Finding Balance in My Creative Outlet
When I started digi scrapping, nine years ago, my focus was two-fold. First, I wanted to record the memories of my growing family. Second, I needed a creative outlet and pass time that I could express myself in. Digi scrapping was giving me a good creative outlet, but I wasn’t always catching the everyday life of my family. Fast forward 6 years, and I found Project Life. Project Life was perfect, I was really spending a lot of time capturing the everyday memories we made. Project Life became everything to me, and I abandoned traditional pages altogether. As you can imagine, after a year or so, I started to feel like something was missing. Recently, I went back to traditional pages in addition to my Project Life pages, and I finally feel like I have balance. Today, I want to share with you how I balance the two styles and the purposes they serve in hopes that I can help some of you figure out what can work best for you.
Project Life now is the main method I use to capture everyday memories for my family. That means that a few things change in terms of how I put a page together.
- My PL pages focus on cards, photos, and words. By keeping it simple, I am able to get more done and get those memories captured.
- I incorporate the same methods each week to keep consistency. My week card and my highlight card remain the same each week to cut down on the decisions I have to make. Less decisions on my PL pages means more pages get done.
- I create these pages in batch style. I posted about this last month, and it has been a time saver and made it so much easier to do pages a little at a time.
Now, I don’t rely on my PL pages to be a massive creative outlet for me. They still look nice, and I still put thought and creativity into them, but when they aren’t the only method I am using, I can be a little bit more relaxed about what I do. Also, my girls seem to like to look at these pages more than my traditional pages, so it’s not like something is missing.
Traditional 12×12 pages have become my main creative outlet. A few things are a bit different in terms of how I approach these pages.
- I use my 12×12 pages to be creative on. I try new methods, experiment with products I wouldn’t usually use. I view them more as art and less as everyday memory keeping.
- Some pictures I use for my 12×12 pages may be repeated in my PL pages. They serve different purposes in each situation, so I don’t feel bad re-using them.
- Whereas my PL pages I create for my family to share, often my 12×12 pages I create are more for me.
Seeing that I have my PL pages to document our everyday memories, I don’t feel as much stress to get all of that documented in my 12×12 pages. I am never really “behind” in creating my 12×12 pages because I don’t feel the pressure to include everything. It’s all documented in my PL pages.
It’s taken a long time, with a lot of trial and error, but I finally feel like I have found a balance between the creative side of digi scrapping and the desire to document our everyday memories. I hope that hearing my approach will help some of you to figure out where your balance is.
