my office and one day when it’s cleaned up, I’ll do a post about that, but for now, here are a couple of my little baskets that I use to keep my cards organized. The grey felt container is from the dollar spot at Target – I have one with all my little inserts from the Clementine edition and another for the inserts from the Turquoise edition. The basket is from Hobby Lobby and it holds the plain grid style cards – they fit perfectly. I have another spot where I house the 4×6 journalers and I’ll show how I organize those another time. I have spent lots of time checking out other setups through Pinterest and other blogs. The Creative Team for Project Life has great blogs with lots of ideas that you should really check out if you’re also tackling this project.

Are you on Instagram? facebook? Twitter or Flickr? Are you forgetful like me? This app is saving my behind as far as recording the little moments that happen in my life and the lives of those I take care of (the three kids and the hubby). Momento is seriously the best app ever…in my opinion. It keeps all my info right there – controls all my feeds and puts them in an easy to use diary of sorts. I love it. And it’s going to save my project life booty. I’m sure of it.

There is another way that I keep up to date when I’m not up to dateI have created (in Microsoft Word) a simple page that has room for me to record what’s going on for the week. I saw a very similar page that was free to download here on Marcy Penner’s blog.  Although her weekly planning page was perfect – my weeks start on Sundays, so I needed to create my own. I have printed out several and three hole punched them and already have them placed one in each week. Marcy Penner also has a great planning page system here for those of you that like to sketch out your pages.

Project life is a system created by Becky Higgins to help you simplify how you document life and preserve memories.  It’s a reminder to celebrate the little things.  You can find out more about Project Life here.