Now that I’ve talked a bit about Project Life, and shown you some of my pages I wanted to share my why with you. Why is this important to me, to my family and my loved ones? Why do I take the time, make the effort?

That’s why.

I’ve been a scrapbooker since about 1999, give or take. I’ve cut my photos into crazy shapes and I’ve used fancy edged scissors to trim the patterned paper to mat my photos. I’ve been to all night crops and CKUs and spent many an hour in a scrapbook store. I’ve designed products, taught classes locally and at CKUs, been in magazines and books and have been a Garden Girl (a what? it’s a scrapbooking thing of days gone past). I’ve painstakingly Xacto’d hand drawn letters out of cardstock well before the days of the Cricut  and the Silhouette. And then my kids got older…and I got busier with photography and I wasn’t making the same time for telling our stories as I once had.

But I missed it. I missed the creative outlet that I so need, I missed the products (I’m a diehard stationary girl and always will be). I missed telling our stories. Facebook is great, Instagram is awesome. But I want something more. I don’t want to flip through screens of instagram posts to see our story. I don’t want to can’t rely on my memory. Those discs of photos I so carefully put in dvd sleeves and a stack of external harddrives is not what I want to pass down to my grandchildren. All my photos on smugmug or dropbox? That’s not what my kids want to look through. They need something tangible with a story to go with it. Photos shouldn’t stay on your computer or in the cloud. They need to be shared and your stories need to be told.

For me, that means printing some for the walls (I’m way behind on that…isn’t there a saying about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?) and printing out photos for our albums. In the post about July Project Life I talk about my process of getting those photos printed and ready for my album. Project Life isn’t hard. It’s supposed to be easy. Here’s a tip: you can make it as easy or as involved as you want it to be, you choose. The photos don’t have to be taken with a big fancy camera (I would say 99% of my project life photos are taken with my phone) or with lots of posing. They just need to show your life, tell your story. Don’t make your kids rely on their memories either. Talk about the ordinary stuff. Celebrate a regular day. That’s what your life is made up of…carpools and homework, sports practice and dance recitals. This is where the good stuff is.