Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Winkflash... and other album thoughts

My Disney World album arrived from winkflash! Overall I'm happy with how it turned out.









The only thing that bugs me is that a *tiny* bit of each page was cut off on the top and bottom, and there is a white border on each edge. Not sure why my perfectly square 8x8 pages didn't fit their 8x8 book... :( But really that is my only complaint, and it's probably not noticeable to anyone but me.







I love the professional look and durability of a hardbound album, and I wish I all my scrapbooks were done this way, but it doesn't really work with how I scrapbook. Since I don't scrapbook chronologically, I can't really upload all of my 2007 pages for a nice book... because I'm still working on 2007 pages all the time! I just scrapbook whatever memory strikes my fancy at the moment, and after they are printed I slide them into a page protector in the right album.

Speaking of albums... for my albums, I was inspired Stacy Julian's "Family Fun Library" system as outlined in her book, "The Big Picture". I took her ideas and tweaked them a bit; I have a set of three albums for each year:

- All About Us: for personality pages. A tab for each person, as well as one for layouts about both boys, and ones for Mom/Dad & me pages.

- Celebrations & Traditions: for those birthday, holiday, graduation pages, as well as other traditions we celebrate.

- Places We Go/Things We Do/People We Love: pretty self-explanatory, with a tab for each of these. Places We Go is for vacations, trips, home, etc., Things We Do reflects our lifestyle from everyday life to hobbies & accomplishments, and People We Love is reserved for layouts about extended family and friends.

So, if I create a page with older pictures from, say, 2006 (which I did recently) I just find the proper 2006 album and slip it in there. I really like how this is working so far.

But in addition to my "Family Fun Library", I think it will be fun to do more mini-albums like this Disney one, and I think I will always do those as hardbound albums. I have plans to start a "Tribute to Philly" album, as well as "A Week In The Life" album (inspired by Ali Edwards) that I'm working on this week and chronicling on my other blog.

I think I'll try some other companies and see who I like best... a few I'm interested in trying are Shutterfly, ArtsCow - they're having a sweet deal, an 8x8 book for $4.99 - , and Viovio.

So, I wanna know... how do your organize your scrapbook layouts? Have you ever had a hardbound book printed and if so where and how did you like it? I'd love to know!

2 comments:

Alyson said...

I'm just like you with the way I scrapbook. I really want to make a hardbound album, but I don't have any one year of pages completed. I organize my albums completely chronologically based on the date the photo was taken. I like the idea of the "all about me/us" album for pages about the family, but I really think one album is plenty for me at this point. Maybe when I have a family I will think about having more than one album per year.

BTW, you Disney Book turned out really cute...and it would bug me too if they cut off edges and put a white edge on every page. But it still looks great!

April (Thorup) Oaks said...

How beautiful! I might have to try printing a book. The things that bothered you would bother me to but I agree there are very few people in this world that would really notice.