I started 2014 with a new plan for my Project 52 / Project 365* layouts, having learnt a lot from my first year in 2013 (yes I admit I haven’t quite finished the pages yet). I like the simple approach of using just papers and no embellishments so I simply rotated the template so it looks different to last year’s layouts. I also improved my templates so it is easier to mix and match the photo and text sections. It may have taken until now to complete my January scrapbook layouts, but my new method works well, as long as I keep on top of identifying the photographs for each week and continue to sort my scrapping supplies as I’m still recovering from my external hard drive failure last year.

Supplies from ScrapGirls.com
If you visit regularly you may recognise some of these pictures from the Sibling January scrapbook layouts I’ve already published. I intend to have two scrapbooks at the end of the year. One will be a collection of pages showing events and occasions and will include the monthly sibling pages. The other will be all the weekly pages showing one picture a day telling the story of that day. Of course there will be overlap but the first book enables me to show several pictures for an event (for example my layouts from January last year) and in the second I can include ‘random’ pictures such as the sunset and frost below that tell the story of our year, but don’t fit into specific events.
Key events of January 2014:
- Flooding in Oxfordshire
- Seeing Frozen at the cinema
- Reunion lunch for a project I worked on for many years
- Attending the village pantomime for the first time
- Arrival of our new bed (first piece of new furniture we’ve bought since moving in)
* Project 52 / Project 365 – are photo challenges encouraging people to take photographs regularly through the year. Project 365 encourages a picture every day while Project 52 is about capturing a week. I aim to take a picture every day, but do weekly layouts which may have 5 – 8 pictures depending on the week. Therefore I think my project has overlaps with both Project 52 and Project 365, but probably doesn’t fulfil either of them properly.

That looks lovely 🙂 I’ve never done scrapbooking myself but people who do it always seem to LOVE it 🙂
Thank you Kate. I love the end result but I don’t always love the process because I can’t achieve what I want. I’m still very much learning and do a lot of playing around and hope something looks good.
Are these all digital scrapbooks? (stupid question probably!) I’ve done a bit of normal scrapbooking in the past, but just don’t have the time now…still need to do my photos as photobooks (just takes so long to upload photos to those websites though thanks to our internet connection
Emma, yes they are all digital done in Photoshop Elements, but they have drop shadows applied to make them look more real paper. I’ve never done paper scrap booking but I assume digital is much quicker especially because I use a lot of templates so don’t need to think about the layout. I buy most of my kit from ScrapGirls.com
Gorgeous! I really love the look of these – I just wish I could push myself to do something similar!
I’ve been planning for AGES to put together all of the monthly photos I’ve taken of D since he was born to have a collage of his first four years… but I intended to do it when he was three and now he’s four…. maybe his first FIVE years?
Thank you Laura. It is difficult to keep on top of projects isn’t it. I find I need a deadline to work to, so the monthly sibling linky works (although I haven’t started the April pages yet). However, I have not done a lot on either kids’ baby books and the eldest is 5.5 now…. One day….