{Project Life}

My 'craft of choice' used to be scrap booking. I spent time making extensive layouts and compiling pages of memories. I would buy scrap booking magazines and comb the aisles looking for the perfect embellishment. It was a great sense of enjoyment for me. But we as a family hit that season of busy-ness in our lives where I just didn't seem to be able to find the physical or mental time to crank out the pages for our scrapbooks like I used to. I enjoyed taking photos so the pictures didn't stop...I just wasn't finding time to scrapbook them. And I didn't want the years to go by without storing and recording all those photos in some way. So about 2 years ago, I noticed Leslie's 'one day at a time' photos on flickr. Every day she had a new photo from her daily life. It was fun to see what she chose to capture each day. This seemed to me to be a great way to 'scrapbook' our life and not get hung up on making major layouts and spending tons of time embellishing pictures. And so last year I embarked on my own Project 365. Every day I chose at least one photo that I had taken on that day (most days I took plenty more to have some choices) and I posted it out on flickr. These pictures were just little bits of our life gathered and collected day by day. It's been amazing how taking pictures each day has stretched me and caused me to find the beauty in the normal, the amazing in the ordinary and the memories in the routine. I've been able to see bits of beauty and art in the grocery store and while waiting in traffic. It's been a journey of enjoying exactly where God has me planted ~an eye opening experience of seeing the blessings in the daily. Recently, Becky Higgins, scrapbook extraordinaire, launched Project Life. Project Life goes along perfectly with my 365 project as it is set up to house a photo a day for an entire year. It also come with cards for jotting down the journaling that goes with each day's photo. If you are already taking a photo a day this is a great album for keeping a 'hard' copy of your photos and if you're not participating in 365...what are you waiting for? It's so eye-opening, you should give it a try. I've already started on 2010...it's going to be a great year. I'm sure I'll grow even more as I walk through this year taking pictures of our life day by day.