3 Humble Tips For Stress-Free Project Life Creativity + Our Week Twenty-Four.

Posted on July 17, 2015 at 1:00 am by Jodie / Creative Projects, Project Life / 0

Happy Friday!

You all know how much I love instagram. And over there on my instagram feed (@jodie.york) I am lucky to be in contact with a bunch of fun and active creatives who take the time to make comments – thank you – and who aren’t afraid to ask questions and get involved – big thank you. One of my favourite thrills comes with hearing that I may have inspired someone to perhaps take a different creative direction in the way they Project Life. But in the little comments section on IG there just isn’t enough room to share everything so I thought I’d tack on 3 Humble Tips For Stress-Free Project Life Creativity to my week twenty-four post. In 2015 I’ve embraced the ‘less is more’ in all aspects of my life, including when creating our Project Life album. The ‘less is more’ concept has given me more space, both mentally and physically, to concentrate on my first love of memory keeping – the capturing and telling of our stories.

Here are 3 revelations about me and my work and 3 humble tips.

Humble Tips For Stress-Free Project Life Creativity.

Humble Tip #1 | I used to be pretty strict on having one photo included in our album for every day of the week. I would stress if I had two or more great photos that I wanted to include on one particular day. I would stress if I had forgotten to take a photo for a day. I would stress, I would stress, I would stress. Wasn’t this project suppose to be fun? Needless to say I would stress and therefore I would not do.

Now I just whip out my phone (trying to take more photos with my big camera too) and capture the moment as it happens. I now include the photos that I want to include whether there be four from our Sunday and none on our Wednesday. Whatever. As long as the stories get told. My approach now is more of a ‘collective record of our week’ not so much focusing on individual days.

Humble Tip #2 | I use to stress out if I didn’t have an equal amount of photos each week for all of my babes. I have four kids. Taking the same amount of photos for each child each week and then including the same amount of photos for each child in our Project Life albums was…stressful. I wanted to be fair to them all.

Now, at the end of the week when I’m putting our week together, I use the photos I have taken. Take our week twenty-four for example. You would think I had only one bubba, Henry. But now I know that I will include photos and stories of William, Stella and Scarlett in future weeks. And you never know, I might even be able to fit in a little bit about me in there too.

Humble Tip #3 | I use to be pretty strict as to what photos I selected for our album. They had to be a good quality photo. Who was I kidding? I was never, and remain, by far, NOT a professional photographer.

Now if I take a photo that is a bit grainy but that I desperately want to include in our album I whack a filter over it or turn it from colour into black and white – like the photo of Henry sleeping that was taken at night with low light and like the photo of the rain that was taken from inside our car on a mega overcast day. My favourite filter app is PicTapGo available in the App Store.

These are just a few of the things that I have discovered, over the years, that work for me. If I don’t do these I get stressed. When I get stressed I procrastinate. When I procrastinate NOTHING GETS CREATED. I need to keep things easy, fun, light in order for my creativity to continue to flow. I want to tell our stories. I want to keep up to date. But most of all I want to keep enjoying the process.

Do you have some tried and true tips that you could share with us? If so leave your humble tip/s in the comments below. I, and others, will love you for it. I’ll be putting together a future post including all your ideas. If you have a blog of your own or would like to share any social media platforms you have feel free to add a link with your comment too. Sharing is caring! xxx

Here is how week twenty-four of our Project Life album came together.

I had fun using bits and bobs out of the Messy Box from A Beautiful Mess. I never use everything from the Messy Box in one go. Just enough to inject some colour into our pages if the mood is right. The day was a particularly over-cast, drizzly day weather wise when I was creating our week twenty-four so playing with some colour was definitely a happy mood booster. I also used some fabulous stamps from Kellie Stamps, flair which features my brush script designs from Scrapbook and More and my go-to white Project Life cards in both 3×4 and 4×6 sizes.

Henry’s blue tongue matches the colour theme perfectly! lol

I made a confetti / shaker pocket by emptying the entire packet of coloured sequins from the Messy Box into one of the page protector pockets. Then I machine sewed across the top of the opening of the pocket. Love the colours.

Always capture the good days as well as the not-so-good days. Kellie has fab stamp set with ‘not so good days’ stamp sentiments in her Kellie Stamps store. Love them.