Operation Project Life

... has officially started. I originally planned on starting my album January 1st, but I was just too excited to wait. All my supplies were burning a hole in my scrappy space. Unlike any of my other scrappy projects, I really wanted to do Project Life in the physical form. Though the digital version looks fabulous, there's just something so appealing about the physical album. I also thought if I did the physical version then my family might be able to participate in the process.

But  ... in order to start I had to get past a little personal hurdle. I had a ton of anxiety about printing the weekly photos. You see, I'm 100% digital. I don't print pictures anymore, I do everything digitally. I've always been someone who collects the little scraps of life -- receipts, boarding passes, kids' artwork, etc -- so those sort of goodies started piling up for the month of December. And I've been taking a photo a day since the start of the year, so I had plenty of photos to use. I just had to figure out how to print them and how I'd print them in the correct sizes for the divided page protectors. 

I worried about this for the last three weeks. And I didn't make any progress on my album. And then I had an epiphany: I could use the Project Life Digital Templates to print my photos. I immediately bought the set of seven templates (above) and went to work selecting my photos for Weeks One and Two, as well as my title page. The templates are the exact same size and layout as the page protectors that can be purchased in the Photo Pocket Pages - Big Variety Pack. I can mix and match which templates/pocket pages I use, which means lots of variety.  

When I was all done picking and clipping my photos, I upload the files to the Costco Photo Center and had them printed at my local Costco (a 12x12 page costs $2.99 and can be done in an hour!). This is what the template pages looked like straight from Costco:

In total, I printed 5 pages: the photos for the cover page and then two pages each for weeks one and two. If I was thinking ahead, I could have added photos from future weeks to the unused photo spots on these pages ... but I wasn't. Once I had these in my hot little hands, I cut out the individual photos, used a corner rounder to finish them off and added them to my album. 

Here's a peek at what my cover/title page looks like:

I bought the Digital Turquoise Paper Pack, and I clipped one of the papers to a photo spot (above).

On this photo I added some word art from Ali Edwards before printing.

I'm already almost done with weeks one and two (Dec 4-17) and I'm hoping to catch up the other weeks this weekend. And then, I should be able to keep up as the year progresses. My plan is to pick my photos each Saturday. Clip them to the template. And uploaded them for one-hour printing. That way either Saturday night or Sunday I can put my pages together. What's good about this is I can do these steps even when I'm traveling. This is huge for me, since traveling as much as I do makes it hard to do any sort of physical project. Adding some digi shortcuts will make this far more manageable for me.

Are you doing Project Life? Any short cuts you want to share? I need all the help I can get!