Father's Day Gift Idea

I am a huge fan of digital scrapbooking. I prefer it to paper for so many reasons... it's easier to start a page or book and then put it aside, you don't need all the physical supplies, it's faster, and in my opinion the product is more likely to hold up over time.

I just finished making books for my husband, dad, and father-in-law for Father's Day. I'm not going to show all the steps here, more the idea. I use Photoshop Elements, which I highly recommend buying. For $70 it is amazing. I use this software to edit pictures, make my scrapbooks, create party invitations, the list goes on and on. It does require some time to learn, but there are lots of free tutorials on the web, and this is my favorite book to learn photo editing.

I create my books in Elements by first deciding what size I want my book to be and then downloading a template from the company I'll be using to print. I am not loyal to one company because I try to find the best deals. Shutterfly is probably my favorite, but I've used Picaboo and Blurb too. If there are no templates, I just make my page size a little bigger than the book size - for an 8x8 book I would make the page 8.25 by 8.25. That's what I did for this project, and then I bought some templates to start with which made things much faster. You could also modify this idea to create a book using the company's software. For that, I think Shutterfly is the best. They have a new "custom path" option which is really nice.

For this book, I then asked my kids "why do you love daddy, what things about daddy do you like" for all 3 of the guys I was making a book for. Their answers were pretty interesting. Like my 3 year old's "I love daddy because he saves me when the police come", as if the police regularly come after us. Or my 7 year old's "I love daddy because he grills our dinner" when I do 97% of the cooking.

I went through all my pictures and found 10 to use and then tried to match up to their answers if possible. I ordered three 8x8 books from Shutterfly for $48 (I had one free email coupon and they were running a free shipping promo and 20% off books promo). With the templates my total cost was $63, $21 per gift.

The pages above are some random layouts from the books. 10 Reasons is the cover, the #1 reason is the first page on the right as you open the book, and the rest are double page spreads. You can still order in time for Father's Day. Email me if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help you through it!