It’s been a long time (years!) since I’ve shared my Project Life pages online. I’m both nervous and excited to begin sharing them again. Today, a look at some of the spreads in my 2025 album.
For the last two years (2024 and 2025), I’ve not begun keeping an album until July. I’ve also not gone back to fill in the first half of the year for either year—and I don’t plan to. Is this ideal? No. Am I happy to have some of the year documented v. none of it? Yes.
Some of these spreads are unfinished; they still need journaling. The holdup: I’m still not sure whether I want to handwrite or type my journaling onto the cards that are missing journaling. So it goes sometimes (most times).
Corner of a Cinnabon box from our annual Cinnabon (and Build-A-Bear) trip
Second row
Corner of a recipe card I ripped up to recycle after messing up the recipe I was writing on it
Scrap of a popcorn bag from the popcorn machine in the waiting area of where I had my flat tire replaced (boo to having a flat tire, thank god it was under warranty and cost me $0.00 to replace)
Scrap of packaging from a box of Pizza Hut my son brought home
Third row
Leaf from the neighborhood
Part of the bag I brought home my holiday cards in from Oblation
Portion of packaging on a notebook I bought for a new project
Label from new sweatpants I (finally!) bought myself during Black Friday sales
Piece of an old refund/gift card that I cut up while going through a small stack of old gift cards to see which still have money on them and which don’t
Last week, I spent an afternoon printing out a batch of filler cards I made (“made”) from patterns I found on Pinterest.
To find the patterns, I searched Pinterest for different wallpapers—floral, botanical, geometric, etc. To make the cards, I opened the images in Photoshop Elements, adjusted size and position to my liking, printed them on (cheap) white card stock, and used my paper cutter to trim them to size.
I also made a few fifty-fifty cards using Studio Calico digitals and patterns I found on Pinterest. Sadly, the Studio Calico digitals I used are no longer available (I’m still so bummed that they left the memorykeeping industry).
I’m excited to add some visual interest and pops of color to my Project Life pages with these cards. Part of why I’ve been so inconsistent with Project Life for the last few years is, most of the time, my life doesn’t feel worth documenting/remembering. My days are highly routinized and not very bold or fun. I spend the vast majority of my time alone in the same few places doing the same exact things, and those spaces and things either aren’t very visually attractive, or else they don’t photograph well. For me, a big part of the appeal of Project Life is the design aspect. I like arranging pages that I like to look at. That’s hard to do when I’m not excited about the practice because I’m not excited about my life. Silly as it may seem, these fun and fresh filler cards add a bit of excitement back to this practice for me. Here’s hoping it sticks.
Here are the scraps of ephemera I saved in August.
Top row
Packaging from a book I ordered
Scraps of a security envelope pattern given to me by someone after they learned I collect security envelope patterns (such a sweet gesture)
Packaging from the Parmesan I sprinkled over the massive slice of pizza my son brought home for me one day
Second row
Caution tape leftover in the courtyard after they repainted the exterior of our apartment buildings (the paint job looks so bad y’all)
Packaging from the first-ever cabin air filter that I installed in my car by myself—I can’t believe I’ve overpaid for the oil change people to do it all these years
Paper from the pizza box that held the massive slice of pizza my son brought home for me one day
Third row
Label from the pool noodle I bought to bring to the river
Old exterior paint from my apartment complex
Oil change sticker
Bottom row
Matchbook cover that I found on the ground during a walk
Packaging from my son’s new Rogue barbell
Packaging from a new vegetable brush that I finally bought after many months of needing to replace the old one I threw out
After seeing this post from @lindalovescreating in early July, I decided to start including monthly ephemera pages in my 2025 album, beginning with July. I think it’s such a fun way to include extra bits of life that normally wouldn’t make the cut.
Top row
Scrap of paper from a basket of street tacos I ate on my walk home after finally visiting an interactive art experience I’ve wanted to visit for the last two years (featuring a line of test stitches from my new-to-me sewing machine)
Piece of a ripped-up $1 bill I found on the ground while out walking
Part of the tear-away freshness seal from a pint of ice cream
Second row
Part of a flyer announcing yet another neighborhood library construction closure
A gold star I found on the ground while out walking
Wrapper from a candy at the nail salon
Third row
$1 bill found in a library book after I brought it home
Tag from a new bikini bottom
Lion decal I found on the ground while out walking
Last row
Portion of branded packing tape from the company I order my creatine from (it’s the only creatine that doesn’t make me bloat—if creatine makes you bloated, I recommend trying this brand)
These pages will live in the back of my album alongside those documenting the media I consume this year. Each month will get one 6″ x 8″ page protector that’s divided into 12 smaller pockets. Only the front of the pocket will be filled. I like the idea of seeing through the gaps, and of seeing the backs of the items in the pockets.
I haven’t yet decided how I’ll include lists of each month’s ephemera. I might type up each month’s list on a 3″ x 8″ piece of paper and slip it into a 3″ x 8″ page protector in front of the corresponding 6″ x 8″ page. I might make one big list and slip it into a 6″ x 8″ page protector. Not sure. For now, I’m keeping track with a sticky note adhered to the front of each 12-pocket 6″ x 8″ page.
Last year, I decided to more completely document the media I consumed throughout the year in my Project Life album: docuseries, movies, podcasts, TV shows. I didn’t include books (I didn’t read much last year) or music (I don’t really listen to music). I used 6″ x 8″ page protectors divided into 12 pockets, each measuring 2″ x 2″, and printed 2″ x 2″ thumbnails for each piece of media, six to each 4″ x 6″ piece of photo paper.
Because I didn’t have the idea to do this until mid-November, it’s not a complete, and therefore not a completely accurate, record. I did the best I could by pulling from memory and going through my watch and listening history in my streaming apps. It’s complete and accurate enough.
I considered organizing each category chronologically. That quickly became too complicated. Not every streaming service tracks when you streamed what (only what you streamed and in what order), and anyway, do you list things in order of starting them or finishing them? What about things that don’t have a clear finish date, like podcasts or TV shows that release episodes weekly instead of seasonally? Or docuseries or TV shows or serialized podcasts that you started and are still watching or listening to at the end of the year but haven’t fully finished yet? I decided to organize each category alphabetically.
They’re not the most attractive pages. Frankly, I think they’re an eyesore. Visually overwhelming. Because they live in the back of my album, their unattractiveness and overwhelmingness bother me less than they would otherwise.
I decided not to include thumbnails of the movies I watched in theaters with those of the movies I streamed at home. Instead, I saved the ticket stubs for those movies in standard 6″ x 8″ page protectors divided into 3″ x 4″ pockets. These I organized chronologically. (These “ticket stubs” can hardly be called ticket stubs. They’re nothing more than shitty receipts. My outrage over the harbinger that is the disappearance of well-designed and quality crafted ephemera is deep and wide and intense.)
This year, I’m keeping a note in my phone to document each category of media as I consume it, and plan to again organize each category in my album alphabetically. Every four to six weeks, I go through said note in my phone, grab a thumbnail for each entry I’ve added since the last time I reviewed the list, add those thumbnails to a template in Photoshop Elements, and check it off in my phone. This way, I’m not scrambling at the end of the year, completely overwhelmed by doing everything all at once.
Printing is the only thing I plan to put off until the end of this year or early next. Partly because I don’t want to misplace printed sheets of thumbnails. Mostly because I know I’ll be tempted to immediately cut out each thumbnail and slip all of them in pockets, which, because I’m organizing them alphabetically, will create more work for me, which will frustrate me, as I’ll inevitably have to remove and rearrange the thumbnails as new media are added to the list.
* * *
For the curious:
Most-enjoyed docuseries in 2024:
Untold: Hall of Shame
Most-enjoyed movies (streaming) in 2024:
His Three Daughters
Run
Most-enjoyed podcasts in 2024:
Diss and Tell
Even the Royals
I Said No Gifts!
Extreme: Muscle Men
Normal Gossip
Scamfluencers
Smosh Reads Reddit
Most-enjoyed TV shows in 2024:
Bad Sisters
Boy Swallows Universe
Call the Midwife
Dark Winds
Ripley
Severance (rewatch)
Slow Horses
The Perfect Couple
This is Us
Your Honor
Severance is an obvious choice. Along with it, Bad Sisters, Dark Winds, and Slow Horses stand above the rest (especially Dark Winds).
I’m pleased to announce that I’m finally making some progress on this project. Slowly. Surely.
Build-A-Bear is my family’s most-enduring holiday tradition. Others we’ve done many years—Santa pancakes on Christmas morning, Elf, Krispy Kreme right when they open (6 am) in our pajamas. Build-A-Bear is the only one we’ve done every single year since our first visit, which we didn’t know at the time would become a holiday tradition, in December 2013.
This mini album is very simple: mostly photos and holiday-themed paper, with very minimal extras and embellishments. So far, I’ve completed the cover page, a decorative insert, and the pages for 2013 through 2020. I’ve still got the intro page and the pages for 2022 through 2024 to go.
The album is clear acrylic with glitter that I ordered years and years ago from a shop that no longer exists (sorry!). The front of the cover page is the back of a Persnickety Prints coupon from almost 10 entire years ago. I’ve held onto it all this time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it in a project. I’m so glad I waited. It really is perfect for this project. To the back of it, I adhered a piece of a letterpress greeting card that I cut down to fit (3″ x 4″). Once I figure out what I want to say, I’ll type up a short blurb about this tradition on that piece of white card stock.
Following the currently blank intro page is a decorative insert I made using a Photo Flips pocket (I cut off the strip with the adhesive) filled with stuffing and a heart from Build-A-Bear (each year I ask to take a small handful of stuffing and a heart to keep as a memento of our family’s holiday tradition and every year (so far) they’ve allowed it), star-shaped glitter from my stash, and a few pieces of the gold thread I used to sew the pocket closed.
And then, the photos (and papers)! On the back of each photo, I adhered a piece of holiday-themed paper cut down to fit—gift wrap that I’ve saved from Chistmases past, old Project Life filler cards, and scrapbook paper. Before adhering, I played around with the order of these papers to ensure they flowed well with each other and with the photo they’d be opposite of (above) when flipping through the album. And then, of course, I messed up the order when adhering them. Such is life.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to include the date of each year’s visit. How to do this was the question. I decided to stamp each visit’s date on vellum using my Mega Date Stamp. Because I had only enough papers to work up to 2021 and because my date stamp was already set to 2021 and it’s a bitch to change, I worked backward from there. Had I worked forward from 2013, I would’ve learned much earlier in the process that my stamp only goes back to 2015. Oops! I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do about this.
I had the photos printed by Persnickety Prints. I decided on black and white because the lighting in Build-A-Bear is atrocious (it’s giving jaundice) and I wanted the finished project to be visually appealing and consistent without having to do much (any) editing.
I’ll pick this project back up around November—it’ll be easier to find holiday-themed papers then (I’m out of holiday-themed papers, I don’t want to repeat patterns, and while I could order holiday-themed paper online at any point during the year, I prefer to shop in person for paper items so I can see and feel the quality of them before committing)—and will share more photos of the finished (well, caught-up) album closer to the end of this year/the beginning of next.
