Christmas Ideas Week 6 - Photo Books for Grandparents

I always swear I will be mostly done with Christmas gifts by this point in December, but no matter how early I start and how hard I work, I never am.  Maybe one of the reasons is because I always make a year-in-review photo book, and I want to include November, so that means I can't finish it until early December anyway.

I know I've probably worn you out on my photo books, but I have to share them one last time.  I started making a year-in-review/scrapbook type digital photo book 6 years ago after my oldest son was born.  My husband is lucky enough to have 3 grandparents still living, and one set of great-grandparents.  In all, my kids have 2 sets of grandparents, 3 great-grandparents, and 2 great-great grandparents.  How lucky is that?  I lost my last grandparent over 4 years ago, so I think it's pretty amazing that my kids are blessed with so many. 

It does make Christmas a little hard though, because all the afore-mentioned grandparents and great-grandparents are lucky enough to have alot.  And although they are all so gracious and excited when it comes to accepting gifts (we could wrap up anything and give it to them and they'd fuss over it), you always want to give someone a gift they really like.  To address that, I came up with the idea of doing this scrapbook and ordering multiple copies for each set of grandparents.  With the exception of my husband's parents, all of them live some distance from us too, so they miss alot during the year.

They love the books, and there is no way at this point that I could get away with not doing it.  There would be major disappointment.  They all love to show their friends the books, and even though it's not really a novel idea, their friends (who are usually grandparents themselves) all seem to love the books too.  An added benefit is that I get a yearly scrapbook for us because I order myself a copy.  This time of year, I am always struggling to finish it and wondering why I had this brillant idea, but truthfully without the deadline I would probably not finish them and then I would forget to record alot of our memories.

I make my pages in Photoshop with digital scrapbooking materials, but you can create a book much quicker with Shutterfly or any of the companies that make photobooks.  For the first 3 years I made 12x12 books through Shutterfly and loved them.  Last year I found a groupon deal for Picaboo and made 8.5x11 books.  I saved alot of money that way and although I like the 12x12 better, I can't turn down over $150 in savings.  I'm doing a similar book this year through another company, again a groupon deal.

I try to do a summary for each month and put my pages in chronological order.  Then sometimes (depending on how sappy I'm feeling!) I write a little letter at the beginning or ending.  Here are a few pages from last year and this year.  Some are 2 page spreads shown together, some are single pages.

Read more...

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!

Read more...