By about September/October I start to lose steam in my year-long projects. I've been making a Project Life album (in various forms, not always the traditional Becky Higgins style) every year since 2010 and around this time of year I start to look ahead at how to change things up for next year.
A year is a long time to work on something so I've learned that if I stick to a simple formula, it's relatively easy to keep up. If I am required to be too creative week after week or month after month then I'm going to have problems. My everyday scrapbooking is where I can be creative, my year-long projects need to lean more to the 'scrapbooking on auto-pilot' side of the spectrum.
Keeping up is one thing, getting bored is another. A year is a long time to work on something no matter how simple or complex you make it.
I've mostly enjoyed working on my project this year - a very photo-centric project with a weekly recap that I am planning to print as a photobook at the end of the year (you can read all about it here). I've kept up with it OK and even when I've fallen behind, it hasn't been too hard (a habit of writing about my previous week every Monday has helped enormously). But with a photo-centric project, the photos are the key and some weeks/months I am just not taking a lot of photos (or photo-book worthy photos more specifically).
I am also missing the little details of life that get documented with the traditional Project Life - the little snippets of information, silly quotes or random ideas that get collected within those little 3x4 pockets.
I want a project that collects everything together - photos (not necessarily perfect photos that enlarge well), little memories, pop culture things we are enjoying, quotes, silly stories, ephemera. The typical Design A Project Life pockets are the perfect way to do all that but I've just made too many of those and feel a bit burnt out.
I'm leaning towards a graphic, magazine-style layout (Pinterest has been throwing a lot of magazine design images at me lately for some reason) so I've been playing around with creating a digital template where I can add photos and some snippets of journaling every week.
This morning I drew out a plan then created a template in Photoshop Elements and added some older photos and words just to see how it would work (how would it look? would I like working on it every week? could I keep up?). The goal is to print an 8x10 photobook at the end of the year so I would make a 16x10 spread every week.
As with all plans, I reserve the right to hate this system come January and completely ditch it for something else. But I like coming into the new year with a plan. Stay tuned :)