project life: working on years past

i mentioned earlier that i've started project life-ing my 2012 pictures.  i'm very excited about the whole process.  it turned out to be surprisingly easy and through it i've worked out how to merge my traditional scrapbooking in with my project life pages. 

i had the great good fortune to read one of shimelle's classes on the organization of layout pages, and it has been on my mind to go back and analyze my albums at some point to fill in the "holes" in our history.  when i began looking through my october 2012 pictures for project life, this thought was fresh on my mind.  i also knew that i wouldn't be able to do past years in quite the loos-y goose-y style that i've been employing for this year's project life as i wanted to be able to skip around instead of starting at the beginning. 

here's the process that i came up with for tackling project life with the past year's photos:

1. i looked through the october photo files on my computer and instagram to compile a list of which photos i wanted to use.

2. i looked through my completed layouts to see which photos i had already used as i didn't want to duplicate them in the project life spreads.

3. i found that i had 3 scrapbook pages from october 2012, so i looked through my list of photos and found one more story that i wanted to tell on a scrapbook page.  now with four completed pages for the month, they would fit nicely in the project life album in two 12x12 sleeves.

4. i then sketched out the photos from the rest of the month like i normally do and began project life-ing them.  the only difference between these spreads and my current year's spreads is that i've made the decision to contain each month on set pages.  in my current album i end the month wherever it happens to end on the page and start the new month there as well.

that's it!  easy, right?  i only ended up with two 12x12 pages and a 6x12 insert.  planning on finishing october 2012 next week and moving on to november!  gotta use up all the great fall/halloween/thanksgiving themed stuff in my october jbs mercantile kits!

any of you out there tackling previous years with the project life system?  i'd love to hear about it!