Before Squirms was born, I decided that I wanted to make a scrapbook to record the first year of her life. I’m pretty forgetful and, while I know I’d be taking a ton of photos, I wasn’t so sure I’d be good about keeping track of everything as it happened. Sure, her glasses showing up in photos in May show she had them then, but when did we first take her to the eye doctor? I’d have no idea if it weren’t for her scrapbook.

(More about how the pages are made and the supplies I use are below the jump.)

Each of her first 12 weeks, I did at least two pages per week. Then things got super busy (like that whole going back to work thing) and I decided, hey, that’s enough of that, and switched to making pages monthly. I’m pretty proud of myself, as I’ve managed to keep it pretty well up to date this way.

Here’s an example of two finished pages, which I just finished this morning.

 
The finished pages look pretty amazing. Part of it is Squirms is adorable so I’d have to screw up pretty bad to make poor pages. The more major part is the format I’m using doesn’t actually require me to be extremely creative nor dedicate hours and hours to putting pages together. It’s called Project Life and it revolves around using these specially-created page dividers. Instead of having to lay out an entire page, I can use the layout the dividers provide me and just worry about how to fill each of the sections. They even make little cards already pre-cut to fit into the two standard sizes of sections (roughly 4 x 6 and 3 x 4). (And, yeah, people do sell knock-offs but they are not very high quality. Trust me, I thought about using ’em.) The main page style has four large, horizontal sections (usually title cards or photos) and four small, vertical sections for art cards, journaling, or photos.

To get started, you just need:

• something to put the pages in (any 12 x 12 notebook with 3 rings will do)
• the PL dividers (I got these and these)
• a camera
• a way to print photos (I use Costco)
• some card stock and a way to cut it (or their fancy cards – I got these and these)
• a pen (I use Pilot G2s)

Really – that’s it. I also use PhotoShop Elements to edit my photos but there’s some great free or online only photo editors that do the same things like Gimp and Picmonkey.

Next time, I’ll explain my process which, really, truly, is simple. Photo editing/selection time + 15 minutes/page.

(Disclosure: No one – Becky nor anyone else at Project Life – paid me or gave me stuff to talk about their products. That would be cool but they give enough to professionals who actually know what they’re doing. I just enjoy the technique and products.)