I love memory keeping and telling our family stories.  I am happy to be the gatekeeper for the family photos and memorabilia and the designatee to get it all organized in a format that we can share with our little family, our larger extended family, friends and with the world at large.

Plus, it’s fun

Toward the end of this year, I felt that I hadn’t really accomplished much as far as my memory keeping / scrapbooking projects were concerned.  I know I have a big bunch of on-line classes that I am going to finish up next year, as well as other ongoing memory keeping projects (that is another post for another day) but I thought I’d tally up my efforts this year and see where I really stand (I am planning in my “to do blog list” to share about some of these projects)…

Project Life

Yes, as of the close of 2013, I am still working on 2013 while looking forward to starting 2014.  Am I OK with it?  Yes.   Does it work for me? Yes…  Am I going to continue with this way of documenting our lives weekly?  Absolutely.    I’ve found during this my 3rd year of this kind of documentation, that sometimes this works best for me if I can “batch” it and do several weeks at once.  Earlier this year, I put together 8 weeks of layouts (8 double or 16 single) in less than 2 hours (!)   For 2014, I would really like to keep more current on this project but we’ll see how it goes.  The most important part is that the photos and the stories are getting documented.

Tally:  52 weeks of 2 – page spreads  (or 104 single spreads) (plus some extra stuff thrown in for good measure)… am going to down grade the number of weeks completed because I realized after I published this post that I’m still working on the last 4 months of 2013….that would be the not-caught-up-but-its-ok part of the project !

Revised Tally:  36 weeks of 2 page spreads (or 72 single page spreads)…still a good number!

Albums

Florida Keys vacation 2012:  

I was really happy to find a way to liberate the photos and stuff from this trip and get it into an album we can all enjoy.  I still need to corral everyone to write a few things down on some of the journaling cards but it’s basically done.   Love how it all came together, since I had everything all categorized and organized ahead of time, it took about 3 hours to pull the actual album together.

Tally:  20 double spreads/ 40 single pages

50/50 for Charlie’s 50th birthday:  

When I thought about my memory keeping efforts, for some reason I did not count this album or Project Life (???)  I know, silly.  This project was a true labor of love and I’m so so happy that I made this gift for my wonderful husband.  In short, the album was a 50 year retrospective of my hubby’s life to date, including photos from 1988 forward that I had, and photos from 1963 to 1988 from his mom.  Everything until about 2007 had to be scanned, cropped and edited (!)

Seriously love this book!

Tally:  202 photo album pages or  large images scanned

484 images edited/manipulated/printed

48 double page spreads / 96 single pages

50th Surprise Birthday Party Album

The album about the party (yes we were just a little party-centric earlier this year!) I almost forgot about this album…I used the same type of album as the Florida Keys vacation, slipped in photos taken at the surprise party and notes from the guests.  Easy peasy done.

Week in the Life Album

I almost didn’t do it this year but at the last minute decided to jump in and keep it SIMPLE which I think I succeeded in doing…. layouts are printed and note sheets are all tucked away just waiting to but put into the album.  This project was all digital which was the only way I could keep it super duper simple and it worked.  I shared about this project on the blog (yay!)

Tally:  24 single page layouts

December Daily Album

Work in process…I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished one of these in December (!) and thats ok.

Girls School Days Albums

Had them each pick out an album color, ordered the albums and started sorting current year and last year items loosely into each album….ongoing project I hope to work on more in 2014, but hey, at least they’re started.

Layouts 

Ah the backbone of scrapbooking and part of my memory keeping toolkit.   I love making layouts and have to admit, that I’ve been doing a lot more digital scrapbooking than paper but I’m making a concerted effort to do more paper scrapping to:  a) step away from the screen b) use up the large amount of scrapbooking supplies I own.  I am working on a better system to keep track of the layouts that are in process, completed, printed out (for digital layouts) and photographed (for traditional layouts) so I kind of feel I have work all over the place but here is a rough estimate of layouts completed….

Tally:  103 single page layouts   …   61 digital  … 42 paper

More than I would have guessed, I think my tally was helped by a weekend crop in January, and Layout-a-Day challenges in February and May.

GRAND TOTAL 

124 Double Page Spreads  (or 248 single page spreads)

127 Single Pages

375 Single pages (counting double spreads as 2 pages..which they are)

Wow

More than a page a day

No way would I have dreamed it was that many!!  Awesome.  So glad I tallied it up.  So happy that all of these memories are written down and in albums for everyone to enjoy and for those who are wondering…yes, I printed out all of my digital pages.

How did you fare this year on your projects/hobbies/memorykeeping exploits?  I’d love to hear!!

Bring on 2014!