Although the first week of 2013 has officially passed, I thought I would share one of the few...*ahem* *cough*... projects I managed to complete in 2012. This year, for Christmas, I made a Blurb book dedicated to my girlie's first year of life.
Given that I have bizillon adorable pictures of Rowan AND her birthday is close to the holidays it made sense to make one book and print multiple copies for us and our families. It's like the scrapbooking gods knew I needed such a gift!
When it came time to making the book, I knew I wanted to try with Blurb. I've seen a few books that Elise had completed and she made it look completely easy and fast.
At first I felt overwhelmed. But being a Simple Scrapper at heart, I chose to make a simple small square book. The book, which has soft covers, measures 7 x 7 inches and has 58 pages. My approach? Channelling my inner MC Hammer. You know, stopping....and breaking it down.....into manageable chunks, that is.
I gave myself the weekend to download the BookSmart software as well as to choose the size, format and photos for the project. In the interest of time, I did not include text. I simply put Rowan's name and the date on the Title page.
When it came time to picking which pictures to include I relied heavily on my Project Life album. Given that my PL binder is organized by month, I was able to choose 4 to 5 of the best montly photos of Rowan, very quickly. It was incredibly easy to see what pictures I liked and had already printed....how cool is that... Project Life has allowed me to organize all my photos chronologically!
I ordered the book on Sunday December 2nd and 5 brand new copies arrived at my door exactly two weeks later on Sunday December 16th. Although I am pleased with the quality of the photos on both the covers and inside the book, I am very disappointed with the binding. As you can tell from the photos, the seams have ripped and some of the pages are about to fall out. This is true for all 5 copies of the book we printed.
I am totally willing to give Blurb another try. Next time, I would like to make a hard cover photo book and perhaps add a few more pictures. FYI: In order to do this you must make a book that has 80 + pages. If at that time the binding is an issue, I will take Steph's advice and try Adoramapix.
But for now, Blurb is in my good books. Pun intended!
Happy Monday!
