If you can be bothered to scroll way back in this blog you'll find a post with me hating everything about Project Life. I still stand by a lot of that. I can't stand twee in any form, I can't stand silly people who make you do scrapbooking - or, indeed, anything - in a certain way and I don't work to a timeframe. However, for the last few years I have been doing a lot of pocket scrapbooking because I like having a photo layout to work to. I've even done weekly Project Life pages, mostly using the Project Life app on my iphone. I then finish the pages in My Memories as for me the layouts are too bland when they leave the phone and I like to add a border and "stuff". You can see some tutorials and articles on my Easy Pocket Scrapbooking site and there will be more shortly.
I started making weekly pages as an experiment to see if there was enough to go in them. There have been some weeks when I've said to DH "We have to go out and do something, I have nothing for my weekly page". Really. The pages have rarely been done in order and I catch up every few weeks. There are missing weeks in every year. No-one cares. NO-ONE CARES!!
It started to go wrong in 2017. Without giving the details our financial future has been put at risk by a bunch of corporate bullies. We've been put through hell and believed we would lose everything. What do you do about something as trivial as scrapbooking when that happens? Well, first of all you get expensive specialist lawyers, check your pension options and - in my case - come out of the retirement you've only been in for a few months and come up with a plan to exact revenge on said bullies. Oh right, what do you do about the scrapbooking?
I just left everything for six months. I did six regular pages, some with photos from last year. I think I managed to do three weeks' worth of PL pages. Although I talked to my friends about what was happening I didn't feel the need to spout about it in a scrapbook. I'm British. We don't do that.
It's June now and I've started to catch up. I made eight pages last week. The hot weather in the UK helped as I could do sunny pages. The revenge plan also helps! There's a long article on this topic in progress on Easy Pocket Scrapbooking but for now by tips when it gets rough are:
1) Don't worry about scrapbooking when you have more important things to think about but stay in your FB groups (well, not the ones full of bullies obviously), admire the work of others etc. Do whatever hobbies help you to relax. Lots of crocheted scarves have been made in our house...
2) Carry on taking photos of anything and everything and taking screenshots of your Facebook page and the weather (is that just me?) and organising them on your phone. Make a rough page with the Project Life app when you feel like it. Tell yourself it doesn't matter what it's like as you're not going to use it. You will find it useful as a framework later and might even use the page you made at the time. Carry on backing up. You don't want a load of lost photos adding to your misery.
3) When you do start scrapping again don't worry about what order you do it in. Just pitch in and start! Don't worry about what falls into which week but make sure you put a date somewhere. Show your pages to your friends as you make them.
4) Get those specialist lawyers!
Here's a quick page I made recently during our glorious hot weather. I hope that two weeks wasn't the entire summer. I used the Project Life app the Instaweather and Instaplace apps. Kits is Melissa Bennett's Hello Summertime.
Cheers!
PS (months later....) we beat the corporate bullies. We had the moral and legal high ground and a real desire to grind them into the dust.
