Rain is here! Rain is here! I’ve been trying to think up some cheesy pun involving May showers & flowers, but I’ve apparently given up and am now just running around hollering “Rain is here!”
Seriously people, this is such a big deal. I started doing Project Life in 2010, back when there was only one edition. It’s the one they call “Cherry” now, and it only came in paper form. I was so taken with the concept (I had never scrapbooked or anything like that before), and the design was definitely something I could stand – no pastels, nice bold Scandinavian-design-esque graphics, and at the time there weren’t even any cards saying stuff like “This is the good life,” etc., which look nice in other peoples’ layouts but definitely aren’t my style. But the Cherry edition, for all its usefulness and life-changing powers as part of my first PL project, was never “me.” When I showed my album to people I would explain it was a kit, and it only came in this one look, and that’s why there were all these photos of goths and board gamers illustrated with cheerful prints and flowers.
And then over the years Becky Higgins (creator of Project Life) has introduced more and more editions. There was Amber and Turquoise and Cobalt and Clementine and Seafoam and Olive – and I actually found all of them to be less my style than Cherry had been. I even bought Amber (in paper form) and never used it. And then Becky gave us a sneak peek back in January of a tidal wave of new designs that were coming all at once – Jade, Honey, Midnight, Kraft, Blush, Cinnamon, and Rain. As I paged through the catalog I suddenly came across something that made my eyes bug out of my head, you know, cartoon-style.
It was Nisa Fiin‘s Rain edition of Project Life, and I was in love.
What I love about Rain: bold, rich colors; deep purples, blues, and greens; not frilly or flowery, the design is as bold as the colors; slightly doodled style – not enough to look messy, but just the right amount of artistic imperfection; striking patterns (the one I think of as “fish-scales quilt” just kills me); I adore Nisa’s handwriting (and it happens to work very nicely alongside one of my go-to fonts, Indy Pimp); there are cards with words and phrases, but they’re mostly silly and clever, not sentimental, and the best thing about going digital is I can ignore those if I like and not worry about running out of cards.
I never thought there’d be a Project Life edition for me. Since becoming involved in the world of digital memory-keeping, I’ve had the opportunity to see how large the gap is between my taste and most of what’s out there. I’ve made my own PL kits and have happily used all sorts of other materials in making my PL spreads. But WOW. What a difference it made this week to have a whole kit all streamlined and ready to go. For one thing, my digital files for this week are about half the size they normally are. For another, I look at these pages and I feel happy and pleased, something that rarely happens when I put as little work into embellishment, recoloring, resizing, and other alterations as I did with this spread. This was the last of the “tidal wave” of new Project Life designs to be released – I’ve watched in jealous anticipation as all the other kits rolled out and people started to play with them – but boy oh boy do good things come to those who wait!
The hardest part of this week’s spread was doing the journaling. I got really stuck for some reason and put off writing it for days after the spread was all laid out. Part of it was that I dread writing digital journaling on journal cards with oddly shaped text spaces. As I’ve mentioned before, that is one major drawback for me of digital as opposed to paper Project Life. I had originally wanted to use a handwriting-style font for my journaling (something about hearkening back to my 2010 Cherry days, probably, now that I’m using an actual Project Life-brand kit again) but it looked way too strange and messy with the odd spacing needed to type around the journal card elements. Typewritten font looked much cleaner and less bizarre. I did pay homage to that original album in other ways, however – the stamped dates and small oval “days of the week” labels on the photos are almost identical to what I used (in actual stamp & sticker form) back in days of yore.
This was another week of having fun with photo apps. I used Photosynth to make a panorama of my room full of garment racks, and 
Snapseed to tweak and edit most of the photos. I’m linking up this weekend with Michelle Bostinelos‘s fun Saturday Project Life Blog Hop and likely with The Mom Creative’s Project Life Tuesday once Tuesday rolls around. Check both these great blogs for lots more Project Life fun. Michelle in particular is awesome because she writes something interesting about each participant in the blog hop, so her posts are really fun to read!
Want a little of your own Rain goodness? As a treat for reading all the way to the end of this post, here is a link to Nisa Fiin’s facebook page, where you can download these gorgeous free journal cards that coordinate perfectly with the Rain kit! And here’s the link to buy the Rain kit in digital form (paper is not available yet – I am probably going to snap up one of those, too, when they release them, just for good measure!).
Her “Botanica” kit directly inspired one of my art journal papers.
