Memory Keeping - Anniversary Minibook - 1YR Batch 1

So far, I've only shared my title page for my Project Life album.  This is the dominant craft in my life right now, so I'll be sharing about it the most. The reason why it dominates my craft life is its purpose: memory keeping. In order to be caught up, I have to spend some time on it every week.  Otherwise, I forget the little details that prompted this project.  Even at this point, while January is 90% documented, February, March, and April are mainly empty.  It seems daunting at times because I feel like we make more memories than I have time to document.  I still have quite a bit of 2015 to catch up on and I also have to document our trip to Scotland and an Anniversary minibook.  As more time passes, the more I forget...I need to come up with a note taking method to make sure I capture the little things that I originally set out to capture.

A bit into my PL process: I do this in batches.  I never finish a spread in one session.  Some amazing people out there, like Kelly Purkey, Ali Edwards, and Candace Perkins, are able to complete their page in one sit down session, then move onto another.  I've tried this method, and it's never really worked for me.  I like to do a lot of the same thing in one session, hence, batches.

I first learned about this method in an A Beautiful Mess class, taught by Rachel Denbow: Scrapbook in a Week.  I didn't know before the class that there are other people who do Project Life in the same way and that there is an actual name for it!  I'm sure that everyone's batching process is different and my batching is definitely different from Rachel's.  I'm also taking a class at Studio Calico taught by Stephanie Bryan, Day by Day: Mix it Up.  She too works in batches.  I was surprised to learn that working in batches encourages her creativity.  She is another giant in the scrapbooking world, known especially for her minibooks.  I thought that someone like her could pull creativity out from under the dust!

In the class, Stephanie asked us to think about what we wanted to work on in this class, and in what size.  I originally set out to document my fiancé's brother's wedding.  While the day was for the bride and groom, Ahra and Jesse, the focus of my memory keeping is on Andy and Me.  I decided to make a 6x8 minibook to capture little bits and pieces of the wedding, but mainly to record the fun time Andy and I had.

Originally....meaning, I'm not doing that.  I decided instead to work on my Anniversary minibook.  Here, I record any major and momentous day.  So far I only have my 6months completed.  So I decided to tackle my 1year date that we celebrated on December 7th.  Then the engagement.  Then the engagement celebration.  I love that it never ends ❤

So back to my project life process.  My first step is choosing photos, editing, then laying them out in photoshop.  This first step is done completely digitally.  By the end, I know exactly where all the photos are going to be.  I don't have to ponder the placement or decide which photos should be included.  I also don't print excess photos.  Everything is decided before printing.  Here are some pictures of my digital spreads after my first batch of the 1year date.

This page is my opener for our 1year.  It's actually scraplifted off a project that I saw on the Studio Calico gallery.  I'll be writing a separate post on it later :)  Usually for opening pages, I pick a nice picture of the two of us and make a scrapbook layout.  This time, it was a picture of us holding hands after eating dinner.  The day was just so great and holding hands was such a sweet way to end it.  I guess I'm a backwards sort of person...using an ending picture to open.

Our day started out with Andy picking me up from school and then driving over to Ihop, where we ate on our first date.  I added a digital stamp from Ali Edwards' Messy Daily Circles and some text through photoshop onto a 6in x 8in photo of the restaurant.  The black vertical rectangle is a page protector separator where the actual gap and album rings would be.  The white block next to the eggs is a blank 3in x 4in spot.  In the physical album, I'll be adding a card to write more (a journaling card) or a card to just look pretty (filler card).

Second stop of the day: Target.  We had a White Elephant gift exchange coming up and we had to buy gifts.  The best place to shop is always Target!  We spent over an hour in this place.  Like actually.  We started out by having a lot of fun.  As you can see in the above picture, I'm a kid trapped a...well a kid's body.  But by the end I was dragging my feet because I was so tired.  Even getting coffee from the Starbucks in the store took forever.

Andy knows that I love nature (he does too, but not as much as I do).  So he took me to Alley Pond Park where everything was just so beautiful.  There were ducks, geese, and swans!  Because it was a warm winter, the foliage was still present and colorful.  Plus, THERE WAS AN ADORABLE LITTLE PUPPY!

We took so many pictures of everything.  But we got A LOT of pictures of duck butts.  Once in a while, the ducks would look underwater for food.  So they just flipped 90 degrees down.  There would be crowds of just butts.  Yes, I'm still just a kid :)  The wide blank on the upper left is a 4in x 6in slot and the squares on the right are 2in x 2in.

We stayed at the pond for a long time to see the sunset.  I know that some of the colors can be attributed to the chemical pollution we have dumped into our atmosphere, but the sky is still so beautiful.

I absolutely love this 3in x 8in silhouette picture, but the better picture is the one of Andy and me because together is better.

Onto the photo on the lower left, I added an Ali Edwards freebie stamp and more text.  We had some time before dinner so we took a break in the car to play games :)  Then we went to The Barn.  If you live in NYC, please please visit this place.  It's super rustic inside and when I ordered the mulled wine, I felt like I was in the Mediaeval Times.  Amazing.

Here is a spread of our food.  So on the left side, 3/4's of the page looks blank.  There is a thin horizontal black line though.  That line is to separate the page into two 3in x 4 in boxes and one 4in x 6in box.  But oh my gosh the food.  So gooodddddd.  We demolished the food by mindlessly cramming it down our throats.  But the one thing that needs special mention is the fingerling potatoes that came with my fiancé's steak.  So crispy and good and amazing.  Please, just go and experience it for yourself!

Here is the last page of our 1year section of this minibook.  We had an amazing flourless chocolate cake.  It was so good!  A glass of milk would have been perfect with this cake.  But these two pictures wrap up our celebration and a thoughtfully planned date.

Putting all of the spreads together on the computer took a few hours.  Now the photos are all printed and placed into the correct pockets.  Batch 2 is filling in the remaining spots with either journaling or filler cards.  To completely honest, Batch 2 is more difficult for me than Batch 1.  There's an artistic element to Batch 2 that I struggle with, and I also feel the pressure to find the perfect card for each spot.  BUT NO MORE!  I know that all of the pressure is in my head and that it's unnecessary.  Hopefully this time, I'll focus more on the story telling aspect and a little less on the aesthetic aspect.

So here is our 1year anniversary celebration and the beginning of my Project Life process.  To anyone not familiar with the batch process or unhappy with their current Project Life process, I hope that this provides some insight into a new method.  For those who do do the batch process, yay! Batchers!  However I do have to mention one more thing.  While I, Jenn Han, start digitally, no one else needs to.  A computer and Photoshop are not necessary at all.  Project Life can be catered to YOUR at home supplies at YOUR convenience.  It really is what you make it to be.

Ok, bye :)

Memory Keeping - Title page 2016

It's currently April, but I thought that I would share my Project Life progress.  I use the term "Project Life" loosely.  As I've shared before, I do both Project Life and scrapbook layouts, so I use "Project Life" to mean both, unless I'm specifically talking about a scrapbook layout.

Like many others, I started off my 2016 album with a title page, the opener of the album.  Generally, the title page of a Project Life/Scrapbook album consists of the year and pictures of the family members.  When I was looking for ideas for the title page, I found a few that inspired me

Pam Baldwin - http://pambaldwin.ca

This 9x12 title page by Pam Baldwin beautifully opens her album.  The idea of adding family photos in the shape of tags is genius! The tags alternate with neutral project life cards that are lightly embellished.  A picture of the back of the title page

I love that the back has more pictures of the family AND goals for the new year.  The scribble by her daughter is adorable!  Here is the tutorial on how to create this page on the Citrus Twist Kits blog.

Ali Edwards - http://aliedwards.com/

Ali Edwards is another creative who inspires me.  She inspires everyone.  She literally has a fan club. She's a great designer and takes amazing pictures. While these traits are inspiring in of themselves, I think the reason why she's such a giant in the memory keeping world is that she is incredibly honest and transparent in her journaling and she's able to draw this out of us.  This elevates our own albums to a different level.  

Journaling is difficult for most, including myself.  It's easy to jot down some quick, on the surface details about a photo.  It's something else to journal the experience.  When we create our albums and record our memories, our intention is to eventually pass these pieces of work down to our family and around to our friends.  Knowing that, a writer's block goes up when we try to write about what we saw and felt.  The lessons we learned and the reality of the struggles get caught within us.  These experiences are too scary and too precious to write about.  However, these are the exact reasons why we must write about them.  Our goal is to pass these memories on.  Not just the visual aspects of the memories, then they would be incomplete.  The whole memories.  Through the albums, our loved ones learn about the documenter: us.  As the person behind the camera, we get to experience an event in a different way.  It's never easy to be vulnerable.  Ali Edwards teaches us to be so by example.

Her 12x12 title page is very simple.  She has the year, photos of her family, and that giant "E" for her last name.  It's clean and lightly embellished.  Yet, it still makes an impact.

The problem I faced is that I don't have my own family.  Sure I have my parents and my sister, but at 26 years old, the family dynamic is not as cohesive compared to the dynamic of a "newer" family.  I'm not married, nor am I a mom.  So, when I was trying to figure this part out in late December/early January, I remembered Kelly Purkey's 2015 title page

Kelly Purkey is another inspiring figure in the PL/scrapbooking world.  Her 2015 album in the 6x12 size was simple, clean, and most of all, doable.  That's why there are many people doing the 6x12 this year.  Even though I didn't jump on that train, I will be documenting my 2015 Scotland trip in the 6x12 size.  I guess I sorta did jump on that train.

What I love about this title page is that it's so cute and creative.  Plus, white on white is a classic look.  What really gets me about this layout is that she conveys that this album is about HER.  SHE is the subject of the album.  SHE chooses what is included.  SHE determines how the memories are told.  I chose to scraplift (the scrapper's socially acceptable synonym for "copy") this one because of its simplicity and adaptability.  I adapted this layout to be about Andy and me.  Also, I adore the photostrips!

Here is how mine turned out

I have a 9x12 transparency divider from A Beautiful Mess that says "our ADVENTURE Book."  These are thick, sturdy, and most of all FUN!  This album really is about my life with Andy (the fiancé) and every days with him has been an adventure.  

Here is just the title page, without the transparency on top.  I took some of my favorite 2015 pictures to jumpstart my 2016 memories.  This page was a lot of fun to put together, and as you can see, I didn't copy Kelly Purkey's to the tee.  I made my own adjustments based off the supplies that I had at the time.  

There's a glare on the left side of the page because I am still a noob at taking pictures of my own work.  I'm also still a noob at using photoshop to edit my pictures.  I don't know how to combine different editing functions to get my pictures to look bright and pretty.  Hopefully as I keep up this blog and taking pictures of my album, I'll learn and improve.  Bear with me here!

Supplies Used:

Album - A Beautiful Mess

Transparency Dividers - A Beautiful Mess

Black Puffy Alphabet Stickers - Freckled Fawn (Currently Sold Out)

"You Got This" Banner - Studio Calico (Tin Man Embellishment Kit)

Memory Keeping

While some classify Project Life as a different type of craft, I think of it as a type of scrapbooking.  You take pictures and pretty papers, put it all together, then slip the finished product into page protectors.  Regardless of how you define the two, what's really great is that you can combine both into one album and they share the same goal: memory keeping.  This is my second year doing this, but I do selective memory keeping.  My reason for memory keeping developed in late 2014, when I started dating my current fiancé.

When we started dating, there were little moments that were so dear to my heart: 4 hour phone calls, silly text messages, our firsts, and cute mistakes.  I vowed to never forget those moments, but after some time, I was left with the memory of the promise, not the memory itself.  After considering scrapbooking, something I tried to get into while I was in college, I came across Project Life on Pinterest.  All great things are on Pinterest, right?

Scrapbooking at first was too hard for me, I failed miserably in college, but this seemed doable.  Project Life doesn't require creativity.  All it requires is living life, in every definition possible.  For some, living life means kids; for others, it's traveling.  For me, it's enjoying my life with my best friend (in NYC).  When I say "enjoy," I don't mean just the good times.  I always include the bad times too.  What I do is memory keeping, not "make my life seem glamorous" keeping.  My fiancé and I look through the scrapbooks and while we love the good memories, we especially linger on the bad.  We reflect on those times and we learn from our mistakes.  We track our progress and appreciate each other more.

I'll be sharing some project life spreads as I go and maybe I'll write up a post on how I go about putting my spreads together :)


Links to companies mentioned:
Pinterest
Project Life

A Goodbye Gift - Yearbook Collage

It's taken me a long time to figure out what I wanted to start this blog with.  I created this blog on June 5th, and I haven't had a clue about what to first write on.  As the name of the blog suggests, this will mainly be about my struggle to create, despite my intense desire to do so.  

This first post is about a DIY yearbook collage as a goodbye gift to some dear friends.  They are members of my church, Woodside Community Church, and they are moving to Washington D.C. for a new job.  All of our friends at WCC are pretty bummed about their move, yet happy that they'll be moving back to where they came from.  The 6 months with them have been full of laughter, learning, and fellowship.  Basically, they're pretty special people and I wanted to do something special for them, other than a typical group photo in a picture frame.  Oh, but I'll be doing that as well...here!

This picture was a little dark when printed, so I brightened it up with photoshop:

The leaves seem greener; people's smiles are brighter! Yay for photoshop! This picture was popped into a simple frame.

The collage took a significantly longer time.

This is the finished product. It's simple, clean, and has an eye catching focal point.  The only thing I would complain about is the inconsistent quality of the photos.  Some were taken off of Facebook and look grainy, especially compared to the third picture on the bottom row.  

**I have no idea when I started this post, but many many months later, I am here to finish it.

After the collage was printed, I asked the people to write a little goodbye/remember me message.  It was then slipped into another simple frame and the two frames were gifted on their last Wednesday night prayer.  I personally love that pop of blue from the only colored picture, the one of our church building.  

So, I have a few thoughts here.  In the beginning of the post, I talked a little about the title of the blog.  I think the time it took for this first post is evidence of my struggle.  I hope that this blog can become an outlet, a way for me to release this ball of frustration.  This means that I most likely won't be focusing on one medium.  I'll be sharing my writing, scrapbooking, knitting/crocheting, and other methods of expression.  

All of these things sound so creative.  To my friends, I do seem creative.  I am not.  When I write, I write about age old, existential angst that have been discussed skillfully and tactfully by much better writers.  When I scrapbook, I copy the beautifully created designs of other scrappers.  When I knit/crochet, I must always have the pattern of the meticulously created item.  

My intent is still to try, and to document my attempts here.