And so I wait...

I discovered the Project Life concept early this year thanks to Ali Edwards’ blog (http://www.aliedwards.com/). At first I did not grasp the concept. I thought: “if all the design part is done for me, what’s the point?” I like the scrap part of scrapbooking: cutting, pasting, painting… But over the last spring, while in maternity leave, I realized that although I was short of time to sit and scrap in a crafty way, I still wanted some way to record all the little details of our life. Being back at work full time, with one kid in kindergarten and the second at the day care, I have even less time at hands. That is why I finally realized how much I could benefit from the Project Life. Looking at what some people do with it, I realized that it would allow me to have best of both worlds: have my stories told AND when time is available do the crafty layouts without worrying all the time about how I could possibly tell such and such story. So all is good… Well kind of… There is one problem: I live in Belgium and we are still waiting for the products to be available for Europe. I have been waiting for months now. I see the products available in the States and I am drooling all over Amazon.com, checking every bit of news that I could get on when they will finally be on Amazon.co.uk. There is no doubt in my mind about which kit I want: I am in love with the Turquoise kit.

The tricky part will be to decide on the page protectors. I like the idea of doing all with the design A, to simplify the process.

But on the other hand, I would also like to have some options… so, I am currently thinking of adding these two other designs to my order: I have already set a budget for that, so it might depend on the final price tag for Europe. But for now, let’s dream about the possibilities!

If you have never heard about Project Life, start here at the source (http://www.beckyhiggins.com/products/ ), from there, you can discover a huge community for inspiration. I hope to add my contribution in French soon!

Scrap recipes: motion capture

Going through my albums, I noticed that I have a soft spot for scrapping people in motion. I like to incorporate several pictures from the same movement creating a sort of animated layout. You can see an example below of my son walking in the woods. All the pictures were taken with the same settings and you can really feel him coming towards you. In this case, the pictures tell the full story because he was one and a half at that time and had been walking for a couple of months only. So the idea was to show how he managed to keep his balance on a challenging surface (uneven and covered with leaves). You will notice that in this particular case, all the pictures have the same size.

Now look at the same boy one year later running in the stairs! Whaou… Where is my baby gone?

Another nice trick is to have several small pictures of the motion and one bigger one (to contrast even more, you could make the small one b&w and the big one full color - or the opposite). That allows you to showcase the best picture of the shooting without losing the funny ones (you know the one with faces or your cat showing up in the background), after all they are probably the pictures you will like the most in a couple of years simply because they are sooooo your everyday life.