Project Life - and we're off!

This year I decided to do a pocket page album.  It's not quote traditional project life as I knew I wouldn't keep up with a spread for every week but I thought I could do a few pages for each month - no specific amount, just however many I could fill up.  Sometimes life is busy & all go and other times not a lot is happening.  I also wanted to capture some of the smaller details as well as the things I'm doing to celebrate my 50th birthday as I knew I couldn't make a 12x12 page for every single thing!

So with this in mind I watched videos. read blogs and subscribed to the Gossamer Blue Life Pages Kit.  These things combined have given me a system I think will work for me...

When I've done pocket pages before I have printed and made the cards as I've gone along.  I now realise this is not an efficient method and explains why it's taken me so long to complete pages in the past!

This time I've done it in stages.  First I printed off all the photos I wanted to use and chose the style of page protector.  This was made easy using my Canon Selphy that I got for Christmas and I can now print straight from my iPhone...

The next evening I picked out all the cards to go in the pockets either as a base for the photo or on their own.

This side I left fairly minimal when it came to adding embellishments as the photos speak for themselves...

The final stage was the fun bit - adding the journalling and the embellishments.  This again was easier as I stuck mostly to the kit only adding a few wood veneers and enamel dots from my stash.  By sticking to a limited number of alphas and embellies I put the cards together really quickly.  Watching Inkie Quill's Grab 5 videos gave me this inspiration :)

The end result is four pages for January that I am really pleased with.  Now it's time to crack on with February!